Healthy Self-reflection Vs Toxic Rumination, & Role Of Awareness

Dharma Lab, Episode 19  |  Richie Davidson & Cortland Dahl

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Introduction

Cort: I wanted to maybe kick this off with just kind of the time of year we're at. We're recording this at the end of the year.

Some of you might be watching this right before we hit New Year's. Some of you might be watching it afterwards, but it sparked this realization that there are these natural periods in life where we spontaneously look back. Periods of self-reflection. So this can happen almost on a daily basis. You know, obviously the end of the day when we go to bed, it's a time where we naturally just reflect on the day, but it can happen after we complete a big project.

It can happen as it is right now, almost on a yearly basis, where we just have a natural transition point in our annual flow and calendar. But the reality is that self-reflection can really go horribly off the rails at times. A lot of times we just don't know how to do this in a way that feels healthy and balanced, and it can be mixed up with all sorts of self-judgment and negative memories and so on.

So we wanted just to talk about this. Richie, I really am curious to hear your thoughts on this. We've talked about this a lot in various forms, but maybe just to create an open discussion about self-reflection — how important it can be, how supportive of our wellbeing it can be, but also how we can ensure that it doesn't slide off the rails and become just a toxic cesspool of negative thinking about ourselves.

So why don't we just open this up, Richie. Maybe you can share any opening thoughts and then we can talk both about what self-reflection is, how we can do it in a conscious, intentional way, and then as we usually end, maybe a little bit of our own practical tips that we use in our lives to bring a little more self-reflection into our daily routine.

The Neuroscience of Self-Reflection

Richie: So thank you Cort, great to be back on Dharma Lab with you. And this topic is really such an important one because it seems like humans have this capacity for self-reflection that is unparalleled. No other species has this capacity, and it's one of these things that affords so many advantages and it also can get us into trouble.

And so first and foremost, just thinking about the neuroscience — one of the important developments in the human brain is this big chunk of real estate that we have in the front of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. And one of the major capacities or competencies that the prefrontal cortex enables is for what psychologists often call mental time travel.

Our ability to both reflect on the past and also to anticipate the future — and the prefrontal cortex is kind of the hub where this kind of activity gets coordinated. And the size of our prefrontal cortex is larger in relation to the rest of the brain mass compared to any other species. And this capacity for mental time travel is clearly more well developed in humans than it is in any other species.

And so the capacity to reflect on the past is advantageous for many obvious reasons, including our ability to learn from the experiences that we've had in the past. We can learn what may be beneficial for us so that we may want to repeat that, we can learn what may be harmful to us so we may want to avoid that — and that can be sharpened with this capacity for self-reflection.

Rumination and the Salience Network

Richie: Self-reflection can also be something that can really hijack us, as you are implying in the introduction. It can slip into what we might think of as rumination, where we are in a kind of perseverative loop, ruminating about the past. And what we think happens in the brain is that when our self-reflection takes on these negative attributes, there are parts of the brain that are being recruited that are important for our emotional processing — and this is the purview of what we often call the salience network.

And so the self-reflection is happening largely in the default mode. The salience network is what is attaching emotional significance to that. And when we ruminate, we really get hijacked by this negative thinking and the affective charge, if you will. The affective juice to the negative thinking is conferred by the salience network. And that can really get us into trouble and can broaden this from just thinking to actually activating all the circuitry in the brain and the body that is associated with, for example, threats.

Cort: Yeah. You're like reliving a stressful moment or something.

Richie: Exactly. So it's not just thinking — it's a lot more than thinking, and it is recruiting this biology that in our evolutionary past was recruited in response to physical threats that were right in front of us, not some retrieved memory from our past or an anticipated threat in the future.

Intentionality — The Missing Ingredient

Cort: So a lot of this is bringing up maybe one of the very important points about self-reflection, which is that it's an umbrella term that covers a lot of different experiences that maybe have a shared thread, but can play out very differently. Certainly feel very differently when they're happening. So when I think about this from the point of view of Buddhist psychology, one of the benefits I think of the contemplative meditative perspective is there's a lot of attention paid to noticing the ingredients of different mental and emotional experiences, so you can see the different factors that are at play that shape them.

And so when I think about it from the point of view of Buddhist psychology — and you think about this big category that we call self-reflection — the thing that's consistent, whether you're having a very healthy, even inspiring moment of kind of reflecting on your life, to something like you're referring to where it feels toxic, it feels negative, it's depleting, it's triggering a stress response or a threat response — what all of those share is you're thinking about yourself and your life.

Like, that's maybe the family trait. What all of the forms of self-reflection share is you're thinking, and what are you thinking about? You're thinking about yourself. For better or worse, that's mostly what we think about. Rarely do we think about other things where it's not in reference to ourselves and how it's going to affect us. But beyond that — that's the part that's kind of shared, again, from a healthy to unhealthy to toxic spectrum — but then there's some other really interesting variables that we rarely think about, that are critically important.

And I would love to hear what you think — how you would tie this to the brain and what might be happening in the brain when this happens. So the first one is intentionality. Oftentimes, especially when it's say negative rumination, we're obviously not intending to do that.

We might just be sitting there and pretty soon we're lying in bed and our mind is just — maybe we remember something from our day and then we're stressing out about that. And pretty soon we're remembering something from a year ago or 10 years ago, and our mind is just spinning. And what happens there is the lack of intention and the lack of any kind of control. We're sort of out of it — it's sort of out of control, even if we wanted to stop it, which we often do. We want to go to sleep or we want to be thinking about something else, but we can't. So it's almost like an absence of intentionality, which I would assume is an inability of the prefrontal — these prefrontal nodes like the central executive network. It's just kind of offline.

So intention is a key piece, and because of that it's now activating emotional responses. It's triggering memories. And all of these things are kind of in a loop — it's like memory, emotion, the thought process itself — and they're all kind of in this self-reinforcing sort of downward spiral.

So that's one important variable, because that all hinges on the presence or absence of intention. And this is one point we can circle back to: the trainability of intention. The other one — and you and I actually, in the first paper you and I ever published together, the Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper, which is titled Reconstructing and Deconstructing the Self — we talked about self-inquiry specifically, and this gets at another of the key variables, which is the motivating propelling force. With healthy self-inquiry, you could say it is curiosity. And oftentimes when it's a fruitful line of thinking about ourselves and our lives, it's driven by curiosity and openness.

Whereas the unintentional propelling force when it's toxic and ruminative is more judgment. Oftentimes it's sort of an assumption of a critical, negative self-attitude. So those two pieces — the kind of motivating force of it, and the intentionality, the presence or absence of intentionality — from a meditative point of view, those are critical pieces. Because that's actually what you train. You kind of train those pieces and that's what keeps you in the healthy end and out of the toxic ruminative event. I'm curious how well that lines up with what we know scientifically.

Richie: Yeah. That's important. Regarding the intentionality piece — one of the things we know from lots of modern science is that stress impairs the prefrontal cortex. In some of our own early work, we've shown that really quite clearly and dramatically with induced stress in the laboratory. And so in the case we're talking about now with, for example, negative rumination, that is going to impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn is going to have an effect of diminishing the intentionality.

Cort: Kind of means that habits are running the show.

Richie: Exactly. Your mind is on automatic and there's no one steering the ship. It's kind of rudderless and it is just pushed around willy-nilly by the forces that are erupting.

Cort: Yeah. You give that great analogy of the sailboat. Maybe you wanna share that — it's such a good example of what it feels like in the moment.

Richie: Yeah. So the kind of metaphor is of a sailboat in a turbulent sea without a rudder. And it's just being pushed and pulled by the winds around us. And that's what it's like to have a mind that is on automatic — it's simply responding and reacting to both the internal and the external stimuli around us.

Cort: And so when you train it, you're basically training yourself to find the rudder, to put the rudder in and operate it. Whereas normally we're kind of oblivious to the possibility of that even happening most of the time.

Richie: Right. And you know, in the Buddhist view, I think we would say that the rudder is always there. We just don't recognize it.

Cort: Yeah, exactly.

Richie: And so the training is really about recognizing it and becoming more familiar with it so that we can get back to it more spontaneously.

Meta-Awareness

Cort: So what is the starting point with intention? This maybe comes back to points we've discussed in previous episodes, but from the vantage point of the meditative perspective, it actually starts with meta-awareness. That's sort of like — forget about intention, anything else, like finding the rudder. It's like you need to suddenly realize, oh, I'm out of control here. And even before you could start looking for the rudder, you need to be aware that you're being pushed all over the place.

Richie: Yeah.

Cort: Most of the time we don't have that, right? We're just caught in the storm.

Richie: Yeah. And so meta-awareness — this idea of meta-awareness — we've talked about it in other episodes of Dharma Lab, but frankly, the more we talk about it, that's good because it's such an important concept.

Cort: Yeah. We should have an episode just on meta-awareness, actually. Because it's so important.

Richie: It's so important and it's basically the quality of knowing what our mind is doing — that's one way you can think about it. And to some viewers that may sound strange. Don't we always know what our mind is doing?

But I think most of us have periods of time where we recognize that we don't know what our minds are doing, and that's helpful. The one example that I often use — I'm sure I've used it in a previous episode of Dharma Lab — is reading a book where you're reading each word on a page and you may read one page, a second page, and after a few minutes you have no idea where your mind has been. You don't know what you've just read, but then you kind of wake up — and that moment of waking up is a moment of meta-awareness.

You know, another example is: if you drive a certain route all the time, let's say from your work back to your home, so the route that you take is extremely well routinized, and let's say you have to stop at a store on the way home. How many viewers have had the experience of continuing on their normal route and not going to the store — because they're on automatic, their minds are totally automatic. And that's an example of not having meta-awareness.

And one of the things that we've learned from our work is that meta-awareness can be trained, and there are people who are walking around who are meta-aware all the time. You and I know some of those people and their meta-awareness doesn't lapse — it's just continuous.

Cort: You can tell how helpful that is because there's a lightness. And almost an imperturbability — like no matter how much, it's like you're the eye of the storm. Like somehow things can be so stressful, everything moving around, and you can just sense that they're just able to kind of navigate that in a way that most of us get knocked off balance.

Richie: Right. Yeah.

Cort: You can feel that when you're around people like this.

Richie: Yeah, totally. And one word that I would use to characterize them is flexibility. Just very flexible, being able to make transitions very flexibly.