A Sense of Unimportance

A Sense of Unimportance I’m going to write today about humility. It’s not highly regarded as a virtue and can remind us of the hypocritical Uriah Heep who was “ever so ‘umble” while being just the opposite, or those who live in the background and never put themselves forward. Winston Churchill cruelly remarked, when someone said the then Prime minister Clement Attlee was a humble man “...he has a lot to be humble about.” So, dull and unmemorable: is that what humility means? As a psychologist I find it a fascinating topic because it is quite rare and I have found it most in people who have other positive qualities to their lives including kindness and generosity. I first started to think about it when, many years ago, I was teaching in a convent school and Sister Mary Christa, asked me to take a school assembly on St. Joseph the husband of Mary and the natural father of Jesus. I scratched my head, he didn’t do much , how could I spread a man who had a bit part in nativity plays over half an hour ? Then I thought that is precisely it: Joseph never sought the limelight, he accepted Mary’s explanation of her pregnancy and became his legal father. Of course, there are those who will think him a fool for doing this but Joseph believed the promises of God. It taught me a lot about humility, so often we don’t listen to others because we want to put our point of view across. We talk endlessly about ourselves and our possessions and our successes in life. We hardly ever talk about when we have been depressed , or broken, or have failed. For our psychological health we need a sense of our self-unimportance and a sense of humour to mock our ambitions and pretensions. Our character is formed from self-knowledge and facing challenges that really test us, not from boasting and exaggerating our achievements. The importance of humility is that we can put our own needs into perspective, "If I could buy that man for what he is worth and sell him for what he thinks he is worth I could make a fortune!"

EXAM' NERVES ?

I don’t need to tell you that we are now in the exam’ season. The RBH will be full of people with their heads down writing furiously in a few more days .I have already had emails concerning difficult topics to revise and requests for notes on alternatives. It’s not a good idea to decide now that some topics are just too hard to revise so I’ll mug up another one. So why do we panic at exam’ time and what can we do about it ? Almost everyone feels nervous before an exam. Butterflies in the stomach and worrying thoughts - 'Will I be able to answer the questions?' 'Have I done enough revision?' - are indications of exam nerves that are probably familiar to all students. In fact, a certain amount of nervous tension probably helps us perform to the best of our ability, producing a rush of adrenaline that helps us to feel alert and focused. But too much anxiety can BLOCK thoughts, create a negative frame of mind, and lead to panic and potentially poor exam performance. There are a number of things you can do to help manage exam anxiety and turn uncomfortable, panicky thoughts into more creative tension. Before the exam It's hard to panic if you are feeling relaxed. Try to establish a pattern of revision that gives you time to relax, especially last thing at night. Experiment until you find the best way of relaxing to suit you - a long bath, exercise, listening to music, a relaxation tape available in all good health shops. Relaxation and positive stress management techniques can be learned and acquired with practice – remember my advice on swimming ? Knowing how to relax is invaluable in the lead-up to exams, and on the day itself. If you think you are under-performing in exams due to exam anxiety or panic, do think ahead and seek help. It helps to feel as well-prepared as possible. As well as thinking about the subjects you are revising, it can be useful to pay attention to practical aspects of the exam. Find out where it is scheduled to take place and how long it will take you to get there. It's a good idea to go and look at the room so that it feels more familiar. This is true even of one you use every day like the RBH. Make sure you know the rules and regulations about what you can take into the exam room etc. Put yourself into a positive frame of mind by imagining how you would LIKE things to go. Imagine yourself turning up for the exam feeling confident and relaxed - try to picture it in as much detail as possible. Rather like rehearsing for a part in a play, this can replace negative, anxious thoughts with more positive ones. Don't work to the last minute on the night or morning before the exam. Last-minute revision may leave you feeling muddled and anxious. In the exam Here are some tried and tested remedies to the 'I can't answer anything' feeling and other worrying thoughts about exams. When you get into the exam room and sit down, the following approach can help settle your nerves: Take a deep breath in and a long breath out Breathe in again and straighten your back - as if someone were pulling a lever between your shoulder blades Look straight ahead at something inanimate (the wall, a picture, the clock...) and focus your mind on the positive thought 'I CAN DO this exam' as you breathe out. Take another deep breath in and a long breath out. Then breathe normally. You have some minutes to read the paper, so do so thoroughly. If you begin to feel panicky again, repeat the focusing exercise. Panicking will stop you reading carefully, so it is important to keep yourself focused and positive. Read the whole paper once, then read it again and mark the questions you think you can answer. Then read those questions carefully - make sure you understand what is required - and select the ones you are going to answer. Decide on the order in which you'll answer the questions. It is usually best to begin with the one you feel most confident about. Think about how you will plan your time, and stick to your plan. Plan out your answer for each question as you go. If you find that thoughts or ideas about other questions come into your head, jot them down on a separate piece of paper - don't spend time thinking about them now. Many people don’t plan – if your thoughts are dis-organised it shows. If your concentration wanders or you begin to feel panicky, you could try the focusing exercise again, or use one of the following techniques to help you overcome anxious thoughts. If you are worried that you haven't got time to spare on this, remember that taking 5 or 10 minutes may save you spending the rest of the exam in a state of panic. Anxiety management techniques Thought-stopping technique When we become anxious we begin to have negative thoughts ('I can't answer anything', 'I'm going to panic' etc). If this is happening, halt the spiralling thoughts by mentally shouting 'STOP!'. Or picture a road STOP sign, or traffic lights on red. Once you have literally stopped the thoughts, you can continue planning, or practise a relaxation technique. Creating very mild pain Pain effectively overrides all other thoughts and impulses. Even very mild pain - such as lightly pressing your fingernails into your palm - can block feelings of anxiety. Some people find it helpful to place an elastic band around one wrist, and lightly twang it when they are becoming anxious. Use a mantra Derived from meditation, a mantra is a word or phrase which you repeat to yourself. Saying something like 'calm' or 'relax' under your breath or in your head, over and over again, can help defuse anxiety. Focusing Looking out of the window, noticing the number of people with red hair, counting the number of desks in each row... all help to distract your attention from anxious thoughts and keep your mind busy. Mental games such as making words out of another word or title, using alphabetical lists etc are all good forms of distraction. Bridging objects It can help to carry or wear something with positive associations with another person or place. Touching this bridging object can be comforting in its own right, then allow yourself a few minutes to think about the person or situation which makes you feel good. This can have a really calming effect. Self-talk In exam anxiety or panic we often give ourselves negative messages, 'I can't do this' 'I'm going to fail' 'I'm useless'. Try to consciously replace these with positive, encouraging thoughts: 'This is just anxiety, it can't harm me', 'Relax, concentrate, it's going to be OK', 'I'm getting there, nearly over'. Whichever of the distraction techniques has worked for you, finish by going through the refocusing exercise (it only takes 30 seconds or so, but may have a profound effect on your ability to believe in yourself and the task in hand). Different techniques work for different people, so it's worth experimenting to find the ones that are right for you. Developing techniques for managing panic can take time, so it pays to keep practising. And GOOD LUCK 

REVISION!

REVISION Dos and don’ts DO – revise in short bursts. Your brain has an attention span of 20 minutes and then it starts to switch off. Revise for 20 minutes then have a break of at least 10 minutes. An ideal plan is as follows: Organise – 5 minutes Revise – 20 minutes Set questions on what you have revised – 5 minutes Go away (watch TV, sing, dance – NO COMPUTER or MOBILE) Come back after 10 minutes – answer the questions you set Look at how much you managed to remember and look up the stuff you didn’t know Consolidate – summarise into bullet points / pictures / poster what you learned Don’t come back to this topic today! If you do this kind of revision for THREE topics in one revision session, you should then have a break of at least TWO hours before you start revising again. DON’T – don’t confuse quantity with quality – you can spend a whole day revising solidly and it will not be as effective. The brain gets tired and the mind gets bored. You will find yourself easily distracted and will get tired quicker. This may lead to you feeling that you have ‘ticked the box’ for revision but you have not actually learned anything! Use your time more effectively for effective learning. DO – look after yourself. Revising is hard work and you need to keep your body and brain fed and watered if you want it to work for you. The brain uses a lot more calories in the form of pure glucose and this can leave you dehydrated and unable to concentrate. You should aim to drink glucose drinks (safely!) and eat sugary foods while you are revising- but not too much! This should only be for a short space of time as the sugar drop after two hours will leave you unable to concentrate – you should then eat carbohydrates and drink plenty of water or sugar free drinks to restore your body’s sugar balance. Do not follow this advice if you have underlying health issues (e.g. diabetes, hypoglycaemia, food intolerance etc.) DON’T –don’t drink high energy drinks or caffeine based drinks (Kick, coffee, Red Bull) – these will not help you to revise. The concentration of glucose is too high and the brain will become over stimulated making you easily bored and easily distracted. DO – revising is stressful and you often do not see the effects of the stress that you are under. Your body is being exposed to steroids and hormones that you are unaware of – exam stress is constant and underlying all of your thoughts regardless of whether you are feeling prepared or not! Your glands are releasing cortisol and adrenalin and these are both having harmful effects on your body and mind. You need to counteract this by forcing yourself to relax – the two best ways to combat stress of a mental nature are through physical activity and water. Going for a run, a fast walk, a bike ride or simply running up and down the stairs a few times in between topics when revising will work miracles! If you are revising with a friend, find a physical activity that you can both do – it should only last for about 10 minutes otherwise it will be counterproductive as prolonged exercise will release hormones to make you sleep! The other way to beat stress is through water – a soak in the bath, standing in a hot shower or simply getting the washing up liquid, a whisk and some jugs and playing in the sink for 20 minutes will restore your relaxation. Water is excellent for stress – trust the thousands of generations that have gone before you and treat yourself to some Radox! Obviously swimming combines water and exercise and is the ultimate stress releaser. Swimming is the ideal stress buster and we have a pool on site...go figure! DON’T – try not to add to your body’s stress by giving it more toxins to deal with. Smoking and alcohol will put your body under physical stress when it is trying to cope with the mental stress of revising and exam pressure. No one who takes their health seriously should smoke or drink (if they are over 18) to excess. DO – use your brain! You have learned about memory – use that knowledge to get the best grade!! You know that smells, different places and moods will help you to remember. You also know that the more you process the information, the more you remember. I have discussed memory in a previous blog. You also know that if the information is meaningful (semantic processing) you will remember it more! Use this information – process your notes. Reading them over is STRUCTURAL processing – the worst kind for revision! The more you change the information, the more it will be rehearsed and transfer into the long term memory. Use all of your senses – make your notes colourful, use certain smells for certain difficult topics, draw pictures or act out research, use phonetic processing – speak your notes out loud, preferably in a different accent. Trust me – these do work! Work hard now and it will mean less in the summer….

We are all actors By DAVID NANTON

The most useless piece of advice anyone can ever give another person is to “be yourself”. Be yourself. Just… Be… Yourself. This is nonsense of the highest order. I can’t think of a single function in life where just being yourself is appropriate. Someone once told me before a big job interview to relax and be myself. I told them that, all things being equal, being myself on that particular day would involve me sitting in a vat of champagne and Häagen-Dazs ice cream with ’80s rock bands blaring out on endless loops. My friend didn’t want me to be myself. My friend wanted me to lie. And why wouldn’t she? If everyone actually listened when people told them to just be themselves, society would crumble. Except maybe America. They might survive. Truth is, 95 percent of every conversation I have is nonsense. I doubt you’re much different. From a staff meeting at work to conversations with a friend to intellectual discourses on whether or not football should introduce goal-line technology, it’s all almost entirely bogus. This is not to say that I am constantly lying. I am not, or at least not at a blistering 95 percent clip. It’s just to say that human nature dictates that we keep most of what we’re really thinking to ourselves and limit our actions to what other people will find acceptable. Every conversation has an agenda, whether it’s to win favour, to order a steak or just not to get fired. We are only talking to get us through the conversation so that we get can back to being lost inside our own head. (Of course, what’s really going on up in there does slip out into the open on occasion and – shock, horror! – the results are not always pretty.) More accurately: We are talking so that people will see us the way we would like to be seen. That image above, the one with me soaked in alcohol and ice cream... well… as pleasurable as it might seem, that’s not the way I’d like to be known. Frankly, it might have been a mistake to even mention it. No, no, I’d much rather you see me as the chilled-out Londoner, the one who means well, the one who remembers your birthday, the one who jumps around all excited when he sees you, the one who wants you to remember him fondly… what a great guy, that David. I’m constantly playing the role of David, and depending on whom I’m talking to, the role is played by a different actor. If I’m at work, I try to be the quiet, affable hard-working gent just trying to do his job and be left alone. With a girl, I’m the loyal, funny, sweet guy who wants her to be happy. With my mates I’m just one of the lads, watching sports and making fun of everyone we know. With my parents I’m the sensible kid they don’t have to worry too much about. Occasionally, I’m just a moody grump. Am I really all of those people? Sure. In little sections, small parts of my personality, I’m a segment here, a segment there. It’s not like I’m lying to them. I’m just giving them each a part that’s appropriate for the situation. You do the same thing. It’s like the stuff you write on Facebook… wait, no… it’s more like a bookshelf you prominently display in your flat; it’s not like you’ve actually read all those books. You just want people to see your books and think something about you without you telling them. Umberto Eco next to Bill Bryson… he’s so *eccentric!* I’m whatever I need to be at that moment. I’m whatever I want you to want me to be. Stick with me here. You have to know what I’m talking about. Surely, the conversations you have with your parents are dramatically different than the ones you have with your partner, just like those are different than the ones you have with your close friends, just like those are different than the ones you have with your colleagues, classmates or teachers, and on and on. You’re shifting on the fly. You know when you get a phone call at school from someone who wants to talk about something personal that you’re not comfortable discussing next to the nosey colleague or classmate? That’s two worlds colliding, right there. Which one is the real you? The easy answer is to say the personal one, but which role do you spend more hours a day playing? At what point does the performer become the individual? Does it even matter? You know what we are? We’re Voltron. Do any of the over-30s remember Voltron? You had five little robot dogs, or something, they were metal, that I remember, and you’d piece them all together to make one monstrous Super Voltron. The little pieces fit together, each part representing something small but vital. No. I don’t like the Voltron analogy, though it really was a great toy. How about those little Russian dolls, like the ones on Mr Terris’ desk, where one doll fits in a bigger one, that fits in a bigger one, that fits in a bigger one? That’ll work. The smallest doll is the one who you are, and the rest are just the layers used to disguise that fact. But to any observer, the largest doll IS all there is to see. So isn’t that doll the real one? Does having something underneath that’s “real” but no one ever sees allow it to be “real”? Are we just what people see? I found out the other day, almost accidentally, that a good friend of mine has tried heroin. Now, I’m not being judgmental here, though heroin doesn’t necessarily seem like my cup of tea — what with the soiling yourself, tendency toward self-mutilation and willingness to sell your own mother if it’ll lead to another hit. This is not the type of guy who has tried heroin. This is the type of guy can name all 70 British Prime Ministers — there have been 70, right? — wears ties to work and is probably seen as legit middle management material at his nice City corporate complex. And he’s done heroin. I cannot square this with the person I know; I can’t even conjure a mental picture of him having a drink. (I try to imagine him with a tourniquet with Post-It notes on it in his briefcase, or producing an Excel document with different syringe classifications.) But he has. Does that mean the person I know is a fake? I would argue not. I would argue that he’s just as real as the one who did heroin; he’s real to me. I’m sure the people he did heroin with have never heard him defend Tory policy. I have. That’s as real as anything. That’s worse than the drugs, actually. But who is he to himself? Can he make peace with the disparity? Deep down, at the end of the day, when someone tells him to “be himself,” what does he think of? Does it make a difference? Hmmm…. I think the public face we attach to ourselves can often be far more real than any layers or shading that we convince ourselves we have. So the part of David will be played today by the quirky, funny guy, until it’s the serious, contemplative guy, until it’s the loving boyfriend guy, until it’s the responsible son or the quiet employee. We’ll be whatever makes it easier to get through the day, to make it to the next day, and to the next day. And at the end of the day, in the quiet, we are alone with ourselves, wondering what role we play now. The prospect is so terrifying that Nature was merciful enough to require us to sleep. If that’s not a persuasive definition of what it means to be alive, I’m not sure what is.

Why do we need a brain ?

Why Do We Need a Brain?It turns out that we evolved brains for acting. I am going to ask you a simple question simple question, “Why do humans need a brain?” At first, this seems like a silly question with an obvious answer. “You need a brain to stay alive,” is the most common response and indeed this is true. You would be dead without your brain, which is why “brain dead” is usually the legal definition of death. Someone is brain dead when there is a lack of reflex responses controlled by the brain stem, the most fundamental structures at the core of the brain that control the vital functions. However, keeping you alive is not the sole responsibility of the brain. The same could also be said of your other major organs including the heart, liver and lungs. While it is true that these can all be successfully transplanted whereas a brain transplant is neither possible nor desirable (the topic of forthcoming blogs), it is not the case that to be alive depends on having a brain. There are many animals that are alive that do not have brains. They may have simple nervous systems but they do not have brains as such. There are even some animals that start off with a brain that they later discard. The classic example is the sea squirt that begins life as a tadpole-like creature, swimming around the ocean in search of a suitable rock upon which to attach. It has a simple nervous system to coordinate movements and even a rudimentary eye spot to “see,” but when it finally attaches to the rock, it no longer needs to move around and so digests its own nervous system.

That’s the answer to why we need a brain. The primary purpose of a brain is to move around our environment in a meaningful way. In fact, one could even argue that most of the brain is dedicated towards actions. If we consider that the basic building block of the brain is the neuron, then it comes as a surprise to most to find out that the majority of neurons are not in the association cortex where “higher” thought processes are generated. Of the estimated 86-100 billion, around 80 percent are to be found in the cerebellum, the bulbous structure at the base of the brain at the back that controls our movements. So, we clearly evolved to act rather than to think. People often assume that animals with bigger brains are more intelligent because they have more brain cells. It is true to some extent but it is not the number of neurons that determine intelligence but rather the number of connections between the neurons. So the ‘association cortex’ is just that, the 3mm thick outer layer of the brain that stores information for processing through the vastly interconnected networks of associated activity. And this of course, is the secret to the processing capacity of the brain. This is what makes us human and where our thought processes take place. Each neuron has up to 10,000 connections, which means that the number of potential different patterns of neural activity is virtually infinite. With just 500 neurons you have the potential for more different patterns than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe! Our big brains are mostly made up of connections between neurons, around 160,000 km—enough in an individual human brain to circumnavigate the equator four times. The purpose of all these connections is to store patterns of neural activity that are the basis for sensations, perceptions, cognitions and other important brain functions we possess. However, we must remember that these abilities all serve the primary function of action. Without the ability to act, we would be completely at the mercy of the environment, which is why we evolved a brain to act on the world. After all, nature doesn’t select for good ideas, it’s action that speaks louder than words. We can use our brains to develop theories about energy but it's bulding wind farms and nuclear power stations that change our environment.