Calm Clarity: How to Use Science to Rewire Your Brain for Greater Wisdom, Fulfillment, and Joy - Softcover

Quach, Due

 
9780143130970: Calm Clarity: How to Use Science to Rewire Your Brain for Greater Wisdom, Fulfillment, and Joy
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0143130978 ISBN 13: 9780143130970
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Author of the viral Medium piece, "Poor and Traumatized at Harvard," Due Quach shares her Calm Clarity program to show readers how to deal with toxic stress and adversity.

We often don't realize how much control we have over our thoughts, feelings, and actions--on some days, the most minor irritation can upset us, but on others, we are in our best form and can rise to challenges with grace. These fluctuations depend on the neural networks firing in our brains, and we have the power to consciously break hardwired thought patterns. Due Quach developed an intimate understanding of the brain during her personal journey of healing from post-traumatic stress disorder.
     According to Quach, people function in three primary emotional states: Brain 1.0, Brain 2.0, and Brain 3.0. In Brain 1.0, people act out of fear and self-preservation. Brain 2.0 involves instant gratification and chasing short-term rewards at the expense of long-term well-being. Brain 3.0 is a state of mind that Quach calls "Calm Clarity," in which people's actions are aligned with their core values. As Quach confronted PTSD and successfully weaned herself off medication, she learned how to activate, exercise, and strengthen Brain 3.0 like a muscle. In Calm Clarity, she draws on the latest scientific research and ancient spiritual traditions alike to show us how we too can take ownership of our thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to be our best selves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Due Quach (pronounced "Zway Kwok") is the founder and CEO of Calm Clarity, a social enterprise that uses science to help people master their mind and be their best self. A refugee from Vietnam and a graduate of Harvard College and the Wharton MBA program, Quach overcame the long-term effects of poverty and trauma by turning to neuroscience and meditation. After building a successful international business career in management consulting and private equity investments, Quach created the Calm Clarity Program, which is accessible to people of all backgrounds. She now leads Calm Clarity workshops in inner-city high schools, university lecture halls, and corporate executive board rooms alike. She is also the founding chair and executive director of the Collective Success Network, a nonprofit that supports low-income, first-generation college students in achieving their academic, personal, and professional aspirations. The Collective Success Network collaborates with the wider business community to create innovative approaches to foster socioeconomic diversity and inclusion. After living and traveling all around the world, Quach is once again a proud resident of Philadelphia, her hometown.

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1.

A Traumatic Start

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.-Richard Rohr

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.-Helen Keller

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.-Rumi

Let's face it. A lot of terrible things happen every single day to bring people into Brain 1.0. No one is immune from tragedy. We all live in a world that traumatizes us and makes us feel like victims of broken systems, vulnerable to exploitation by con artists, criminals, and crooked politicians. Our environments are full of temptations for drugs, alcohol, food, retail therapy, and other pleasures and thrills as a form of easy escape. At the same time, the world is also full of wonder, majesty, and inspiration that naturally bring people into Brain 3.0. In every corner of the Earth, people are working hard to improve life for their families and to make a difference in their communities.

The fact that the misery and the awesomeness of our planet are not evenly spread out has always been very hard for me to come to terms with. The more I learned about how unfair the distribution of resources can be and how unequal the access to opportunity can be, the more my sense of outrage grew. Seeing signs that the system is not only rigged against the poor and powerless but also set up to exploit them has always triggered my Inner Godzilla.

Being born on Earth is like a lottery. A small lucky proportion are born into loving families blessed with inner resources (like education, emotional intelligence, and resilience) and a degree of financial stability, where parents are generally able to shelter children from the harsh realities of this world for as long as possible, give them a safety net in case they fall, and then coach and equip them to prosper in their careers and to raise a family of their own. Loving, caring, "privileged" families like these naturally develop and pass on Brain 3.0 from generation to generation. But a lot of people aren't lucky. The vast majority of people, like me, are born into families that cannot shield them from horrors. Too many parents are so traumatized that they get trapped in Brain 1.0 and can't help transmitting their pain and suffering to their children just by role modeling what for them are normal behaviors and expectations.

As I dive deeper into Brain 1.0, please keep in mind that what I mean by Brain 1.0 is a pattern of neuronal network firing rather than a specific part of the brain. In the Brain 1.0 pattern, the amygdala, a part of the brain that is involved in reading emotions and looking for signs of danger and threat, is highly activated and puts the entire body into a state of "red alert" that scientists refer to as hypervigilance, a prolonged state of anxiously looking out for danger and threats and not being able to relax (a.k.a. freeze-fight-flight mode). Whenever the body is in this very strong state of stress, there is reduced blood flow to the frontal lobes that help us carry out higher-order mental processes; thus we have less "processing capacity." This is why when we are afraid and anxious, it can be nearly impossible to think clearly, take in and process information, and make sound decisions.

According to the Sanctuary Institute, a pioneer in the area of trauma-informed care, "trauma is defined as an experience in which a person's internal resources are not adequate to cope with external stressors." In the Sanctuary Model developed by Sandra Bloom, the experience of trauma can fall along a wide continuum that includes discrete events as well as ongoing, cumulative, and less tangible experiences such as poverty, racism, discrimination, and neglect. The Sanctuary Model also reframes many of the behavioral symptoms related to trauma as the misapplication of maladaptive survival skills developed to cope with adverse experiences.

In psychiatry, for a person to receive a diagnosis of PTSD, the trauma needs to be related to a direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violation. However, I have found that many people carry painful emotional scars from circumstances that may not fit this hurdle of being life threatening. When we are young children, we are completely dependent on adults for our well-being. Therefore, not having attentive parents, caregivers, and teachers; not having a sense of belonging at home, at school, or in the community; not getting sufficient emotional nurturing; or generally not having the sense of safety and security needed for solid emotional development can be overwhelming and prompt us to turn to maladaptive coping strategies that can later get in the way of our well-being and ability to form healthy and nurturing relationships as adults. Therefore people sometimes use the terms "little-t trauma" or "micro trauma" to refer to distressing experiences that are not life threatening but still inflict psychological pain and suffering.

When we experience trauma or long-term exposure to very stressful conditions, our brains, minds, and lives get reorganized as if the trauma were still going on, such that the trauma contaminates every new encounter and event. The amygdala stays hyperactivated as a "default" state, and the functioning of the frontal lobes becomes disrupted and impaired. Since the left frontal lobe is involved in the experience of positive emotion, when Brain 1.0 disrupts its functioning long-term, we can easily get trapped in a chronic negative emotional state. Furthermore, any bodily sensations that remind people of the trauma easily become overwhelming, so they often adapt by subconsciously dissociating as a way to block, suppress, and numb the painful sensations and memories.

In The Body Keeps the Score, a groundbreaking book providing a scientific perspective on healing trauma, psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk explains that "traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves." He further explains, "People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic-they develop a fear of fear itself."

What's even more sobering is that the negative impact of trauma is not confined to the person who experienced the trauma-it is transmitted across generations. Research has found that experiencing trauma can cause changes in gene expression that can be passed on to offspring. These changes result in an increased risk factor for developing post-traumatic stress disorder. I can testify from firsthand experience that children born to parents who are traumatized have a high likelihood of being exposed to trauma and of seeing traumatic experiences as normal. Unfortunately, the impact of trauma in childhood-what scientists refer to as "adverse childhood experiences" (ACEs)-is even worse than in adults because it negatively affects the development of a child's brain and body in ways that make him or her more vulnerable to...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143130978
ISBN 13 
9780143130970
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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Pärnu mnt 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
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