Rewire your brain for Love
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The way your brain is wired can either help you have happy, satisfying relationships or it can be a huge obstacle to healthy love.
So where does this wiring come from? Unfortunately, most of your brain’s wiring for relationships was determined unbelievably early in your brain’s development—before you were about two years old. (Your interactions as a baby have an enormous, lifelong influence on how your brain does relationships.)
The good news, though, is that you can rewire your brain for better relationships. You can change your old “relationship brain” neural pathways and develop new and improved ones using simple, 2,500-year-old mind-training techniques that are more precise than a neurosurgeon’s blade, and without all the mess. The ancient practice of mindfulness meditation, as it turns out, produces real, measurable changes in the brain in key places so that deeper connections, better love, and healthier relationships can really take hold.
In as little as 20 minutes a day.
Whaddaya think? Are your relationships worth 20 minutes a day?
Open Mind + Well-Wired Brain = New Frontiers
So how exactly do you change those structures and connections into supporters of happy relationships? Recent studies by leading neuroscientists and biobehaviorists—researchers from Harvard, UCLA, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Cambridge, to name a few—have shown that mindfulness practice promotes changes in your brain in areas and ways that promote healthier relationships with yourself and others.
The neurological changes seen in the brains of mindfulness meditators show up in how they feel, how they deal with their feelings, and how they do relationships. And it doesn’t take years of practice—many beneficial effects are seen in the earliest stages of practice, in as little as a few weeks of practicing 20 minutes a day.
Can’t do 20 minutes? That’s perfectly okay; start with two.
You don’t have to become a monk or a vegetarian or spend hours contemplating your navel. You don’t need to hum “Om” over and over, trying to get your brain to be still or empty.
What you do during mindfulness meditation is practice simply noticing your mind’s busyness (a.k.a. your thoughts and feelings) and not getting all tangled up in it. You don’t even have to sit while you do it (and you definitely don’t have to sit like a pretzel). You can do walking meditation, eating meditation, lying-down meditation, or even washing-dishes meditation. With practice, you can meditate anywhere, during just about any activity.
By using simple mindfulness meditation, you can rewire your brain’s relationship pathways—and change your life.
This book is about why and how to use mindfulness meditation as a simple, good-for-you approach to rewiring your brain for better, healthier, juicier romantic relationships.
The Seven “High-Voltage” Benefits
Consider this: developmental psychologists talk about essential characteristics that are seen in people with healthy, attuned childhood relationships—characteristics that bode incredibly well for these people’s ability to have healthy relationships in adulthood.
And then this: those same characteristics are seen in people who practice mindfulness—plus bonus characteristics.
To top it all off: the latest scientific research has increasingly been showing that these characteristics are associated with areas of the brain that change as a result of mindfulness.
As I’ve worked with my patients and consulted with other psychotherapists, I’ve found that the most helpful way to think about these characteristics is to group them into a list of seven acquirable skills. These are skills you can develop and grow within yourself, within your brain – and they seem to be the most powerful in creating and sustaining a healthy and happy relationship:
Management of your body’s reactions
Regulation of your response to fear
Emotional resilience
Response flexibility
Insight (self-knowing)
Empathy and attunement—within yourself and with others
Perspective shift from “me” to “we”
In the work I do with my patients, I’ve seen that the growth of these seven characteristics has such an important impact on interactions with others that I call them the “high-voltage” relationship benefits. I’ve been seeing the results confirmed through my psychology practice, in myself, and in the lives of my friends and colleagues. I want you to benefit as well.1. Marsha, what does mindfulness have to do with relationships? Aren’t relationships about interaction and isn’t meditation something you do by yourself?
You’ve got an excellent point! After all, most people don’t say, “I’m so lonely, so heartsick – I’m so eager to have a partner – I know! I’ll go sign up to learn meditation!” But here’s the synapse – the connection: Our brains are wired – or not – for healthy relationships. If, like so many people, yours is not, you can improve that wiring through the simple practice of mindfulness. Research from Harvard, UCLA, and so on have shown that changes happen in the brain when you practice mindfulness, in areas that have to do with better emotional resilience, healthier empathy, quicker recovery after an argument. I talk about those changes in terms of seven “high-‐voltage” relationship benefits.
2. You say that we can we “rewired for love.” Do you mean that literally? Will a “rewired” brain show up differently on an MRI?
Yes, there are actual changes in the connections and pathways in the brain. One of the ways that researchers look at this is, in fact, on what’s called a “functional MRI” (fMRI for short), in which they’re able to see the areas of the brain that are most active during certain tasks – like meditating; or in experienced meditators, they can look at how different parts of the brain react to, say, the sound of a crying baby. They can also measure the size of brain areas in people who meditate and compare them to non-‐meditators. Overall, the changes are seen in areas that are deeply involved in the seven high-‐ voltage benefits.
3. You prescribe mindfulness as the antidote to the Big Enemy. What is the Big Enemy in relationships?
The Big Enemy is autopilot. The mind is a wonderful thing. But when it goes on autopilot, we’re it’s captive. If you’ve ever heard words come out of your mouth that you knew were not from your heart, your deepest, best part of yourself; if you’ve ever been in an argument with your partner, where you knew that the worst of you was interacting with the worst of them – getting out of the habit of autopilot is for you. Mindfulness meditation rewires your brain so that your autopilot isn’t running – and ruining – your relationship.
4. Is your work about helping people find a new relationship or is it also about improving an existing one?
Many of the people I see in my psychotherapy practice are coming in on their own – some are single, but some are in a relationship and having a hard time – but their partners aren’t willing to come in to therapy. I also see couples who, despite their best efforts (sometimes already having tried couples’ counseling), are going round and round the same old problems. The practice of mindfulness changes the neural pathways that result from mindfulness practice – and better neural pathways are the path to better relationships. That’s true for those who are in a relationship, or those who want to be.
5. What exactly are the benefits of mindfulness meditation?.
Here’s the best way I’ve found to summarize the impact of mindfulness practice on relationships:
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a) Better management of your body’s reactions
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b) Regulation of your “fear” response
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c) Greater emotional resilience
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d) Increased response flexibility
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e) Improved insight or “self-‐knowing”
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f) Healthier empathy and attunement – to yourself and others
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g) A perspective shift from “me” to “we”
I’ve found that the growth of these seven acquirable skills – that’s important: we can acquire these! – has such potent impact on our relationships with others that I call them the seven “high-‐voltage” relationship benefits of mindfulness.
Marsha Lucas, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and neuropsychologist who has been practicing psychotherapy and studying the brain-‐behavior relationship for over twenty years. Prior to entering private practice, she was a neuropsychologist on the faculty at the Emory University School of Medicine.
She has a special interest in the practice of mindfulness, especially in how it stimulates the brain to develop new, more integrated circuits ~ which may be at the heart of well-‐being, including emotional balance and resilience, enhanced relationships and friendships, and greater empathy and connectedness.
Dr. Lucas currently practices in Washington, D.C. and also writes about love and relationships. In addition to being the Mindfulness and Relationships blogger for PsychologyToday.com, she has been interviewed and quoted extensively by media, most recently including Psychology Today, iVillage.com, Glamour (UK), AARP Magazine, Reader's Digest, WashingtonPost.com, Psychologies Magazine (UK), Providence Journal (Scripps), and The Hill (newspaper written for and about the U.S. Congress)
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