Moment of Mind February 2020

There’s a saying in the contemplative field that wherever you go, there you are. In mindfulness we’re using our attention as a tool to notice our moment to moment lived experience. This includes the movement of the mind. When we practice using our attention this way we learn how to develop a relationship with our changing thinking and emotional states rather than being yanked around by them or avoiding them. We realize that they aren’t us.
This past week was a roller coaster for me in terms of the thoughts my mind generated. One day was filled with bleak “you won’t ever be good enough, you’re failing now” thoughts. The next day was relatively engaged without much negative thought showing up. The day after was a whirlwind and I can’t remember what kind of thinking was happening. The day after that was a mix of worrying thinking combined with fatigue. Then there was a day that was kind of foggy.
What I’m pointing out here is a pattern: constant shifting. Yes, there were several days this week that my mind was not a fun place to be. I would not have sent any of you there even as a punishment. And yes, there were also days where it was pretty alright being in my mind, hanging out with the thinking that was showing up. This is what a mind does, brings more thought in. 
In the past I was socially conditioned to think that external events caused the thinking. That a bad event equals bad thinking, feeling and sensations. That’s what it looks like when we aren’t taught to look past the superficial. What I see now is that while events and circumstances do have a degree of influence, because we are in physical bodies which get injured, the mind has intrinsic activity independent of external circumstances. 
This week I invite you to look for patterns of when your thinking/feeling/sensation experiences are independent from your circumstances. They create your experience of those circumstances. 
Practice #1 – I invite you to be on the lookout for circumstances you usually would define as stressful, bad, or annoying and notice when you’re in those circumstances and your mind is generating okay, bemused, or even cheerful thinking. Start with something small like being stuck in traffic or waiting in line. Notice when your mind happens to not be creating stressful, worrying or anxiety or irritation thinking. I invite you to write down what you notice.
Practice #2 – I invite you to be on the lookout for circumstances you usually define as relaxed, or fun, or easygoing and notice when you are in those circumstances and your mind is generating other types of thinking. Again you don’t have to wait until you’re on vacation, you can just notice a sunny day or a funny movie or a relaxed walk and where your mind is – what it experience is it generating that is not the chill circumstance? I invite you to write down what you notice. 
Happy exploring!.

I love a good pun. Especially in the titles of scientific articles. This month’s study is a longitudinal one (that’s when a population or group of people is followed through time and researchers evaluate what changes for that group of people during that time based on a specific set of questions and variables researchers are exploring) following a group of more than 45,000 people between 2009 and 2017 in the United Kingdom. 

Researchers set out to understand the role that diet has on subjective well-being and mental health. Subjective is how you and I say we’re doing – meaning there’s no objective measure, it’s just how we report feeling at a given point of time. Researchers found that reported subjective well-being increases in a dose-response fashion with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables consumed or with the number of days in which either fruits or vegetables are consumed in a given week.

They basically found a dose-response relationship between eating more fruits and veggies and people consistently reporting feeling okay. This is “big deal” territory in the world of science because in order to get to being able to show causality (if you do this, then you get that) you have to show a consistent dose-response, among other conditions.

We know that our minds are generating sensations continually about how we’re feeling. When researchers see over time, among the same number of people, a consistent increase in “I feel at ease” self-reporting when controlling for other variables then we know something else is happening.

Researchers focused on what is called “positive and negative affect” for the well-being measure, rather than life satisfaction or general health (see picture below). Affect is how your brain-body feels inside, called interoception, or inside seeing. Affect is a mixture of states where you feel activated to calm mixed with feeling positive to negative. Your brain uses affect as one input, along with social conditioning and language, to construct emotions like fear/anger/sadness/happiness. Affect is signals from your body that relate to food, sleep, physical activity, and social support among other things. Your brain is always trying to regulate what’s happening in your body. And if your body is “off” you get a bad feeling – nudging you to take care of it. See this fun cartoon on the Theory of Constructed Emotion for more info. 

In this study, people were asked 3 questions on fruit and vegetable consumption that got at both quantity and frequency of consumption. They were also asked a 12 question inventory about feeling happy, depressed, worrying, and other well being measures.  Researchers controlled for age, income, gender identity, relationship status, number of children, education, long standing health conditions, smoking, and walking frequency.

After some fancy regression statistics math, the authors state “…our results show that increasing one’s daily consumption by just one portion (on a day when some fruits or vegetables are already consumed) provides the same increase in subjective well-being as 10 extra days of walking every 4 weeks.” In this same study they had already calculated statistical relationships between how people said they felt and other factors – like walking regularly (associated with feeling better), having long term chronic illness and having lost a spouse (associated with feeling worse). They further state, “if an individual who consumed vegetables daily stopped consuming them altogether, they would suffer a greater loss in subjective well-being than becoming widowed, or approximately 57% of the loss of someone who went from being employed to being unemployed.”

Wild, right? I want to be clear here that they are not saying that if you lose a job or become widowed that eating more fruits and vegetables will magically make you feel better. There’s nothing in the world that can make feelings stay any one thing for an extended period of time. However, loss of a support relates to physiological changes in the body. Which gives you affect shifts inside, which contributes to the emotional states your brain constructs. 

What they’re saying here is that when they measure different inputs on subjective well-being, the effect of eating fruits and veggies has a similar impact on self reported well being as when people walk regularly. And, if you remove that support, this is similar to removing other supports like a job or a spouse. When your mind notices negative affect, it generates stressful or sad thought-feels. They are pointing out a link that fruits and vegetables may be contributing to physiological body changes that contribute to feeling “low” or “up”. They further caution readers that this isn’t just an effect of how often one eats fruits and veggies, it’s a combined effect of eating a higher quantity frequently. The researchers call for conducting randomized controlled trials on this, where some people eat more fruits and veggies compared to a control that doesn’t and again they find out how people report feeling. This is the next step in developing causality…this study deepens the association researchers are seeing. 

This past fall I jumped on the green drink bandwagon to help me get more fruits and veggies because I was not hitting the 5 a day recommendation (public health training doesn’t mean I necessarily have the best habits all the time). I now have 2 servings of fruits and veggies in oat milk every day in a green drink, beyond what I eat through meals, and I have to say, subjectively speaking, that I have noticed that it seems to help my general energy levels (the ‘activation’ portion of affect). The brand I buy costs me 50 cents a day, which isn’t too bad for a little more blood sugar regulation or whatever it is that it’s doing. It certainly can’t hurt.

This is called an Affect Circumplex and it’s used in psychology and neurobiology to help people understand some of the building blocks of emotional categories. These are sensations, or feelings, that we feel inside our bodies that our brains use, with language concepts from society, to construct emotions such as sad, happy, angry or fearful. I invite you to explore naming how you feel in your body with it for practice at expanding your awareness.

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