Your Brain on Art Part 2 - Zen and the Art of Mental Wellness Maintenance

Posted on Monday, Nov 18, 2024 | Mental Health, Art, Creativity, Mental Illness, Art Therapy, Creativity, Psychology, Medication, Neuroscience, Zen Buddhism
In this second episode of the Your Brain on Art series, Alex discusses Zen, how meditation and mindfulness can aid mental wellness and what this says about flow states and the creative process.

Show Notes

Summary

In this second episode of the Your Brain on Art series, Alex discusses Zen, how meditation and mindfulness can aid mental wellness and what this says about flow states and the creative process.

Show Notes

Transcript

“Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, “It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.” ― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“Real wisdom is the ability to understand the incredible extent to which you bullshit yourself every single moment of every day.” ― Brad Warner, Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye

Zen Buddhists set a lot of stock in sitting still. The word Zen itself derives from the Chinese word chan and basically means “meditation”. Zen Buddhists’ refer to meditation as zazen, which translates to “Sitting Zen” or “sitting meditation”. To them, the act of sitting and shutting up is the very act of engaging with the universe, of interfacing with infinity, communing with God. When you practise zazen you are at one with all beings, in fact you are all beings.

Meditation in the Zen sense means hitting the pause button on your body and mind. Taking some time to free your mind of the thoughts that bind us to reality with all its prickly, sticky messiness. When you meditate properly, you are not thinking “no thoughts”, you are simply not thinking, you are just being.

But you don’t have to sit still to achieve this. According to Zen, you are in zazen at all times. You are always at one with the universe. It’s just that when you’re out and about in the big wide world, drinking coffee, and tapping manically at your phone giving someone a sick burn on the socials, you are unable to recognise this. You’re too busy with petty distractions. Only when you sit down, shut up, and clear your mind for a few moments, can you experience true reality. But reality sits quietly in the background while you exist in your state of perpetual delusion, you just have to stop ruminating on that weird comment your friend made yesterday, and notice what’s going on right now. This is often referred to as mindfulness, and it’s a word that been so used and abused over recent years as to be meaningless.

But it does have meaning. It means you are present. Ideally in the purist sense. This is something that you should practise as much as possible, commune with the universe wherever possible as we shall see, it’s good for the body and mind, but for those of us who suffer chronic mental illness, its value and purpose is much more practical and arguably more essential.

To understand why this is we need to rewind a bit to the glorious neuroscience of the prior episode of this series.

So, if you listened to part one of this series you might remember that I talked about homoeostasis. If you don’t remember this, then that may mean that you didn’t listen to part one, therefore you probably should go and do that, since otherwise this episode probably won’t make much sense.

So homoeostasis is concept of a system being in equilibrium, the system in this case being your nervous system, and by extension, your body, the whole of you. I talked about the fact that when you are suffering from mental illnesses such as chronic anxiety and depression, your nervous system has got stuck in a panic state that I referred to as “bad homoeostasis”. Perhaps I made this sound like this means you’re in a state where your body cannot achieve equilibrium, but this is not quite the case. You are in equilibrium, just an undesirable one.

You see, your nervous system doesn’t really have a preferred state, just that its state is appropriate for the environment. It takes its cue for this from your what your senses perceive about the environment, and what those signals mean, and what they might mean for your future state. The brain is essentially a prediction machine, and this is a concept that I’m going to return to a lot in future. Your mind has a model of the world as perceived by you, and makes predictions about future states, usually the most imminent future states. Essentially it makes some assumptions, based on past experience, about what might happen next. So if you walk into your bedroom, your brain’s model has this room containing a bed before you enter. If instead of a bed there is a large pile of Lego bricks where your bed should be, then you’ll experience surprise, which is what happens when events in reality don’t match the range of events our brains consider probable. If, instead you walk into your bedroom and see your bed merely strewn with Lego pieces, you will still be surprised, but much less so, since in this scenario you have kids who have Lego and the habit of playing with said Lego in places you’d rather they didn’t. Conversely, if you walked into that room and were presented with vast vistas of sand dunes with giant sand worms battling space craft, you’d be very surprised indeed. Unless that is, that you have a giant screen in your bedroom and someone is in there watching Dune.

Your nervous system sets its equilibrium to whatever state suits your environment. If you live in a war zone, your nervous system is likely to be permanently in fight or flight mode, since you could encounter guns and bombs and any number of nasty things at any moment. If you’re sitting on your sofa binge-watching episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross with his soothing tones and strangely alluring afro, then your nervous system will be in rest and digest mode. All this is exactly as it should be. Being stuck in fight or flight mode is likely an optimal response to being in a war zone, since being ready to flee is arguably the optimal state for such situations. Yes being constantly stressed is bad, but being captured, maimed or dead are all arguably worse.

The problem arises when the inverse happens. Attempting to loaf on your sofa, you find that Bob Ross’s soothing tones do nothing to calm your brain, because your brain is not thinking about oil painting, it’s obsessing about that snarky emails you sent yesterday. You’re fidgety, biting your nails, looking through the TV, and you have a knot in your stomach. You’re in fight or flight mode, and now you come to think of it, you’ve been that way for a while now. When was the last time you were actually able to sit in front of the TV and relax? Your nervous system has found an equilibrium that is inappropriate to your surroundings.

This problem arises because all reactions to all situations happen in your head. You don’t have to be afraid of the tiger salivating in your general direction, but its helpful to be so. Your nervous system has deep seated understanding that this is bad, even when the tiger is at the other side of some sturdy bars. Not being afraid is a bad thing. But maybe you’re a tiger tamer, and you’re not afraid. That confidence may or may not be founded in reality, but one way or another you’re not stressed in a situation where perhaps your should be. It’s all in the head. You see, your nervous system responds to how you perceive the environment, which is not always a realistic, or even a vaguely appropriate perception.

Therefore, while you sit there obsessing about that job interview that’s 4 days away, your nervous system earnestly responds to your trepidation by triggering fight or flight. Not in 4 days time, but now, while Bob is putting some detailing on that tree. It doesn’t care that there’s no tiger, the fear is real, because you think it’s real. Therefore your nervous system responds accordingly by increasing your levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline and cortisol and you feel wired and worried. Bob Ross fades into the background while you sit and fret and doomscroll to take your mind off of it.

As I said in the last episode, anxiety begets anxiety, and once your body gets in that state, if you don’t remove the perceived threat, in this case the ruminations, then it will stay in stress mode and likely find some more stuff to worry about.

So unless you’re in the war zone, or confronted with the giant, salivating feline, then the solution to your problem resides in your head. Bob Ross’s hair might not help much, but following his lead might. Well, maybe don’t follow his lead too much.

In short, you gotta stop thinking the bad thoughts. Easy, right? Well, if it were, you wouldn’t be staring at the ceiling at 3am thinking them, would you? But this is where mindfulness comes back into play and, by extension, you guessed it, art!

Let me paint another picture. A forest or bush fire is burning its way to a town, increasing in intensity as it finds more fuel, and creating desolation in its wake. Frantic fire crews turn up, and some of them go dump some water at the advancing front. Another group heads a few miles towards the town. Here they start clearing trees and foliage in a line parallel to the advancing fire. They might even use fire to do this. Why? You’re probably aware that this is a fire break. They create a strip of land free of flammable material wide enough so that no flames can cross it, so that when the fire reaches it, it cannot advance, and hopefully peters out. Maybe the fire makes it across, but you slow it down for a while, calm it down a bit by starving it of fuel, and it gives the firefighters a chance to make another fire break, which will slow it down further. If you do this enough, you’re hopefully able to stop the fire entirely.

The flames are your anxious thoughts, and the fire break is some activity that creates a gap in the path of these thoughts which stops them dead in their tracks. Doing so once will help a little, but doing so regularly could stop the surge entirely. To extend the analogy, medicines such as anti-depressants, which we spoke about in the last episode, are like the fire crew with the water hoses on the front line of the blaze. They hold the anxiety at bay so that you can do what’s needed, in this case, create some more fire breaks.

And what are some good ways to create that fire break? Meditation, mindfulness and…creativity. I can hear you breath an audible sigh of relief as I finally get to the point!

A full explanation of what mindfulness is and how to achieve it, is outside of the scope of this particular discussion, but here’s a quick recap.

According to Wikipedia:

“Mindfulness is the cognitive skill, usually developed through meditation, of sustaining meta-attentive awareness towards the contents of one’s own mind in the present moment.”

Well that’s pretty clear right?

Put more simply, but perhaps less succinctly, mindfulness is the state of being mentally present in the now. This involves progressively disassociating your minds processes from the thoughts within. This sounds a bit contradictory, since it seems to most of us that our mind and our thoughts are the same thing. But most of what happens in our brain and body happens without us noticing, for example, you fled from the tiger before you even had time to consider your predicament. Thoughts are just one facet of human cognition. Therefore it’s not so bizarre to consider relegating those thoughts to the cheap seats and watching the real game unencumbered.

The best known approach to achieving this is via meditation. Which usually involves sitting still and focussing on something specific, commonly your breath, or perhaps a meaningless phrase, sometimes called a mantra. But there are many other ways to achieve this, for example using apps like Headspace, having another person guide you through it and yoga.

Mindfulness has its roots in Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but there’s a whole industry that’s sprung around it now, that’s saturated with chancers and charlatans to the point where psychologist Thomas Joiner is quoted as suggesting that modern mindfulness meditation has been “corrupted” for commercial gain by self-help celebrities, and suggests that it encourages unhealthy narcissistic and self-obsessed mindsets, while American clinical psychologist Jeremey Safran dubbed it “McMindfulness”.

However, the effectiveness of mindfulness has a long history of research, some more robust than others, but there is a general consensus seems to be that it is an effective means of managing a large spectrum of psychological conditions. Neurological studies have indicated that over time it can actually change the structure of the brains suggesting that " Grey matter concentrations in brain regions that regulate emotion, self-referential processing, learning and memory processes have shown changes in density”.

Some studies have suggested that regular practise of mindfulness focussed activities increase mindfulness in general, meaning that you are more mindful when participating in any other activity. And it has been found to be very effective in the treatment of ruminant thoughts and consistent anxiety. Not only does it provide the fire break effect I’ve described, but the overall effect can make it easier to combat these type of thoughts at other times.

Once you cut off those unhelpful thoughts, you starve them of fuel, your nervous system can start dialling back its panic response. Less of the fight or flight neurochemicals are released such as adrenaline and cortisol, and more rest and digest neurochemicals such as serotonin and GABA are released. You might slip back into your anxious state soon after the mindful activity but as you regularly repeat it, like our repeated fire breaks, you start to find those thoughts lowering in volume and frequency. This is the process of your nervous system finding a more appropriate equilibrium. Since it was the unhelpful thoughts that were causing you to be stuck in fight or flight mode, discontinuing them allows you to exit that state. Your nervous system finds a new equilibrium in a calmer state. Good homoeostasis!

I’ve practised meditation on and off for a couple of decades now, and have certainly felt the benefits in terms of recognising unhelpful thoughts and shooing them away. But with a family, work, chores, social life and all the other fun stuff we pass out time with, finding time, space and peace to meditate can be troublesome. If you can combine mindfulness with another activity that helps you create a state of focus and calm, then mindful states can often be easier to achieve.

When I started making art again more seriously around seven years ago, I found even less time for mindfulness. However, once I’d found my groove in the creative realm, I started to notice that I was achieving states of focus when in front of my easel that resembled meditation, and left me feeling similarly relaxed and balanced. Time would fall away and my thoughts seemed to stop. I would be making decisions, applying techniques, adjusting, improving, but all without seeming to notice doing so, and without thinking about anything else either. I seemed to be on autopilot.

This is very common with creatives and adjacent practices like musicians. You hear a writer saying something like “the words just seemed to flow through me, like I was just a conduit”. This is what mindfulness is - being present, or perhaps just being. And I’ve talked about it before. The state of focus you get into when you’re fully absorbed in the creative process. It’s called “flow” and it’s the state that most if not all creators spend their time trying to achieve.

I frequently achieve it writing these episodes, including this one. I started off this series assuming that this was going to be a single episode. Thanks in part to flow, I’m in the process of realising that this probably needs to roll on to yet another episode. By just letting my thoughts flow I realise that I had a lot more to say on this subject than I had previously thought. This is just another effect of such states - when you get out of the way of your subconscious, when you stop trying to force yourself to think, to create, it can just spill out naturally, and you’ll be surprised what you can achieve. Another aspect of flow is the desire to just keep going. To surf that wave for as long as possible.

However, I need to get off an give you all a break. I’ve got other things I’m supposed to be doing, and the longer the episode, the more time and effort it takes to record and produce. And all that stuff is much less mindful!

I’ve been promising an episode on flow since I first started this podcast, and now it looks as if I might finally get to it. I think this is me committing to it, and as I’ve said before, I hate disappointing people. Will it be the next episode I release? Maybe, maybe not. You’ll just have to turn up and find out.

I’d also like to expand my thoughts on the probabilistic brain and how this relates to the creation and consumptions of art, movies, TV, music and the arts in general. That may also get included in the next episode. Or maybe there will be a fourth part. I know, the suspense is killing you.

One last thing. Having documented my departure from Twitter in the last episode, I’ve just joined X-nemesis BlueSky, which seems like a much nicer place. My handle is AlexLovelessArtist. I’ve quite chatty on there at times, you have been warned. Once you’ve followed me on there, please go through and like and repost any or all of my posts if you would be so kind. This stuff really helps new people find me. Thanks!

See you soon!