The Brain Science of Honesty: Why Avoidance Keeps You Stuck | American Recovery

People who are not willing to take an open and honest look at themselves in order to kind of get to a to a better place often struggle to find that sort of life fulfillment that they're seeking that the purpose is it possible or is there a hindrance to finding or somebody feeling like they have found their purpose if there's just no way to be able to figure out how to disclose those secrets come to a place of honesty but yet understanding them as well seems like it'd be a very tough uphill battle to say the least yeah it would be tough I mean I think coming back to to mindfulness because there has been a lot of research on the brain impacts of mindfulness and the ways that it changes the brain one specific construct in mindfulness that we're really looking to help people change is this sort of ability to be kind and compassionate to towards themselves and a lot of what that's tied to especially in addiction but probably in other illnesses as well is being able to look inward and say I failed at something I'm not perfect I'm like far from perfect and I can accept that and they have their there are ways of measuring what we call like trait self-compassion so some people are like born like this like they're like they're just internally kind to themselves they're like walk around in life and say like it's okay I'm not perfect it's you know you know um I accept that about myself I forgive myself for you know making mistakes they're able to just brush off mistakes but also or failures but they're also able to recognize them when they happen and not like avoid them or not look at themselves and not try to learn from them but for a lot of us that has to be learned like that that's I don't know what percentage of people like show up with this self-kindness and self-compassion and studies have shown that with mindfulness training people do learn that skill and then you see reductions in anxiety reductions in depression like it changes a lot for people emotionally when they're able to do that so it's safe to say that verbalizing past failures or limitations uh plays a part in rewiring habits and decision making as a whole well what's really interesting about that about rewiring decision making and habits is we've been talking about the stress system and the technical terms are the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and this is like what um so the hpa axis this is discussed a lot in research on addiction how it's dysregulated how it's handicapped how it's disrupted and part of that is that when you're under stress and addiction is stressful like because of the lying because of the chasing the withdrawal but you know and trying to like find a solution to that because of the the negative consequences or the wreckage that it creates in life and the chaos right like it is very stressful and what happens is that system is very closely in communication with the prefrontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex controls our ability to solve problems like it's you know you've probably heard the term executive functioning right so um the prefrontal cortex helps us make rational decisions make good judgment calls and when the hpa axis or our stress system is like dysregulated it's not releasing cortisol in the appropriate ways at the appropriate times and then you're in a stressful situation and your brain wants to reach for a rational solution studies have shown it can't access those solutions so it goes to instead of like thinking of a range of healthy healthy coping skills like um like you run into some kind of chaos at home and you're like um chronically in a pattern of substance use your stress system doesn't work right and then you try to think of a solution your brain is going to go to something impulsive that is not going to be a great solution to sort of move your life forward right so that's part of the wiring of self-control of problem solving of all the functions you really need more than ever when you're in that world of chaos but you can't really access them your memory can't even access those those solutions at that time so we see though that when people are in a recovery and they're successfully like you know off of alcohol and other substances we see in imaging studies that those systems are changing and becoming more functional again