Yogis ahead of science: Does it help to reframe our thoughts and look for the silver lining?

Imagine messaging your mother and not getting a reply for hours. You start to get worried, but later you learn that her phone died. Or a car swerves in front of you on the freeway, and you are furious. Then you see the hospital sign at the next exit, and the anger evaporates. Or your listener yawns while you are telling a story. You feel hurt, but then find out that she was up all night with a sick child.

Our lives are full of moments when we form snap judgments about situations and people without having complete information. We are quick to assume the worst, but often these situations are open to interpretation, and as soon as we see them differently, our feelings change too.

In 2002, Kevin Ochsner and his colleagues at Stanford studied this shift in the lab. Fifteen women in a brain scanner looked at upsetting photos and either let themselves feel the emotion or reinterpreted the image so it felt less negative. When they reinterpreted, activity in the amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, dropped, and the prefrontal cortex, which steers attention and reasoning, became more active. (1)

Psychologists call this cognitive reappraisal. Patanjali described something very similar about two thousand years ago.

What yogis knew

In Yoga Sutra 2.33, Patanjali suggests: vitarka bādhane pratipakṣa bhāvanam. When disturbed by negative thoughts, cultivate the opposite mental attitude. This is different from pushing a feeling away or pretending it isn’t there. Pratipaksha bhavana asks us to look at the same situation from a different angle and embrace the view that serves us better. Why would we do it? Patanjali explained that earlier in the same chapter, in Yoga Sutra 2.16: heyam duhkham anagatam, suffering that has not yet come can (and should) be avoided. Often, we can’t change what happens, but we do have a choice in how we interpret it. Changing the interpretation of the event changes how much it hurts us.

What science discovered

In the 1960s, the psychiatrist Aaron Beck noticed that his depressed patients shared a pattern of automatic negative thoughts about themselves, their world and their future. When patients learned to catch these thoughts, question them and replace them with more balanced ones, their mood improved. This became cognitive therapy, later known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), one of the most widely studied treatments in psychology.

Neuroscience then showed what happens in the brain when we reframe. A 2014 review pooled 48 brain imaging studies of reappraisal. Across all of them, reappraisal activated the prefrontal areas responsible for control and reasoning and reduced activity in the amygdala. (2) Researchers also compared reappraisal with suppression, trying to hide or push down a feeling. Suppression hid the emotion on the outside but didn’t reduce it on the inside, and it actually increased the body’s stress response. (3) Changing the story calms the alarm in the brain, while gritting our teeth through it does not.

We could all benefit from cognitive reframing, but it is not an easy task, especially when our resources are depleted. The key word here is bhavana, which means cultivation, deliberately growing a thought or quality over time until it takes root. It can become part of our yoga practice.

Try it for yourself

The next time an unsettling thought grabs hold of you, take a few breaths with a long exhale first. Then try one of the four ways of reappraising described by David Rock in Your Brain at Work. (4) We can reinterpret the event by asking what else might be going on. We can normalize it by recognizing that new and unfamiliar situations are stressful for everyone. We can reorder our priorities by asking how much this really matters. Or we can reposition ourselves by imagining how someone else would see it, a friend, a teacher, or our own self ten years from now.

Afterward, check in with yourself. Do you sense any difference in how you feel? Did your breath change? What about the sensations in your jaw, your shoulders, your belly? That’s the first proof, direct experience. The brain studies explain how a new interpretation can calm the alarm center, which is inference, the second proof. For testimony, Patanjali, Beck and decades of neuroscience all point the same way.

Living with ambiguity

A yoga student of mine likes to say, “Your happiness depends on your ability to tolerate ambiguity.” We could go one step further. Our happiness depends on our ability to interpret ambiguity in a way that serves us and keeps us regulated. Unanswered messages, swerving cars and yawning listeners will keep showing up in our lives. What we make of them is up to us.

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References

(1) Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(8), 1215–1229.

(2) Buhle, J. T., Silvers, J. A., Wager, T. D., et al. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: A meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. Cerebral Cortex, 24(11), 2981–2990.

(3) Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281–291.

(4) Rock, D. (2009). Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. HarperBusiness.

Kabel, O. (2017, September 13). Pratipaksha bhavana – the most powerful tool of mind control and emotional regulation. Sequence Wiz. 

Kabel, O. (2017, September 20). Four ways to change your emotional responses: Types of cognitive reappraisal. Sequence Wiz.