“I’m a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring “good-enoughist” Brene Brown
I have worked for years with a colleague that has a superpower. I know it is a superpower because I would give nearly anything to also find a way to have this superpower AND there is no one I have ever met that also has this same innate ability. It is the power to shut down everything that happened during the workday in his brain and just move on with enjoying his evening and most importantly his sleep!
A good friend recently accepted a promotion into a management roll after nearly 20 years in sales. We walked and talked often about this opportunity and reviewed her pros and cons list for weeks. Once she accepted the new roll, she was instantly thrown into a position that required hiring and training a sales team along with achieving performance objectives all at the same time. She no longer was in control of her hours and days, meetings consumed her free time and all that was out of her control took over every inch of her brain. On a recent walk, she confessed that she cannot stop thinking about work when the day ends, it keeps her up at night. “I wish I could shut down my brain like I shut down my computer!”
The truth is that the non-stop banter and worry in our brains long after our work day is a much more common thing for women than men. Although all men may not have the “super power”, they most certainly have a better ability to silo their thoughts and activities into distinct parts of their brains and therefore be able to separate their work and home lives more easily than women. Thankfully scientific studies have shown that this is a result of the differences in women’s and men’s brains and not just our inability to function the way that men do.
A Stanford Medicine Study reported the following:
How men’s and women’s brains are different | Stanford Medicine
“In 2000, Cahill scanned the brains of men and women viewing either highly aversive films or emotionally neutral ones. The aversive films were expected to trip off strong negative emotions and concomitant imprinting in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found in each brain hemisphere. Activity in the amygdala during the viewing experience, as expected, predicted subjects’ later ability to recall the viewed clips. But in women, this relationship was observed only in the left amygdala. In men, it was only in the right amygdala. Cahill and others have since confirmed these results.
Discoveries like this one should ring researchers’ alarm buzzers. Women, it’s known, retain stronger, more vivid memories of emotional events than men do. They recall emotional memories more quickly, and the ones they recall are richer and more intense. If, as is likely, the amygdala figures into depression or anxiety, any failure to separately analyze men’s and women’s brains to understand their different susceptibilities to either syndrome would be as self-defeating as not knowing left from right.
The two hemispheres of a woman’s brain talk to each other more than a man’s do. In a 2014 study, University of Pennsylvania researchers imaged the brains of 428 male and 521 female youths — an uncharacteristically huge sample — and found that the females’ brains consistently showed more strongly coordinated activity between hemispheres, while the males’ brain activity was more tightly coordinated within local brain regions. This finding, a confirmation of results in smaller studies published earlier, tracks closely with others’ observations that the corpus callosum-— the white-matter cable that crosses and connects the hemispheres — is bigger in women than in men and that women’s brains tend to be more bilaterally symmetrical than men.”
Scientific studies have proven that a women’s brain naturally engages emotions along with facts… AND THAT IS WHAT KEEPS US UP AT NIGHT! So, what can you do about it? What strategies can you use to shut down your brain when you shut down your computer? Here are the strategies I have used that have worked for me.
- Walks with friends
- Hobbies (See You Will Teach People How to Treat You post)
- Journaling
- Intense jolt of exercise (20 minutes is enough to achieve a release in the brain)
- Binging a good show
- Audible or Podcasts listen while walking
Before bed night ritual:
- Bath with soothing salts and lavender
- 5 minute meditation (CALM or Insight Timer Apps are both great)
- Weighted blanket can ease the tension in your body
- BOX BREATHING when you cannot stop the cycle in your brain
Box Breathing Benefits and Techniques – Cleveland Clinic
How to do box breathing
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to master the box breathing method right away. “You don’t want to go too slowly or too quickly,” Dr. Young says. “Stay at your comfort level, making sure you’re breathing very gently and not straining.”
- Breathe out slowly, releasing all the air from your lungs.
- Breathe in through your nose as you slowly count to four in your head. Be conscious of how the air fills your lungs and stomach.
- Hold your breath for a count of four.
- Exhale for another count of four.
- Hold your breath again for a count of four.
- Repeat for three to four rounds.
Box breathing was a technique I was taught during the stress of COVID living. When I need to calm my brain late at night, I will extend the counts to 5 by 7 by 7 by 5. This is breathing in for 5 counts, hold for 7 counts, exhale for 7 counts and hold for 5 counts then repeat. I would only recommend this when you are laying in bed and have no intentions of standing up. Holding your breath for an extended period of time can make some people dizzy and this breathing stuff requires practice. Start with the four by four and see what works for you. When I cannot “shut down my brain”; box breathing (or in my case rectangle breathing) is the fastest way to get back to sleep.
There is a saying which is “control the controllable”. This makes it all sound too easy if you ask me, but the statement is true. As much as I would love to control the uncontrollable, the universe has simply made that impossible. I can control my breathing, my reactions and my thoughts; the rest will have to be left to the stars, the moon and the sky.
The Heart of the Middle 