BH: It seems as though a lot of people sell themselves short by putting themselves in a box – right brained vs. left brained.
Dr. Jill: That's one of the reasons I'm so pleased that this video hit the airwaves. When all the right hemisphere, left hemisphere stuff hit, it was really big in the 70's. It was big news, people were right hemisphere or left hemisphere and then the school system started adapting to this, "Are you more of a right hemisphere learner or a left hemisphere learner and what does that mean to us."
People got stuck in these holes or these categories. The right hemisphere person grows up thinking, "Well, I'm more of a creative person, I can't handle that stuff because I'm not left brained" and the left brained kids grow up thinking "Oh, I'm not creative, I can't draw, I can't sit and create something new, I have no talent." People say these things and I'm thinking, "My God, who put you in that box!" It's time to bust out of the box and decide we have a whole brain and it's a beautiful thing, and it's got these incredible tools, and who's in here and what does it want to do now!
People go and have their personality types taken and I think personality typing tools are wonderful instruments, but I think you have to measure both halves of the brain. You can't give me a personality type testing and tell me I only have one personality because I know that's not true. I have two and they're both very strong and they're both very individualized and talented. So who are the "we" inside of me? I'm just thrilled that people are recognizing they have a whole half of a head they haven't really been respecting.
Then there are people who say, "Oh, I don't want that because I don't want to have to take responsibility." That way they can be "right," it's all about that right vs. wrong thing.
BH: I love the part in your book where you discuss that when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body and then after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.
Dr. Jill: The 90 second rule and then it's gone. It's predictable circuitry, so by paying attention to what circuits you are triggering and what that feels like inside of your body, you can recognize when it has happened. We all know what it feels like when we suddenly move into fear. Something happens in the external world and all of a sudden we experience a physiological response by our body that our mind would define as fear. So in my brain some circuit is saying something isn't safe and I need to go on full alert, those chemicals flush through my body to put my body on full alert, and for that to totally flush out of my body, it takes less than 90 seconds.
So, whether it's my fear circuitry or my anger circuitry or even my joy circuitry - it's really hard to hold a good belly laugh for more than 90 seconds naturally. The 90 second rule is totally empowering. That means for 90 seconds, I can watch this happen, I can feel this happen and I can watch it go away. After that, if I continue to feel that fear or feel that anger, I need to look at the thoughts I'm thinking that are re-stimulating that circuitry that is resulting in me having this physiology over and over again.
When you stay stuck in an emotional response,you're choosing it by choosing to continue thinking the same thoughts that retrigger it. We have this incredible ability in our minds to replay but as soon as you replay, you're not here, you're not in the present moment. You're still back in something else and if you continue to replay the exact same line and loop, then you have a predictable result. You can continue to make yourself mad all day and the more you obsess over whatever it is, the more you run that loop, then the more that loop gets energy of it's own to manifest itself with minimal amounts of thought, so it will then start on automatic. And it keeps reminding you, "Oh yeah, I was mad, I have to rethink that thought."
BH: At times it seems like we live in a left hemisphere dominated society. Is the left hemisphere naturally dominating?
Dr. Jill: No. Not necessarily. Look at children. Children are born, they have two hemispheres, the right hemisphere actually develops before the left hemisphere anatomically, it's just a stage ahead. But both of the instruments are blended together.
Then we put our children in school and we are now teaching them details. Learn the alphabet earlier. As soon as we start teaching these abstract details to our children, the left hemisphere turns itself on and starts becoming a functional machine. Depending on how much structure the brain gets at an early age, then the brain becomes more structured.
You're going to have children who, by the time they're five, they're little geniuses at school kinds of work because they've really turned on and mastered their left hemisphere structure. So then what do we honor in our society? We honor academic achievement, and academic achievement means thinking, reading, writing, math and all of these wonderful skills that are skills of the left hemisphere. So we praise our children, we reward our children, we give them higher paying jobs when they have really done a great job with their left hemisphere.
The right hemisphere on the other hand is kind of peaceful, kind of filled with bliss, kind of happy at being. Well nobody is going to give me a job to exist as just being, so I have to do, do, do. So, it's the structure of our society that I believe has shifted the development of the brain and how we reward people in our society. When you look at a typical school in America , they are trying to get rid of the music program, or P.E., or they're trying to get rid of art. These are the only courses that actually really actively engage, train, and develop the continuation of the right hemisphere. The brain is responsive to its external environment and if all I'm doing is feeding my left hemisphere, then my left hemisphere is going to over-develop as opposed to my right hemisphere skills.
BH: Are people who take the time to cultivate their right hemisphere better at finding peace?
Dr. Jill: A highly dominated left hemisphere extremist generally has a lot of stress in their lives. The difference, the advantage of living more in the right is that first of all, there is no measurement of time. If you are in your space creating something and the day goes by and you are not in a state of urgency, you're creating. You're being, you're evolving something, you're using the essence of what you are to create something new and there is a joy and a satisfaction in that.
That lack of urgency, that's very different from sitting in an office being on the phone, being on the e-mail, text messaging every moment, never really connecting to the essence of what you are. You're just acting like a machine that's in process. That doesn't mean that you're not being creative in what you're processing, but you have to have the pause. During the pause, it's an opportunity for healing, it's kind of like sleeping and waking. In so many of our jobs that are left hemisphere dominant, we're just output, output, output, there is not pause, there is no refueling, no regeneration.
Overall, if you're going to look at the health of the organism, our traditional society is very unhealthy. If you look at the mental health of our society, it's very poor and we don't even have a handle on how to create a mental health system that can help us. Most of us are not really tending to our own mental health, so how can we expect to have good overall mental health of our society?
BH: You talk a little bit in your book about studies that have been done with Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns that showed when a meditative climax was reached, certain areas of the left hemisphere had decreased activity.
Dr. Jill: The beauty of this is there are scientists who are open to recognizing these are realities. Just because we may not understand them is no reason to say they don't exist or they're not real. Now we have enough modern technology, and really open-minded scientists saying, "Let's explore this.” So, it's a very exciting time because the two worlds are facing one another with curiosity instead of resentment. And boy what a difference that is!
