The psychology behind ‘taking responsibility’ is fascinating, but my real passion is to understand its neurobiological underpinnings.
Bearing up under the weight of responsibility
When I first heard the term ‘the weight of responsibility’ it immediately struck a chord. Responsibility does indeed feel like a crushing weight, the handling of which requires our constant attention. Like the body builder who gradually adds more and more weights to build the size and strength his/her muscles, the more we are exposed to handling the weight of responsibility the ‘stronger’ our ‘weight’ bearing abilities become. Not that the ‘heaviness’ itself ever goes away. No, it is ongoing, and it is relentless and the sooner we learn how to bear up under the ‘heaviness’ associated with responsibility the better it will be for our health, wellbeing and our performance.
My personal struggles with bearing up under the weight of responsibility, took off with a vengeance when the StressEraser project finally got the nod. Despite my anxious heart telling me that this was a bridge too far, I committed to it wholeheartedly. Noticeable similarities — to when I committed to mastering walking on the practice peg leg within 4 weeks, following being knocked of my bicycle by a speeding container truck — were apparent.
In learning to walk my head could relate very well to Lao Tzu’s take: “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step”, but my heart remained unconvinced. Instead my heart kept reminding me that “the first stretch of the journey is the most difficult” a line attributed to Shakespeare. Walking out of the parallel bars for the first time after being mostly bedridden for 5 months and struggling with severe brain and spinal cord injuries was anxiety provoking in the extreme. It was not only my heart that failed me, my head was also pounding viciously and spinning out of control, my muscles were like bands of rubber, my body was weak and uncoordinated, my energy was non-existent, my fear of falling overwhelming, never mind the debilitating pain.
It required engaging every fibre of my being to master the first stretch of the journey. The game-changing difference between my futile initial attempts at trying to walk with the peg leg — while I was at the same time trying not to fall — and walking, was my single-minded focus on the task at hand, i.e. walking with zero ‘mental interference’.
I similarly had to step beyond my Performance-Arousal tipping point, and not even think of failing, by keeping my focus on my single-minded goal of measuring the effects that deep breathing has on the neurobiology of performance. How exactly I was going to go about taking these measurements was the unknown that kept me awake at night. The big difference between my anxious heart telling me to find an alternate career, after I had seemingly made no noticeable headway for 7 years following my accident, and my anxious heart telling me not to take on the StressEraser project was my single-minded goal.
The importance of having a single-minded goal
Keeping this single-minded goal ‘alive’ in my brain allowed me to ‘look beyond’ my current stress levels to where I wanted to be. As I fine-tuned the research protocol and Gabriell took over from Diane and the equipment arrived from the UK and pilot testing started, my nerves started to settle. The StressEraser research taught me a whole lot. Not only was deep, slow HRV paced breathing very effective in managing anticipatory anxiety, it also had a significant positive effect on cognitive performance and on subjective relaxation ratings. The primary reason why deep, slow breathing works so well is because the heart follows the ‘breath’. Upon deeper examination, it becomes apparent that it is not the heart rate that follows the breathing rate, rather it is the heart rhythm that follows the breathing rate. This is so, because your heart rate speeds up as you breathe in and slows down as you breathe out. A fast, shallow breathing rate leads to a fast but ineffectual heart rhythm. Ineffectual because a fast heart rhythm is not calming. In contrast, slowing your breathing rate down to 6 breaths per minute brings another rhythm into play — the alignment of your heart rhythm with your blood pressure (BP) rhythm.
The importance of coherence in your 3 internal bodily rhythms
By digging a bit deeper still, it becomes clear that the heart rhythm is not following the breath as such, but rather follows the Primate brain, because it is your Primate brain that sets your deep, slow breathing rhythm. What is more, your Primate brain is now also aligning with your Mammalian brain, which then leads to coherence in these 3 internal bodily rhythms, the breathing, BP, and heart rhythms. The practical steps to achieving this coherent state is to increase the force and length (to about 3–4 seconds) of your in-breath and slow your out-breath to about 6–7 seconds so that your combined in-and out-breath is about 10 seconds in duration. The feedback that your Primate brain and your Mammalian brain receives from a heart rhythm that rises and falls according to the aligned 6 breaths a minute rhythm is tranquil, and as such, is restorative in nature.
Why does taking 6 breaths per minute calm your heart?
For that matter, why doesn’t 10 breaths a minute or 3 breaths a minute calm your heart? The underlying physiological basis for this is that your BP feedback loop operates on a ’10 second rhythm’. Unlike your breathing rhythm and your heart rhythm, your innate BP rhythm cannot be overridden by your Primate brain. It operates on this 10 second rhythm — regardless of Primate brain interference — to ensure you BP is stable over the long term, despite wide short-term fluctuations each time your heart beats or you have an emotional response. These short-term BP reactivities serve as both homeostatic and interoceptive feedback signals to enable your bodily systems and your mental processes to remain in dynamic equilibrium. The greater the harmony between your homeostatic and your interoceptive feedback signals the less strain you will experience and the greater your wellbeing.
Note that your BP rhythm is independent on your BP, i.e. no matter how high or low your BP is, it will still operate on a 10 second feedback loop. Say for example your BP drops, your BP feedback loop corrects this as follows: 1) baroreceptors inside your arteries fire that 2) sends a message to your brainstem, 3) where different sets of nuclei will interpret and 4) relay the signal to your blood vessels to constrict them 5) and to your heart to speed your heart up to 6) thereby increase your BP. This whole feedback loop has built-in delays so that it ends up taking ~10 seconds in total. This feedback loop keeps on cycling and manifests as a 10 second BP rhythm know as the Meyer wave.
Engaging in 5 minutes of deep, slow breathing just prior to a stressful meeting, an exam or a sporting event will thus help you to be calmer and more focused, and positively impact your reaction time and your performance. This occurs because your heart–brain-body loop becomes highly synchronised after about 5 minutes of taking 10 sec breaths. This enables your Primate brain to switch to a state of heightened awareness instead of engaging in over-thinking and in overriding of your Mammalian brain. Hence the importance of thought control.
If this is done correctly, the feedback from your now coherent 10 second heart rhythm back to your Primate brain and your Mammalian brain will indicate that all is well in your body & environment and thus no need to activate excessive bodily resources to cope with potential challenges. This is the perfect time to be following your heart because you know it is your Primate brain setting the rhythm of your heart, rather than a stressor. Needless to say, following your heart when your heart is reacting to a stressor will lead to panic. Do not follow it there!
There is an even deeper level that needs to be appreciated.
Powerful as deep, slow breathing is in calming your heart and managing the tension brought to bear by the weight of responsibility, the breath is only effective when it aligns with your BP rhythm. This suggests that it is the alignment of your heart rhythm with your BP rhythm that is the effective ingredient underpinning keeping calm under pressure. Your BP rhythm is under dominant Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) control, which necessitates modulating your SNS in addition to your parasympathetic vagal nerve to bear the weight of responsibility over the long term without burning out. I used to take to running/cycling in the mountains to modulate my excessive SNS drive to thereby manage the ‘weight of responsibility’ of completing my PhD thesis.
Exercise refreshed my body and cleared my head like nothing else, but now that hard exercise robs me of too much energy, I make use of a more efficient technique to balance my SNS and calm my heart . . ./Part 4 to follow
