Decentering- Go Touch Grass
By Eva Soffel
Mindfulness practice has been fully absorbed into popular culture. According to the National Health Interview Survey, the percentage of U.S. adults who practice meditation rose from %7.5 in 2002 to %17.3 in 2022. While meditation and mindfulness practices feel more approachable now, they have also been monetized and corporatized. For me, the capitalist weaponization of encouraging mindfulness is a nonstarter. The notion that we can “recharge” with some breathing exercises and work at our desks for an extra 4 hours without flipping them over is exploitative. I prefer dispassionate neuroscientists who aren’t trying to sell me anything to make the case for why I should do something. Maybe you do, too.
Decentering: Viewing one's memories and thoughts with objectivity, as removed.
This may sound familiar if you’ve ever taken psychedelics. People who have, describe the experience of ego-loss, the complete disconnection of the Id, and an ability to reflect on one's past actions without shame or judgment. All of us have experienced not just these moments of reminiscent personal horror but also the inability to stop oneself from utterly spinning out. “They hate me”, “they’ve never forgotten my embarrassing behavior”. Introspection is daunting; we often call it “emotional work” because there is suffering in the confrontation of our own painful experiences. It is no curious thing to me that psychedelics as controlled medicine for distress disorders have become a popular treatment option. But it is not the only one. When we explore decentering as the mechanism, we can understand why mindfulness and psychedelics offer us relief.
Decentering is defined in three parts:
Meta-awareness: Separating the self and reality from a thought or emotion
Disidentification: Viewing the thought or emotion with detachment and objectivity
Reduced Reactivity: Weakening the emotional response to thoughts and emotional experiences
The Salience Network (SN)
The Salience Network can be essentially understood through its name: the network in our brains that processes stimuli and determines their salience, or importance to us, what the appropriate behavioral response may be, and the level of urgency. i.e., does that distant sound indicate impending doom? Am I thirsty enough for it to constitute an emergency, or can I wait a while? This network relies on many parts talking to each other, our amygdalae, which assess danger and fear, our prefrontal cortex, which processes stimuli and determines what a proportionate AND socially acceptable response should be- it’s a frenzy of calculation, both conscious and not. It relies on all the mechanisms being up to their task.
It should be unsurprising, then, that in Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, and Substance Use Disorder, we see hyperactivity in basal neural activity as well as SN and amygdala dysfunction. Somatic anxiety and hyperarousal are fully quantifiable, and those without clinical diagnoses are not immune to such dysregulation. The dopaminergic flooding we get from the chaos of the time and place we live, and the social media we consume (sometimes, ironically, to unplug and distract ourselves), is markedly harming us all.
In the peer-reviewed paper, A Neurobehavioral Account for Decentering as the Salve for the Distressed Mind, the authors present research demonstrating that mindfulness practice measurably reduces hyperactivity within the SN, and not just during practice. There is longevity in this reduced activity for those who practice with regularity (King, Fresco, 2019).
Decentering is a powerful tool. Like the use of any tool, practice leads to proficiency, proficiency to mastery, and mastery allows the user to exploit the full potential of the tool's capability.
Life does not soften its sharp edges to ease our suffering. The agency we have lies squarely in our ability to mitigate the damage and fortify our resilience. Our grandparents may have taken a more repressive approach, and you, in turn, may have been taught to shove your emotional responses under the nearest rock and soldier forth. The scientific community offers us a more comprehensive and sustainable solution that does not involve denying the validity of our own experience.
We do not need expensive subscriptions to engage with it. Mastery is always possible, and there are plenty of tools to help us get there, but a good start is just understanding and considering the mechanism. We can recognize and label our thoughts. We can acknowledge that we are not our thoughts and that our experiences are fleeting.
Become proficient at decentering.
Start small.
As the kids say, “Go touch grass.”
Citations
William W. Seeley, The Salience Network: A Neural System for Perceiving and Responding to Homeostatic Demands. Journal of Neuroscience 11 December 2019, 39 (50) 9878-9882; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1138-17.2019
King AP, Fresco DM. A neurobehavioral account for decentering as the salve for the distressed mind. Curr Opin Psychol. 2019 Aug;28:285-293. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.02.009. Epub 2019 Feb 22. PMID: 31059966; PMCID: PMC6706318.
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Meditation and Mindfulness: Effectiveness and Safety. NCCIH. (2022).
