A brief side trip into A brief side trip into your brainyour brain

Creating a Sustainable Writing Process • Caren Gussoff • Eastlake & Roanoke

Why talk about the brain in this course?

Working without a process is like working without a net. It can be exciting. Not having a process may feel like you are keeping yourself open for any possibility, for adventure, for the unexpected, ready and able to embrace the spontaneous. But that isn't true. It hardly seems like freedom when you weigh the costs: missed deadlines and opportunities, forgotten commitments, big projects you never quite get to, small things that fall through the cracks, missed meetings, piles of laundry (literal and figurative), unanswered emails, clutter.You'd have to have been living under a rock, under the methane seas of Titian with nothing to construct even the most crude of receivers to be surprised that chronic stress is bad for you.

In and of itself, stress is a critical adaptive trait. The hormones and responses -- of the autonomic nervous system and hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal glands -- activated by our stress responses protect the body, and help us survive. But we were not designed to exist in a state of stress. Our brains and bodies are damaged by long-term, low-level stressors, like those super common in modern life: •anxiety from responsibility•tension from commutes and traffic•worry about loved ones and work•financial pressures•the effects of not always taking the best care of ourselves

The Mayo Clinic estimates that 75% to 90% of all doctor's office visits by adults are for illness and complaints related

to stress

Science has proven that prolonged low-level stress can lead to a whole litany of legit symptoms and conditions, such as:•anxiety and mood disorders•fatigue•idiopathic pain disorders (such as fibromyalgia)•inflammation•migraines•digestive and gastrointestinal issues•insomniaIt can also make existing conditions worse.

Stress is kind of a big

deal.

We can't avoid all stress. That's silly. It's also unthinkable; we are writers, after all, and much of our material comes from experiencing, observing, and seeking out situations which are stressful (for good and bad).

But there are things we can do.Minimizing unnecessary stressors can have remarkable effects on reversing the war wounds of stress. And the really good news is that neuroscientists are finding out that our brains stay plastic throughout our lifetimes.

We can make big changes -- learning and practicing new habits and skills -- and re-carve our very neuro-circuitry.

Practice makes (perfect) myelin

Learning new information and performing new tasks triggers the growth of myelin, a fatty tissue that helps nerve impulses move faster. As you practice a new skill or knowledge base, you actually build a new myelin freeway for that information or activity. That's why new information or activities feel slow, unfamiliar and weird, until we practice them. The more practice, the more myelin we produce for that specific case. The more myelin, the faster, smoother, and better we get at recalling those tidbits or at performing a certain task.

This is the lovely myelin at work.

Here’s a typical

neuron. We can’t make

more of these, but we

can repair them.

It’s good news!So, it doesn't matter if you've spent half (or more) of your life flying by your pants' seat and marinating your brain in stress hormones. Practicing time management and process can completely transform our brains.

Don't feel bad if sticking to a process and

organizing your life feels like a slog at first.

It's supposed to. You are growing new myelin.

As you go, I promise, it will get better, easier, and much more efficient.

I know I don’t say it often, but I love you, writer.

A writing practice is not just good for our careers, it’s good for our brains.

Music is “1st Unabridged Thought Reform Bible,” off the album The Wholesale Brain by Zhang Li.Rights to the diagrams belong to their respective owners. For a bibliography of all information used in this presentation, send an email request to info@eastlakeandroanoke.com.The written portion of this presentation is released under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. If you use it in one of your classes, we’d love to hear about it! Let us know at the same email, above.