INsight/ The Two Mindsets

Photo by Dmitry Khrustalev-Grigoriev on Unsplash.

Manila, 27 April 2022 — How neuroscience affirms an ancient wisdom tradition.

Story

It happened this past week. Inspired by the research of Lisa Miller, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, I took a deep dive into her book The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life (2021). In a fascinating account of her team’s journey of discovery through years of scientific experiments using MRI studies, genetic research, and extensive epidemiological work, she makes a number of groundbreaking claims about humans being born with an innate, biological capacity for spirituality that’s part of our development. That made me sit up.

When we engage this capacity, Miller explains, we access “unsurpassed psychological benefits: less depression, anxiety, and substance abuse; and more positive psychological traits such as grit, resilience, optimism, and tenacity.” Spiritual awareness, she argues, can protect against depression, support health, and reveal deep interconnections between all life around us. Remarkably, in the MRI scans of participants, she found that those who valued spirituality had a brain that “was thicker and stronger in exactly the same regions that weaken and wither” in the brains of people suffering from depression. 

Miller then goes on to explain that we go through life with two mindsets: Achieving and Awakened. The choice is up to us on which one we engage in and when. Our Achieving mindset gives us focus and commitment to complete tasks and achieve goals. “When overused, or exclusively used,” Miller cautions, it “overrides and changes the structure of our brains, carving pathways of depression, anxiety, stress, and craving. When out of balance, achieving awareness is narrowly focused, unguided by the bigger picture, obsessed with the same track or idea, never satisfied, and often lonely and isolated.” That description sounds worryingly familiar with behaviors that we frequently observe in some of our workplaces today.

Challenge

While succeeding in life requires us to put our Achieving mindset to good use, relying solely on this mindset can cause us to become disconnected from the heartbeat of everyone around us, warns Miller. That’s why she challenges her readers to also engage their Awakened mindset which, she explains, uses different parts of the brain. Switching on our innate capacity for awakened awareness helps us see more and integrate information from more sources of perception. “Instead of seeing ourselves as independent makers of our path, we perceive ourselves as seekers of our path. We look across a vast landscape and ask, What is life showing me now?” 

Miller was curious to know if this Awakened mindset was limited to some people or shared by all, so she studied 5,500 participants from wisdom traditions around the world, and found that they shared five spiritual phenotypes, including altruism and a sense of oneness. “We invited young adults from many different faith traditions into an MRI machine and asked them to tell us about a time when they’d had a deep, personal, spiritual experience. And the first thing we found was that indeed, there are clear neural correlates associated with spiritual awareness. But perhaps even more profound was our finding that whether someone is Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or not attached to any religious tradition, the very same neural correlates are engaged when recounting a spiritual experience.”

From earlier research by a colleague, Miller already knew that the degree to which a person is spiritual is 29 percent determined by genes, and 71 percent by their environment. Hence the importance of phenotypes, which are observable characteristics in participants that result from the interaction of their genotype with their environment. What that means is that exercising our Awakened mindset in our daily life and work will increase its utility and impact. Using this awakened awareness “allows us to perceive more choices and opportunities available to us, feel more connected with others, understand the relationships between events in our lives, be more open to creative leaps and insights, and feel more in tune with our life’s purpose and meaning.” 

Question

As I reflected on Lisa Miller’s studies and explanations and the engaging stories in her book, it dawned on me that the Achieving and Awakened mindsets look and feel remarkably similar to the insights discovered by ancient Chinese philosophers many millennia before the advent of neuroscience and MRI scanners. I’m talking about YīnYáng, the complementary and alternating expressions of Qi, the vital energy of the universe. In people, Yáng perfectly describes Miller’s Achieving Mindset, and Yīn the Awakened Mindset. In Chapter 42 of Laozi’s Dao De Jing, we read how everything is embedded in Yīn and embraces Yáng, with harmony reached through the flow of Qi. Meaning that people need to use both mindsets for a harmonious life.

While the continuous interplay of receptive Yīn and projecting Yáng energies and mindsets have always been well understood by people in the East, we read in Miller’s book how people in the West have ended up privileging the Achieving mindset to such an extent that it has had dire consequences for mental health. It’s therefore high time, she argues, for people to rebalance their life and work by using their innate capacity for spirituality, aka the Awakened mindset. To get there, Miller describes the quest for an inspired life as a practice for people to frequently toggle between the two mindsets. 

My leadership question for you this week is how you are using your two mindsets, and especially your Awakened mindset, described by Miller as your innate biological capacity for spirituality that can enrich your life with a much wider and more connected view of life? In Miller’s words: “What is life showing you now?” Your awakened brain is ready to give you the answer to this question when you switch it on. Taking benefit from millennia of wisdom from the traditions, and several decades of neuroscience, we can become better leaders by using both the Awakened and the Achieving mindsets, or YīnYáng.