Brain Confusion

Exploring Happiness Blog - Brain Confusion

The other day, I listened to a podcast about the brain and they talked about brain confusion. No, that’s not when you can’t find the car keys or remember if you bought carrots when you are in the veggie aisle of the supermarket. They made it up by copying the concept from muscle confusion. What’s muscle confusion? When people exercise a lot they get to the point where it gets hard to grow more muscles. So, they mix up exercises and routines to confuse the muscles. If this actually leads to muscle growth seems to be hotly debated but it doesn’t matter for my reflection.

What is brain confusion?

Our brain likes routines and habits. It can push those activities into the reptile brain like an automated program. Why? Because it requires less energy. Brain processes require a lot of energy. That’s the reason why we often avoid thinking and decision-making. Those are very costly processes. You’ll feel it, particularly in the evening when you’re exhausted and you can’t even make the decision to get up and go to bed instead of Netflix binging. Or the decision not to open the bag of chips and instead drink a herbal tea… well, you know.

Our brain happily pushes everything that can be automated into a program and we get into autopilot (ever wonder why the years are flying by so fast?). If you want to be happy and/or learn new stuff, you need to get out of autopilot (hello mindfulness) and mix things up. One of these strategies is Do Something Different. This is totally a brain confusion strategy. Like crossing the street on your way to work where you usually don’t cross the street. Or eating with your left hand if you’re right-handed. Or suddenly breaking into song or dance. Or walking out in the middle of fights without explanation (you need to return later when things calm down and continue the discussion).

Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck coined the term Growth Mindset (in contrast to the Fixed Mindset). The Fixed Mindset sees things how they are now. The Growth Mindset focuses on the flow of life and that things change. It’s particularly important for learning. Where a Fixed Mindset person might say they are not good in something (maths!), the Growth Mindset person would add “yet” to show that this could be changed and is not FIXED.

Now, we all like to think of ourselves as Growth Mindset people as I observed (myself not excluded). I also observed that this is more illusion than reality. We happily get into our autopilots, don’t question how we get out of situations we don’t necessarily like and generally make our life more self-controlled and happy. Brain confusion is a good tactic to adopt more Growth Mindset. Just do stuff you won’t usually do and your brain gets confused and spits the disk with the program out from the reptile brain into the cortex where we now have to deal with life. It can be more fun than this sounds!

Travelling is brain confusion

I think travelling has a lot to do with brain confusion. Unless you use a travel package with all-inclusive, you have to get out of your routines. The more you organise your trips yourself, the more you have to deal with new situations, different customs and ways to do things and adopt other perspectives. The whole idea of broadening your horizon is brain confusion or Growth Mindset. Particularly, if you’re not complaining the whole time about how the weather, transport, food and people are just not as good as you expected (or like home) but just take in the experience.

I love travelling and I often feel that some things in me crack open. As if there is more light. Travelling is not easy and it can be frustrating. The best travelling – I find – is when you do it as local as possible. Busses and trains over planes. Walking streets and taking public transport instead of taxis. Hostels instead of hotels. Local grocery stores and markets instead of McDonalds and pizza. The brain gets super confused – time to grow and live.

What do you think? Do you confuse your brain sometimes? How?