POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: Managing the magic of the mind

DR James Doty, a renowned neuroscientist and neurosurgeon died last July. He left behind an impressive legacy including his knowledge and research, the patients whose lives he saved, and many philanthropic endeavours.

In 2016 his book 'Into the Magic Shop' was published. This book is part memoir and part guide to the practice of mindfulness and self-compassion. It is a compelling read and has lovely, succinct takeaways for anyone wanting to manage their minds and getting the best out of their lives.

Dr Doty came from very inauspicious circumstances. He grew up in California. His father was an alcoholic who found it very hard to hold down a job, and his mother had had a stroke when he was a young boy, which left her both physically and mentally compromised, suffering bouts of severe depression which included a number of attempts to take her own life.

He had one sister, older by nine years, and a brother who was older by three. Doty describes how challenging it was for him growing up.

He was no stranger to hunger and the unpredictability of his father’s behaviour meant that he grew up in a chronic state of stress, with his stress response always turned to fight/flight mode.

His brother used to withdraw and retreat - flight/freeze - to his room; this was his way of coping with adversity. He died a young man before there was any effective treatment for AIDS.

Years later as a very wealthy man, Doty supported many global health initiatives and charitable causes including HIV/AIDS programmes.

Doty recalls that he was well on the way to becoming a “juvenile delinquent” when at the age of 12, something transformative happened to him. This was to alter the whole course of his life.

That summer, to while away the time, he used to go for long cycles on his bike. One day his journey took him to a magic shop located at a shopping mall.

He was interested in magic and magic tricks and had mislaid his fake thumb. He entered the magic shop to see if they stocked a replacement.

He spoke to a middle aged lady there, who was minding the shop, while her son, the owner was out; he describes how she engaged him in conversation, how he felt seen by her and how she was interested in what he had to say.

Doty was not used to unconditional positive regard from the adults in his life. To cut a long story short, the lady, whose name was Ruth, promised to teach him magic.

Moreover, the kind of magic that she would teach him would help him get anything he wanted in life. All he had to do was to show up at the shop every morning for the next six weeks.

Doty was interested to learn this magic, but also the lure of cookies and snacks (kindly provided by Ruth) and a lack of anything else to do, ensured that he did indeed show up for those six weeks in the summer of 1968.

Doty describes her teachings as Ruth’s “tricks”. This was 1968, when mindfulness, meditation and manifesting were not a part of mainstream medicine or psychology. However, in essence, these “tricks” were very much part of what we now call mindfulness.

With the first trick, Ruth taught the young Doty to relax his body. For the reasons mentioned above, he was rarely relaxed; he committed to this practice and it became something he did every day.

She taught him to breathe deeply and to systematically relax the muscles of the body, head to toe. This kind of guided meditation and a similar relaxation technique, called “progressive muscular

relaxation” are tools we psychologists often use with our clients to help move them out of sympathetic nervous system (fight/flight/freeze) arousal and into parasympathetic nervous system activation (rest and digest).

Once he had mastered the first trick, relaxing his nervous system, she taught him how he could tame his mind. She taught him how to quieten his mind by managing his attention.

As psychologists we work with many anxious minds. One approach to slow down the worry thoughts is to teach our clients to focus on one thing at a time, to sort of “anchor” their minds to one thing, for example, their breath, the flame of a candle, a mantra.

The more we practise training our attention the better we get at managing worry thoughts and calming an anxious mind.

Attention is so important; it can create more grey matter in areas of the brain so that we can learn and perform better. This is why we encourage our clients to meditate, either formally by sitting and focussing (perhaps using an app on their phone) or informally by just paying attention to what they are doing when they are doing it (for example, if they are washing dishes, then focussing on the action of washing the dishes…).

Ruth’s third trick was to get the young Doty to “open his heart”. She explained that when you can connect with other people and wish them well, even those with whom there are difficult relationships, there are significant psychological, emotional and even physical benefits.

This is the essence of the practice of compassion and self-compassion. Ruth would not have had the

science based evidence to back this up in 1968 but what we do know 50 years on, with the benefit of scientific research, is that practising compassion is good for us.

Psychological research tells us that when we learn to be more self-compassionate, we manage stress better, we experience less depression and anxiety, more self-confidence and life satisfaction, we are happier and our immune systems work better.

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We also know from the psychological literature that authentic social connection is important for our mental health, for example it is protective against depression and also for our physical health, for example it is cardioprotective.

The fourth trick revolves around setting a very clear intention around what you want in life and visualising yourself doing it, in detail. The young Doty, having met with and being impressed by, a medical doctor who gave a talk at his school a few years previous to meeting Ruth at the magic shop, set his intention at this point to become a doctor.

Remember, this was the youngest child of a couple in debt, with very limited education or means and significant physical and mental health problems, so becoming a doctor was going to be an enormous challenge.

However, Doty did it. He got to college, got to medical school and ultimately trained to become a neurosurgeon, performing the most intricate, fraught and delicate of surgeries.

Doty describes how when dealing with the most complex of surgeries he always went back to Ruth’s tricks. And how imperative it was for him as a surgeon, to relax the body and calm the mind before picking up a scalpel.

Doty describes in the book how when our brains and hearts are working in collaboration we are happier, healthier and more connected with each other. It was out of this conviction and the motivation to validate this scientifically that the Centre for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) was founded by Doty and others at Stanford University in California.

By today’s standards, Doty’s death at the age of 69 was premature. However, the amount he packed into those years and the contributions he made to medicine and neuroscience was enormous and a wonderful legacy to bequeath to humanity.

Julie O'Flaherty and Imelda Ferguson (pictured above) are chartered clinical psychologists, both based in private practice in Tullamore. Through Mind Your Self Midlands, they run courses on positive psychology and mindfulness throughout the year. They can be contacted through the Psychological Society of Ireland www.psychologicalsociety.ie (Find a Psychologist section) and also on their Facebook page, Mind Your Self Midlands.