What therapy tells us about people

Therapy has never been as relevant as it has been now in these lockdown times of Covid. Often understated, this time by ourselves is leading to enough self-introspection to reach out to that therapist, life coach, best friend, or even perfecting that sourdough bread that may as well be called coronoabread going by the number of posts by people trying their hand out at baking bread.

But when it comes down to what really feels therapeutic, the coronabread is not the only option. People are dabbling with dancing, painting, and maybe even doing the dishes!

It’s a little surprising though, that what feels therapeutic for one person, may even be stressful for another. Dishes for example is a huge source of stress for many people. For me though, this is therapeutic. And I’m not alone here. Bill Gates himself does this, and he’s clearly not short of people or machines who could do this for him.

What is it that makes doing the dishes therapeutic for people like us, and coronabread for the others?

To understand this, we need to know the operations of System 1 and System 2 in the brain. System 1 is the operations of the limbic brain while System 2 is the neocortex brain. All mammals have the limbic brain which gives us basic emotions like fear, hunger or even having sex. Humans are blessed with the neocortex or the cognitive brain that gives us rational thought processing and made us all-powerful.

However, we give the neocortex too much credit. We tend to believe that our neocortex is operational through most of our waking day, but in truth, the neocortex is only marginally more active when we are awake than we are asleep. It is the limbic brain that remains most active even when we are awake.

Continuously operating the neocortex is exhausting. Which is why, it is a default mode for us to quickly find the best way to operationalize or standardize a task, so that the limbic brain can take over, giving our brain the rest it always craves for.

Increasing the operations of the neocortex is of course possible, and there are two ways to do this. Through meditation, which is akin to a sharpener if our neocortex were the pencil. Or through performing tasks that use up our limbic brain, so that it is well rested enough to then fire the neocortex.

Yuval Noah Harari meditates 2 hours a day, which gives him enough brain power to write books like Sapiens and Homo Deus, and then some to even write 21 lessons that nobody wants to read. Bill Gates does the dishes so that he has defaulted to his limbic brain for long enough to figure the solution to the corona crisis.

Given most of us don’t meditate, since the results appear a lot slower than the cuts on your biceps after a month of bicep curls, we tend to use the limbic brain more, thereby leading to tasks that are in effect, therapeutic for us.

The limbic brain is as different for us as our neocortex is. Just as how the neocortex for one person is sharpened to Jave code, while for another it is playing Fornite, the limbic brain also differs in the exact same way. For one person it is painting, for another it is dishes.

The reason for this difference goes down to the fundamental operations of our brain. When it comes to the dishes, there is a certain geometry and arrangement involved, and this lies in the limbic for some people, while when it comes to painting, it is the brush strokes that lie in the limbic.

It is up to each of us to identify what exactly it is that fires System 1 and therefore makes this therapeutic for us. But the bottomline is, it can be very different for each of us.