From the dancer's face to the sticky mind

One of the interesting terms I learnt this Fall was "dancer's face" from a video by Allie Christensen. She referred to the idea that dancers have learnt to not show on their face how difficult the dancing really is. I very much recognize that. One funny sight at the ZhemFit classes (fitness classes with a bit of a ballet background) that I like to take is that you can easily tell the ballet dancers from the non-dancers in that they do not wince, no matter how hard the exercise, unlike basically all the other participants in the class. 

A clear case of dancer's face at Morlaix Ballet Camp
Picture by Michel Le

This makes me think of Lojong slogan 57, which is "do not be reactive" or "do not be irritable" or "do not be jealous". In all its incarnations, the slogan reminds us to not react too strongly to what happens. Of course it is also important to not suppress emotions. So the amazing Buddhist teacher Khandro Rinpoche uses a phrase that I really like "keep it short." You can feel whatever you feel, but don't waste too much energy in it. Try to drop the emotion whenever you can. This is of course easier said than done. 

In my lab, we are very interested in studying this kind of mental reactivity, which I like to call "stickiness"--not letting go of thoughts of often emotional reactions. In fact, the most reliable way to induce such sticky thinking is to evoke people's hopes and fears, for example in a social stress test, which we have used here. We find that after a social stress intervention people have more trouble concentrating on a task than after a therapy intervention, and that they also tend to be more stuck thinking about the past. In another study we have been developing machine learning tools to help classify when a person is stuck in their thoughts. Interestingly, we found that on a person-level, classifying whether people are prone to this kind of sticky thinking can be done more productively on the basis of just 5 minutes of so-called resting state EEG (where people are just sitting there without a task) than on the basis of a specific task we have to measure mind-wandering. Hopefully this research will help us understand how our mind becomes reactive and sticky, so that we can find ways to reduce this tendency.