How to learn new things

What kind of coffee do I want? Where are the canned tomatoes? How do I cross the street? Life is full of “big” questions that can send our brain into overdrive. Here’s how to take care of your brain when you're dealing with new stuff.

Newness is exhilarating. It’s an adventure. And it’s exhausting. But it doesn’t have to be.

Do you remember your first driving lesson? Ever started to learn another language? How about that new exercise class where you had the athleticism of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz?

Doing something new for the first time takes a lot out of us.

It’s really hard work for our brains to create synapses, these new connections between our brain cells.

Limit the actors on your stage

David Rock writes about how we can use our brains to be productive and responsive. His book Your Brain at Work talks about how to use our brains effectively. He has a great metaphor about the importance of managing what’s on your stage.

Your stage is the inside of your head – the main tasks you’re focusing on and the secondary topics that, like the chorus in a Greek play, pack the back of the stage.

The more ‘actors’ we have on our stage the more challenging it is for our brain. It’s what can make the difference between surviving and thriving. The fewer actors on our stage at a time the better it is for our brains.

This is key: Limit the actors on your stage.

Here are three tips to limiting your actors:

1)     Make prioritizing a priority. It takes energy and concentration to prioritize. Do it early in the day when you are fresh. Figure out what to work on when and write it down. Do not, repeat, do not do your email before prioritizing, as this will use valuable energy, meaning when you do get back to prioritizing you’ve less energy and focus.

2)     Get things out of your head. Don’t hold things in your head assuring yourself that you’ll remember them. You won’t and trying to remember them will drain your energy and crowd your stage. Write tasks down and get them off your stage so that your stage has more room.

3)     Divide your day into chunks depending on brain use. Creative writing and deep thinking on a sticky problem need a clear mind. Routine, administrative tasks take less focus which could provide a rest for your brain between the more intensive pieces of work.

In addition to all of this, when we’re dealing with new things our stages get crammed more quickly than normal.

And when there are too many folk on our stage complications arise from even mundane questions like “What can I get you?” from a friendly barista to standing in a supermarket aisle, stupefied, wondering “Where are the canned tomatoes?”

Managing and processing new experiences makes us work just that bit harder. We observe, we process, we catalogue, and we search for understanding. All this takes energy.

Rock speaks about dealing with new:

“New means uncertain, which means arousing, which reduces space on your stage. Yet being in a new environment means you need to use your stage a lot. With overworked actors, your ability to label or reappraise, to dampen down the arousal of uncertainty, is harder.”

Here are some practical ways to manage your stage when you’re dealing with new stuff.

Culture shock

This is about processing culture shock when lots of things are new…

Not long ago my Viking husband and I, along with our 176 boxes, moved from Reykjavik to Amsterdam. I swapped living in Europe’s least populated country for its most populated country, from living in a country that has more animals than people (each square km is shared by 3 people, 8 sheep and 100 puffins) to living in a country that has more bicycles than people (there are 23 million bicycles in The Netherlands compared to 17 million people). 

I’d imagine that crossing the street is something you’ve probably nailed by now but the first few weeks of crossing the street in Amsterdam was a complex task. And crossing the street created culture shock which took me by surprise.

Reframing

In Amsterdam there is a lane for vehicles, a lane for bikes and then a pavement for pedestrians. And although I’d moved from Iceland where traffic is also on the right hand side the infrastructure of central Amsterdam is an old city. In this way it was more similar to Edinburgh, where I’m originally from, than it is to modern Reykjavik. This meant my brain naturally defaulted to expecting traffic being on the left.

You can tell that there was a lot of stuff being processed in my brain!

Crossing these new streets was tricky. I had to think in a far more conscious way than I normally would have. And when it got to a Friday, bizarre as it sounds, I was mentally tired from crossing roads.

To help with the overload, reframing the situation helps calm the brain down. And the more you practice reframing the easier it becomes.

Normalizing

One way of reframing or reappraising a situation is by normalizing it.

In short “yes, things feel scary, uncertain and threatening but really it’s not because….”

And you fill in the blanks for why it’s not.

When I cross the road thinking “Okay, this is just my limbic system lighting up more because I’m doing something new and tricky. Things feel a bit strange and wonky and like swimming through mud at times but it’s okay. I’m learning my way around my new home city and creating new mental maps. This is good! Tonight, I’ll know more of Amsterdam than when I got up this morning.”

Explaining new situations in a positive light helps to reduce feelings of uncertainty and increase a sense of control.

Research on reappraisal shows it has many benefits. James Gross is associate professor at Stanford University and works in the field of emotional regulation.

He explored the effects on two groups: one who used reappraisal and one group who suppressed their emotions. Gross did a variety of tests on these two groups around optimism, environmental mastery (my crossing my new streets), positive relationships and life satisfaction.

What do you think he found?

In each of these areas those who used reappraisal compared to those who suppressed their emotions were significantly better off.

Labelling

Speaking of emotions, the language we use to express emotions has consequence.

Think about that for a minute.

How do you talk to yourself about your emotions throughout the day?

Rock explains that labelling emotions in a word or two or using metaphors helps to reduce arousal, the state when we feel anxious (e.g. my two words to describe crossing new roads were strange and wonky and I used the metaphor swimming though mud).

However, getting into a long internal chat with yourself will have the opposite affect and increase arousal making you more unsettled.

You want to use language that pinpoints and gets to the heart rather than long, rambly “and another thing” conversations which will spiral your negative thinking and get yourself into a froth.

So, labelling is good. Chattering monkey is bad. 

Your brain will thank you for it.

Be the clown

There’s another way of reappraisal that you most likely experience every day.

And it will probably make you smile.

A joke, a giggle, that colleague who comes out with the one liners to make you laugh out loud.

Humour is a great way of introducing reappraisal. It shifts the focus and introduces lightness.

Your brain gets a break from the heavy lifting and perspectives are changed.

Don’t be shy to play the joker or the clown, be that in a meeting with others or managing your own self talk.

Practice makes perfect

Managing the actors on your stage, reframing, labelling and using humour to reappraise have great power in helping your brain work well in general and especially when you're dealing with a whole bunch of new things.

Practising when and how to use them takes time.

It could be done with a mentor or a coach, exploring situations that you know push your buttons and practicing how you could take a step back and respond to things.

It could be something you do with a trusted colleague or during a feedback session with your boss.

And working on this independently and journaling about your experiences could also be a way to better manage your brain.

The important thing is the next time you feel overwhelmed just take a breath and think.

“This is absolutely fine. That’s just my brain. I’ve got this.”