Healthy Brain, Happy Life
Read Healthy Brain, Happy Life Online
Authors: Wendy Suzuki
For Mom and Dad
I love you both
CONTENTS
O
ne day I woke up and realized I didn’t have a life. As an almost-forty-year-old award-winning, world-renowned neuroscientist, I had what many considered
everything.
I had achieved my life-long dream of running my own successful and highly respected neuroscience research lab at New York University and had earned tenure as a professor. These are both feats that are extremely hard to achieve for many, many reasons. Too many of my female friends from graduate school, where the ratio was fifty–fifty male to female, had drifted away from science. The reasons were in some ways common for women in any profession. Their husbands got a job in a place where there wasn’t a job for them in science, or they took time off to have kids and found it hard or impossible to come back. They might have become discouraged by the ultra-competitive grant-writing process, or they just got tired of the long hours and low pay and found other outlets for their talent and creativity. The women, like me, who soldiered on in science were few and far between. Specifically, women now make up on average 28 percent of the science faculty at most major U.S. research institutions. The roller coaster–like drop from 50 percent women in graduate school to an average of 28 percent women at the faculty level works like a big flashing neon warning sign to women, saying, “Beware: Life is mighty challenging in this neck of the woods!”
Despite the depressing statistics, I kept moving forward. I published many articles in prestigious scientific journals and won many prizes for my work on the anatomy and physiology underlying memory function in the brain. I was a role model for women scientists and highly respected by my peers. On paper, I had a stellar career and an impeccable track record. And I loved doing science—I really did.
What could possibly be wrong? Well . . .
everything else.
To be honest, my life was pretty depressing. While I had created a dream career for myself, I had no social life and no boyfriend in sight. I had strained relationships with members of my department and my own lab. When a senior faculty colleague I was teaching with decided he would write exams, grade exams, and set up laboratory exercises at the very last minute, I felt completely powerless to push back. When a student decided (without telling me) to take a chunk of time off from her research with me to take a teaching job, I was incensed. The only way I knew how to relate with the other scientists in my lab was through work—or more accurately, working really hard. I couldn’t talk to them about anything else in life because in my mind there
was
nothing else in life. Oh, and did I mention that I was fat too? Twenty pounds overweight to be exact. I felt miserable, and for the first time in my life, completely without direction. I was really good at engaging with science and advancing my career, but it seemed that I was really bad at living. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved what I was doing. I was and always have been passionate about science. But could I get by on work alone?
Then I came to a startling realization: I was truly clueless at something, something really important.
What does a woman of science do when she realizes that she is missing out on everything but science?
In my case, I decided to conduct an experiment on myself, which changed the course of my life.
Over these past few years, I have leveraged my twenty years of neuroscience research and taken a wild leap of faith. I ventured beyond the world of science and discovered a whole new universe of health and happiness that ironically led me right back to where I started. And an enormous, almost total transformation happened inside of
me
.
Determined to change my fate, I went from living as a virtual lab rat—an overweight middle-aged woman who had achieved many things in science, but who could not seem to figure out how to also be a healthy, happy woman with both a stimulating career and meaningful relationships. I was at a profound low point, and I knew that the only person who could lift me up was me. I didn’t want to wake up ten years later, at age fifty, and feel like my life was empty, but for more publications, awards, and lab results. I wanted much
more
.
Was that too much to ask? Is each of us destined to be or do just one thing, choose only one path?
And don’t we all have many sides? Which side of yourself have you given up on in the course of pursuing your work or family or both at the same time? And given the chance, wouldn’t you like to connect with that missing part of yourself—perhaps that creative, fun, exuberant, childlike part of you that rides life like a rodeo cowgirl on a bucking bull? My answer: “
Yes, I would!
”
So in the middle of my life, I began to tackle the seemingly forced separation of my two selves and get happy. Of course, there have been lots of books about what happiness is, and how to make yourself happy. From my reading I gathered that happiness is all about attitude and being able to shift your inner balance of emotions from negative to positive. Happiness also seems to require a certain form of self-permission: as in, give up your attachment to being a stoic victim who is judged only by precisely how productive she is and instead allow yourself to break free, explore, and create. I also learned that being happy is about determination and free will. It’s about stepping up and actively claiming your own happiness and not waiting for someone else to mail it to you in a gift basket topped with a big red bow.
But, as an award-winning scientist, I felt like I needed something, well, more substantial, more scientific to really show me the way. Why not apply all that I know about neuroscience to my life? I realized that to be happy I had to use all of my brain—not just the part of my brain that designed great neuroscience experiments. I realized that there were vast parts of my brain that I had stopped using (or used very little) since I started my lab and teaching career at NYU. I had the distinct feeling that these underused parts of my brain were starting to wither away. For example, big parts of the motor areas in my brain were just not being used because I didn’t ever move. Parts of my sensory brain, the areas involved in certain (non-science-y) kinds of creativity, and parts of my brain involved in meditation and spirituality were like barren deserts compared to the parts of my brain that designed new experiments, followed the rules, and judged myself at every turn. All of those science-based areas were lush and green with as much life as the Amazon rain forest. I realized I had to get in touch with my own brain—all of it—as a first step toward getting happy. But there was still more.
Despite my deep love and respect for the brain, I also knew that we are more than just our brains—we have a body connected to that brain that allows us to interact with the world. And it wasn’t just parts of my brain that were not being stimulated. My entire body was being neglected. I didn’t just need to stimulate the barren parts of my brain; what I really needed was to start working my entire body. In essence, I slowly learned that being happy comes down to making sure you not only are using all parts of your brain in a balanced way but are also connecting your brain and your body.
The good news, the amazing news, is this: That when we start activating our brains and start making this mind-body connection,
when we tap into all that our brain does for us and that beautiful and inextricable connection between the body and the brain,
we give ourselves an exceptionable, irreplaceable way to make our brains
work better.
In other words,
we sharpen our thinking and increase our memory capacity
. We learn how to
leverage the good
aspects of our environment (including our bodies) and
protect ourselves
against the bad (stress, negative thoughts, trauma, or addiction).
My own journey began with regular aerobic exercise, with a little yoga thrown in for good measure, after many years of mainly couch potato behavior. Seeing and feeling my body get stronger did something quite magical for me. It gave me a brand-new kind of confidence in my physical being that I had not felt since I was a kid. It made me feel strong and even a little sexy and put me in a fantastic mood that got better the more I worked out. My body was learning new things all the time, and it turns out that my brain loved it! Not only did my mood improve but I found my memory and attention improved as well. I started enjoying life more, my stress levels decreased, and I felt more creative. I even started applying my new passion for physical exercise to my science life, exploring different ways of asking questions and considering new topics on the brain that I had not thought about before. Perhaps the most miraculous thing that happened is that this new confidence, physicality, and great mood started to chip away at the boring, workaholic, controlling, nose-to-the-grindstone “scientist persona” that I had been so lovingly cultivating for so many years. Instead, I felt myself tapping into long-lost passions and embracing joy.