Your Relational Brain

Your relational brain is the part of your brain that is designed to help you have healthy relationships with other people.

When your relational brain is online, you care about your partner, and you also care about yourself. You’re less likely to do or say something that makes your partner uncomfortable, unless you have a really good reason to do so. 

Your relational brain sees your partner as a living, breathing, human being, just like you. It sees their love, their passion, their sadness, their longing. 

Your relational brain cares. It cares about you, and it cares about others. 

Above all, your relational brain knows that you can’t make other people do things. In fact, it knows that every time you attempt to control another person’s behavior, you will actually get the opposite of what you’re aiming for. 

Your relational brain cares about context, about the big picture. It thinks about the past, and it plans for the future. It doesn’t get sucked into the drama of the present moment. 

It always knows what’s most important. It knows when things matter, and when they don’t. 

Your relational brain helps you focus on what matters most. It helps you treat people with kindness and respect. 

At the same time, it also helps you stand up for what you want. It knows that you, just like everyone else, will never yield to control and manipulation, at least not in the long run. 

Your relational brain understands the impact you have on others, and the impact they have on you. 

Your precision brain

You also have another part of your brain that’s designed to solve simple problems that don’t involve other people. Let’s call this your precision brain. 

This part of your brain is designed to control your environment. That might sound bad, but it’s a good thing! 

You need to control your envioronment to stay safe, accomplish your goals, and take care of the ones you love. 

Your precision brain is good at simplification. It tries to make sense of the complexity in the world by reducing things to their most basic forms. It loves categories, methods, habits, traditions, and rules. 

Your precision brain knows that their is always a right way and a wrong way to do things. It sees things in black and white terms. It has a lot of confidence, and it often jumps to conclusions. 

In order to actually get things done, your precision brain has to make things simple enough to understand. That means getting rid of a lot of nuance, and focusing on just one thing at a time. 

Your precision brain doesn’t pay attention to the past or the future, just what’s happening right now. It also treats every thing and every person as a static, inanimate object. 

Your precision brain always thinks it’s right. It doesn’t go around second-guessing itself. It loves to sort, categorize, and label the world around it. Once it reaches a conclusion, it doesn’t like to go back and double check, it just sticks to what it has already decided. 

This is your Relationship on Precision Brain

When your precision brain gets involved in your relationship, some interesting things start to happen. 

First, you find yourself caring less and less about your partner. Your goals and desires seem way more important than your partner’s goals and desires. When you disagree, it’s hard to see any value in your partner’s point of view. It seems obvious that you’re right, and they’re wrong. 

Second, you find yourself explaining the same thing to over and over. This happens because your precision brain thinks its solution is so good, that all it has to do is communicate it, and your partner will fall in line. 

Third, you start to see your partner as an annoyance, a threat, or an obstacle to get around. When you fell in love, you saw your partner as a living creature, so unique, and so wonderful. As your precision brain takes over, you stop seeing them like that. Instead, you see them as a problem to be solved, or as a threat to your wellbeing. 

Fourth, you can’t stop thinking about your relationship problems. Your precision brain is not good at deciding what to think about, so it tends to just keep thinking about whatever problem it’s trying to solve. In a relationship, that “problem” often ends up being your partner. 

Fifth, you keep trying to pressure your partner into doing things they don’t want to do. Your precision brain doesn’t know that people don’t respond well to pressure, especially in a relationship, so it just keeps trying the same stupid tricks, over and over. To the precision brain, things like cricitism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling seem like great ways to make your partner fall in line. Sure, they haven’t worked the last hundred times you tried them, but the precision brain just doesn’t care about the past, the future, or any other kind of context. It only cares about what is happening right now, and right now it thinks it can get your partner to finally fall in line. 

How to Activate your Relational Brain 

Falling in love is a relational brain experience. When you fell in love, you saw your partner as a living, breathing, dynamic being, full of mystery and potential. You saw all of the complexity, all of the nuance, and marvelled at how well it all fit together. You would have known instinctively that this is a person who cannot be controlled, a person who will defend their right to self-determination. 

As your relationship progressed, your precision brain started to take over. You stopped caring as much as you had, and you started focusing on small problems, rather than zooming out and looking at the bigger picture. You started looking for ways to pressure and manipulate, instead of allowing your partner the freedom they crave. 

Here’s how to activate and nurture your relational brain:

Move your body:  your relational brain loves full-body movement, especially if it’s not precise. Group workouts, dance classes, worship services, and any other activity where people move their bodys in unison will help your relational brain wake up. Free workout groups like F3 and FIA provide excellent opportunities to make friends, move your body, get in shape, and change your life. Sign up for yoga, tai chi, martial arts, dance class, Zumba, aerobics, or anything else that involves full-body movement. Go for a run, or a walk. Do some pushups, or jumping jacks, or situps. All of these things are even better if you do them with someone you know, or if you get to know people by doing them. 

Be in Nature:  Nurture your brain by spending time in whatever natural spaces you can find. Go for a hike, a swim, go out on a lake, go to the beach, go to a park. Sit under a tree. Leave your phone behind if you dare. 

Sing:  singing used to be as much a part of daily life as talking, walking, and eating. We used to sing together, and we used to sing alone. Now most people don’t sing at all, and some even claim they don’t know how to sing. Sing in your car, sing in the shower, sing when you’re home alone, or even if you’re not alone. Sing loud, sing soft. Go to church just to sing, even if you don’t believe. Host a karaoke party at home. Sing with your friends, and sing with your lover. 

Read a Poem:  You’ll need your relational brain’s help to read a poem expressively. I often start therapy sessions by reading a poem because it forces me to turn on my relational brain, and it helps my clients do the same. 

Brain Change is the Path to Relationship Improvement

Your relationship will get better as your brain gets better. Most couples therapy focuses on surface-level changes, without addressing deeper levels of personal growth that have to happen if you want to have a better relationship. 

The average human brain isn’t capable of having a good long-term intimate relationship, just like the average human body isn’t capable of running a marathon. Good relationships, like high levels of fitness, are available to those who are willing to put in the work.