Worship is good for your brain

My wife has just finished reading a book called Change your brain – change your life by a psychiatrist called Dr Amen (a fitting name don’t you think?) She has been sharing some of her discoveries with me. Amen attributes different psychological challenges to either the over or under-activity of various systems in the brain.

I was particularly interested in the symptoms indicative of an over-active Deep Limbic system. They seemed to fit me. One sentence in particular resonated strongly: When the Limbic system is over-active, one negative thought follows another. Amen calls these negative thoughts ANTS which stands for automatic negative thoughts. Some days, I end up crawling with ANTS. For example, I might notice that someone is gazing out of the window whilst I am preaching. Now, I am not talking about the usual sleepers and window gazers. No, I mean somebody that I respect. So I think, “it’s probably because he doesn’t agree with me”. If I do not take that thought captive and dispute it, one thought leads to another, and I will end the day wondering when I should go back to engineering!

My parents occasionally remind me of an event that took place when I was a toddler. I would often (the story goes) take my potty into the garden so as to introduce an element of beauty to an otherwise ugly necessity. However, on one occasion, I disturbed a nest of Matabele ants and ended up screaming from the rose garden, “ants bite, ants bite!” And they do! This is where Amen’s advice comes in useful. Since an over-active Limbic system leads to problems, he suggests various ways to calm it down. One way is to cultivate positive bonding.

Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with worship, the topic I introduced last week. Well my wife made the observation that singing-worship is a way of bonding with God. Nothing else knits your heart to God’s in quite the same, profound way that worship and prayer do. I had a bad “ANT attack” on Saturday night, but the intimacy I experienced in worship on Sunday morning supplied the ANT-killer.

Prayer and praise put us in a place where we can receive the power we need to glorify God in tough circumstances. I wouldn’t be surprised if calming the Limbic system is part of the process. Psalm 22 records a period of intense struggle and persecution for David. In fact, his sufferings were so severe that they provided a fore-shadow of the ones Christ experienced. But notice how the psalm oscillates between complaint and praise or between doubt and faith. Eventually, however, from verse 22 on, the psalm ends on a long triumphant note of praise to God. Whether you are suffering from ANTS, something more concrete or a mixture of both (which is usually the case), praise and prayer will bring you through victorious. Paul and Silas were beside themselves with pain and discomfort as they sat with their legs forced cruelly apart in the stocks, trying to keep their shredded backs off the ground. Yet midnight found them “praying and singing hymns to God” (Acts 16:25). They could afford to do nothing else. And look at how God brought them through.

May I encourage you, therefore, to fumigate your own ANT infestations with a good dose of worship? Medicate your suffering with praise! And you needn’t wait till Sunday either. Switch on a CD player or pick up a guitar, but whatever you do, start praising God.