Neural Smudging

Can a bad job change your brain?

We all carry a mental image of our bodies. It’s called proprioception. It lets you know where you are in space. You can close your eyes and touch your index fingers together tip to tip because you know where your hands are.

When you have chronic pain, it can mess with your proprioception. Essentially, your body’s map of itself in space gets it wrong. This is how “phantom limb” pain happens, pain that a person senses in a limb that has been amputated.

I’ve had chronic pain in my hips for about fifteen years. Two surgeries helped, but didn’t erase the pain. I’ve been to some excellent physical therapists over the years, and the one I’m seeing now told me that my proprioception is off. I can’t “see” my hips in my own mental model.

Try this. Close your eyes and do a body scan right now. Start at the top of your head and sweep down through your shoulders, hips, knees and feet. Easy, right? When I do that, I can’t imagine my hips. I see head, shoulders, trunk, legs, feet. No hips. Blank space.

This is called “neural smudging.” It means that my proprioception has changed so that my body can’t accurately picture itself. I like that phrase, neural smudging as if my brain had blurred the lines around the source of my chronic pain, like an artist will do with charcoal on a white page.

The problem with neural smudging is that since I don’t “see” my hips anymore, I don’t use them to do what they are supposed to do – move my legs. Instead, I use my lower back. Which hurts my lower back. When I swim, which I do often – I should be using my glutes to kick, not my lower back. But my proprioception has erased my glutes so I use my lower back. which aches when I get out of the pool.

The solution is to redraw that missing part of my body in my brain’s map. In addition to a bunch of exercises where I isolate my hips, I am supposed to tell myself that I have glutes. Literally say as I move through my day “I have glutes. I have muscles in my hips.” I tried this with internal eye roll when I was doing laps, but to my surprise it worked.

When I got my head around the fact that chronic pain could re-map my understanding of my how I move through the world, I began to wonder what chronically painful work environments do to us.

What gets erased, smudged? What becomes inaccessible? What is overworked instead?

For most of my career, I’ve been subjected to chronic sexual harassment and/or a workplace that is hostile to women. That is chronically painful. I was treated terribly when my son was injured and disabled, and I needed to take care of him. Most of the people of color I know have experienced chronic racism.

Many of us have experiences of chronic difficulties at work. White men who have plenty of privilege can still suffer chronic work stress under dysfunctional leaders, or the threat of layoffs.

I would argue that we also have a work proprioception, a sense of who we are and who we get to be at our jobs. And that chronic stress or discrimination can cause the same neural smudging or distortion that chronic physical pain does.

What does that mean at work? For me I’ve noticed that I don’t accurately assess my skills in the workplace. It’s like I’ve got on glasses that distort and erase my abilities. This makes me overprepare, since I worry about skills I have. A good example of this is public speaking. I do it often, I have a podcast, and I even teach other people how to present more effectively. But I don’t see that I have skills there. When I need to present I will overprepare, and rehearse way more than needed. It takes up a lot of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere.

Last week, Eugene and I did our Bad Boss Brief podcast live. We haven’t seen each other in person since before the pandemic, so I thought, great, we can work in the hours we have between his arrival and the live event. Rehearse!

But after we ran through the content briefly, Eugene was done. That was enough for him. He was right – we’ve done a dozen episodes of the podcast, we’ve known each other for over thirty years, we didn’t need extensive rehearsal. The event went fine without it.

Eugene can accurately perceive our joint level of skill in a way that I can’t.

I also don’t always perceive damage as quickly. Since I’m inured to a certain level of pain, I don’t always see a slight or aggressive behavior in the moment, when I could address it most effectively. It’s not until much later, if at all, that I’ll see it. Sometimes, I won’t even understand what’s happening until I recount an episode to a friend who will say, “wait, what? He said what?!?”

I can’t think of a job where I’ve felt a sense of psychological safety. I’ve felt it in other areas of my life, and I know that I do better work when I feel safe. I am more creative, effective and happy. In corporate work settings I have usually been clenched, braced for an impact that may or may not arrive.

Being hypervigilant takes up so much energy. Energy that could be flowing to more constructive areas like creativity, problem solving, interpersonal relationships.

When it comes to my physical well-being, I understand now that living with chronic pain for years before addressing it actually rewired my brain. My perception of pain, which areas of my body I could use effectively and not, indeed even something as fundamental as how I walk is still impacted by all that pain I carried. I’ve got PT exercises and ways to understand the pain that are helping me heal and reconnect with a more accurate understanding of my body and how it moves through space.

But what about the chronic pain of living with discrimination, hypervigilance and fear at work? How many of us have experienced work neural smudging in our inability to understand our own skills and competencies; a problem seeing injuries as injuries; the discomfort of overcorrecting or overextending certain skills like preparing compulsively to compensate for not seeing that we’re better than we give ourselves credit for?

And what are the exercises that we can use to heal? I’ve largely left the corporate world, and only come in as a visitor to help others. What do we do for the people who are still in the thick of that chronic pain?

Maybe just being aware that this can happen, and looking around at where our understanding of reality is smudged or distorted is a way to begin. Take it seriously. The world in which we live impacts us on the physical level, our brains can be rewired by trauma and stress, and we can’t always bounce back.