Your Journey to Success: How to Accept the Answers You Discover Along the Way. Kenny Weiss

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СКАЧАТЬ In our midbrain, our thalamus, which is part of the limbic system, takes in information. This is where almost all nerves that connect our brain and body meet. The thalamus diagnoses different sensory information transmitted to the brain through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. It acts like a traffic cop directing all incoming information. In addition, the thalamus is the emotional control center of our brain. In any situation, it sends signals to our body when a physical response is required. The thalamus also sends information to the prefrontal cortex, whose job is to assess, plan, and make choices. Most importantly, it sends a signal to the hypothalamus, which monitor’s critical internal body functions like temperature, hormones, blood sugar, appetite, sleep, thirst, blood pressure, immune system response, and metabolism. Consider this our state of balance—the “norm” of our brain, body, and mind.

      Our Brain’s Role in Emotions

      For our discussion, we will focus on the brain’s role in our emotions. When we experience life, the hypothalamus creates the necessary chemical cocktail that causes us to feel the way we do. For example, when we see our spouse, our hypothalamus secretes a chemical concoction that tells our brain, body, and mind how we feel physically and emotionally. That feeling then generates the thoughts that follow. Simply put, our feelings are just a bunch of chemicals in our brain that get fired repeatedly. We’ll want to keep this concept in mind as we learn about ways to get out of the Worst Day Cycle.

      Our midbrain is also home to our amygdala, which plays an essential role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions. The right amygdala evokes negative emotions like fear and sadness while the left induces either pleasant or unpleasant emotions. When our thalamus gathers incoming data, it runs everything by the amygdala first. The amygdala acts as an alarm system, as it reviews all new information and determines whether or not it is a threat. Perceived threats trigger our defensive fear response, which we know as fight, flight, or freeze. In the amygdala’s view, a threat can be anything from someone holding a gun to our head to a memory of something that has frightened us in the past to even learning something new. Further, the amygdala doesn’t differentiate between an immediate threat of danger or perceived danger. Unintentionally, our amygdala can send us a signal that we are experiencing a physical or psychological threat. From there it bounces off of our hippocampus, which is like a secondary smoke alarm to our amygdala. It lets us know what is safe/isn’t safe and what is known/unknown so we can react with a ready-made response. The hippocampus helps us draw on those memories stored physically in the cells of our body as well as in our brain. This can be dangerous, as chronic stress (which is actually fear) or any chronic condition is just the accumulation of these chemicals that are stuck unprocessed in our body’s cells. That is why we will typically have a physical symptom (illness, disease, or even physical injury) in response to an emotional situation. Our body has now found a place to store the chemicals linked to that emotion. The hypothalamus generates the chemicals that trigger the emotion associated with trauma and shuts down the body to enable us to be in the best state to survive impact. That is great if a bear is coming toward you, but not so great if you are entering a business networking meeting and are frozen in fear.

      How Our Brain Works Against Us

      Even though we desire to live in our best day, it’s hard to get out of the Worst Day Cycle because our brain doesn’t know how to behave. If we don’t know something or are exposed to something new, we have no emotional chemical marker for our thalamus to categorize the situation as homeostatic (our norm or equilibrium). That’s when our amygdala gets triggered. The adrenaline rush of fear shuts down the cognitive thinking and reasoning part of our brain. When we are afraid, we automatically go into denial because our brain seeks homeostasis whenever possible. In other words, it seeks what it knows; it seeks comfort. It doesn’t recognize the difference between good and bad. That is why, in general, positive thinking is not as important as learning to feel positively, because our thoughts about a situation are derived from what we are feeling. This chemical reaction, the feelings we have been firing for so long, is more powerful than our thoughts. Our brain and body become addicted to the feelings associated with our trauma and our worst day because they have been firing more than any other feeling. We can’t remember our best day or live our life to its fullest potential because we don’t have that chemical addiction inside our brain and body to do so. It’s like telling ourselves, “Don’t do that, it is wrong,” but somehow we can’t stop ourselves from doing it. We end up repeating the behavior that we already know will end badly.

      The Role of Trauma in the Brain

      Trauma has a way of overwhelming us. When we are threatened, our first response is fight, flight, or freeze. These are physiological or psychological reactions to a traumatic event. As a result, the brain changes to deal with future perceived stressors. Consider victims of domestic abuse who refuse to leave the situation. Cognitively they know it is bad for them, but the mere suggestion of leaving will send them into a fight, flight, or freeze mode because their brains and bodies have become addicted to the abuse. I choose the word “addicted” because they become helpless in the face of their craving for those chemicals—that is, the intense chemical reaction in their brain and body. As a result, their feelings override their thoughts. They want to change, but since their amygdala and hippocampus have no blueprint or intense chemical reaction for what leaving looks like, they stay. Our brain and body like the status quo because their central job is to keep us alive. No matter how horrific our situation might be, their mantra is to stay put; after all, we’ve survived it before so it must be okay.

      The Pesky Role of Neural Pathways in the Brain

      As we experience an emotion repeatedly, we create something called a neural pathway—a series of neurons that connect to send signals to other regions of our brain. A great metaphor is sledding in the winter down a hill. With freshly fallen snow, there are no tracks to follow. We can go anywhere we want, as nothing is guiding us down a particular portion of the hill. With each successive trip down that hill, the ruts and grooves become deeper and as a result we can get stuck. No matter how hard we try to steer the sled in a different direction, the ruts are too deep. From this point on, we are destined to take the same path down the hill every single time. Our brain loves this because it knows the path. It’s repeatable and familiar. As long as we are alive, we will continue to go down that same path—even if it is a horrific ride. To get unstuck, we need to go back to the top of the hill and forge a new, unfamiliar track. That’s our solution. We need to retrain our brains.

      This book shares new concepts, so be patient with your brain. You may choose to read the book several times as you get your brain comfortable. That way our amygdala can quiet down, our hypothalamus can fire new chemicals, and our hippocampus can start storing new, more positive feeling memories. This will allow us access to thought and reasoning. If our life isn’t where we want it, it’s because we have experienced an emotional marker that fires repeatedly and has created a system that is working against us. Our sled has not left that track for years. Until we address that emotional marker, we cannot change. Thoughts alone will have little effect. To create a new neural pathway, we must address the emotion and rework it and the accompanying belief structures. To do that, we need to go toward that original trauma. We need to become an expert in all of it, including the resulting fear, self-victimizing shaming behaviors, and the denial we use to guard it. If we don’t do this, we are destined to ride that treacherous track the rest of our life.

      The Role of Self-Sabotage

      Something we also need to be aware of: the fear and the excitement responses in our brains are exactly the same. Our brain does not know the difference. Ever wonder why people sabotage their progress or even career with senseless choices? It’s because as they get excited and are about to reach their potential, if they have not resolved their trauma their gut instinct tells them something is wrong. The excitement creates the same feeling as СКАЧАТЬ