Archive for the ‘The Brain’ Category

When you find yourself feeling stressed, you can neutralize the damage by engaging in this simple exercise that begins with several deep breaths.

Sit upright in a comfortable chair with both of your feet balanced on the floor. Breathe deeply and slowly from your diaphragm (not just the top part of your lungs). Notice when you start to relax. If you want to change your physiology a bit, move around a little, wiggle your toes, take another breath. You’re settling in for even deeper relaxation! Now, try to focus your attention on your heart. Try “breathing” through your heart. (Think about this for a minute so you can get a visual that works for you.) Note the sensations your body, breath and brain experience through this sequence..

Now go ahead and think about something entirely opposite from what was the initial cause of your stress – maybe a happy moment or fun time in your life. As you fill your mind with a pleasant thought (or memory, or visual) this will actually help to change the fight or flight response in your brain and body. Fight or flight response changes the biochemical mix in your body – swapping for a pleasant thought will help alter your mind/body chemistry, too.

In this exercise, I like to think about what and who I am grateful for – people, places, things, situations that make me feel good. This not only brings a smile to my face, but helps make more positive connections in my brain that then allow me to deal with stress triggers in a healthier way.

Go ahead…try it now!

The subconscious, or, your unconscious mind, loves patterns and repetition. What’s familiar to your mind resonates instantly. When it’s a positive pattern, great! You can achieve many, many things. But, when it’s a negative pattern or thought that’s repeated over time, then you become your own worst enemy and it’s harder to meet challenges, to excel, to achieve.

Modern research has discovered that our emotional states are produced by a couple of things like how we hold our bodies (our physiology) and the mental pictures we focus on. Did you know that we have approximately 44,000 to 66,000 mental pictures or thoughts a day? That’s a lot of content to experience, process and react to.

The one primary way we can change our emotional states is to change our physiology or how we are holding our body. Exactly how we are holding our bodies can trigger every emotion that we have ever experienced—how you carry yourself throughout the day has the potential to trigger feelings like being sad, mad, happy, or confident. As soon as we train our body to be in the physiology we want, we can instantly feel the corresponding emotion!

My Mental Toughness and Success Moment CDs are each designed specifically to help you get into and stay in the physiology and emotional state you want each and every day. My CDs are designed with specific suggestions and imageries that teach you to develop a mental toughness and with repetition (or, as I like to say, repeatedness). Take control your states of mind—positively and effectively!

Is it really possible to change how we think? There are so many self-help books out there telling us we can alter our thoughts to change our brains. I have many friends and clients that buy and read every self-help book there is but they still can’t seem to change their lives. They have done everything and yet nothing seems to work to undo years of negative thought patterns.

Many of you know that I have dedicated my life to finding ways to solve the problem of anxiety and depression. In the ’60s and ‘70s there wasn’t much help for these symptoms and often doctors thought you were crazy if you exhibited symptoms of anxiety. I was personally treated terribly by friends, family, doctors, teachers and therapists who all thought they were helping. As I look back on it, my condition was not really understood, so everyone thought I was making it up. I hear it in my office today from many clients who have family and spouses that think they are making it up, that panic and anxiety are not real. But, these are real conditions with real symptoms that stop people from having full and rich lives.

So, can you change the way you think? Can you really change automatic negative thoughts?

Understanding more about your brain/body connection can be helpful. You are born with a fight or flight mechanism that allow us to protect ourselves in dangerous situations. When a person senses danger, the body prepares itself to either fight (defend itself) or flee (run away from the situation). The body’s fight or flight mechanism causes the heart rate to increase, the eyes to dilate, and the body to prepare itself for a dangerous situation. Even though these effects are intended to be a good thing, sometimes the body misunderstands a situation and believes that there is danger when in reality there is not (e.g., taking a test, giving a speech, meeting someone for the first time).

The part of the brain that triggers fight or flight is called the amygdala. The amygdala is trained to remember the thing or event that triggered the fight or flight mechanism (the test or speech). This part of your brain is keeping track of all things that might cue danger. You can see how this can cause much unnecessary anxiety. The brain has to be retrained to stop reacting in flight or flight to something that is not actually dangerous.

Part of successful retraining includes using guided imagery, hypnosis, NLP, HNRI, Brainspotting or EMDR. Finding a personal development coach that is trained in the some or all of these therapies is critical to success, too.

Change the way you think to positively affect your life!

In John Overdurf’s coaching perspectives classes, he talks about many studies about the brain and the unconscious mind.

The quantum Zeno effect (aka “a watched pot never boils!) is a concept you might be familiar with. This quantum phenomena was first demonstrated by George Sudarshan at University of Texas in 1977, and, in 2005, Stapp and Schwartz applied the quantum Zeno effect to mental experience. They found that attention and focus stabilize brain circuitry. Paying attention to any specific neural connection keeps the associated circuitry open dynamic and alive. Rapid and repeated observations not only stabilize transient chemical links, but eventually can alter physical changes in the brains structure. (Similar studies are conducted via neuro-plasticity research and can be read in The Brain That Changes Itself. All fascinating.)

So, the moral of the story is we get what we focus on–unconsciously!

And, you probably want to avoid the negatives in life, right? Suppose you have a panic attack. Your brain now has a neural pathway called anxiety or panic…then it happens again…so your brain now is really paying attention to panic. You could go to talk therapy and talk about your panic attacks. but what is happening in that situation? You are focusing on the panic and therefore repeatedly observing the panic, which then causes the neural pathway to light up and here comes the symptoms again. It’s quite a cycle of negativity.

I always tell my clients it’s like going down the same railroad track over and over again, consciously and unconsciously. And, not one client in over 20 years has told me that they can hardly wait to panic or are excited to be depressed. But, remember, by the time you experience panic there is already a mental pathway there for it to easily occur. Our work together is to help shift your conscious attention (your own attempt to solve the problem, the panic) to increased redirected unconscious activation (a new railroad track – get on it!)

Stay Confident, Stay Connected, Stay Focused are all effective CD programs that can be used to help your brain change to discover new neural pathways that can positively affect your life.