Your Brain and Body are Amazing

What's happening with the Brain, Body, Mind?

What is your strongest memory of last year? It was a peak experience, an intensely emotional moment - whether positive or negative. You're wired to pay attention to the big peaks.

These are what your brain uses as feedback for your behavior patterns and neural structure.

The more powerful the experience the more it shapes you.

Powerful experiences, good or bad, wire your brain.

Your brain and body are reinforcing the most powerful experiences you've had (whether they were positive or negative) every day!

All brains experience the healing that wires the body/mind for positive responses. This is how you get a healthy baseline to your mental fitness (and improve your baseline if you work on it).

All brains experience trauma that wires the body/mind for negative responses. This is what post-traumatic stress disorder is. And everyone has some of that going on.

Understanding PTSD is not about understanding war or combat. It's about understanding how the brain works, and how your brain works all the time, whether you have PTSD or not.

The human race survives because of our ability to learn from our experiences. Trauma and learning are very connected, but for those who experience trauma, sometimes that learning is not a good experience. Trauma can cause disorders such as PTSD or even depression.

When our bodies go through new experiences (including pain, fear, and anxiety) our brain goes on a search. The brain is looking for a memory. The brain is looking for when something similar and maybe more severe happened. Replaying the same traumatic events over and over again is how suffering emerges. This is why you can experience some event at 37-years of age but your body feels like it's 4 years old and you start acting childish.

Your brain/body has become entangled. The chemical processes, your nervous system, and memory processes are jumbled up.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a survival mechanism wired into the body. If you're living in an environment that provides you with stimuli that are substantially out of sync with your brain's ability to process it, then this mechanism is ultimately what propels you to safety.

Brain, Body, and Mind Differences

Your brain, mind, and body are different. It helps me to know the difference.

Your brain is the organ housed in your skull. This is your neurology.

Your body is the combination of all your systems (electrical and chemical). The 11 organ systems are the integumentary system, skeletal system, muscular system, lymphatic system, respiratory system, digestive system, nervous system, endocrine system, cardiovascular system, urinary system, and reproductive system. This is your physiology.

Your mind is your outlook. This is your psychology.

It's shaped by the brain in your skull and the brain in your gut (where you have many neurons) and the chemical processing that's happening in your body.

One of the greatest forces on this planet is your mind. It literally runs everything in your life. It helps you understand the world, allows you to navigate social situations, helps you learn new skills, lets you connect with people, and keeps you sane (well, as sane as it ever is). But it's connected to - and can't be separated from - your body or brain.

So what do you do?

1. Choose positive experiences

When you choose positive experiences to reinforce your brain and body instead of negative ones, it rewires your nervous system for long-term positive change.

Daily you get the opportunity to embrace new positive experiences and reject traumatic negative ones. A trigger from the past is only traumatic when you don't choose how you react to it. It's not the event--it's the reception that turns something good into something really bad or something really good into a big boost.

2. Reinterpret negative experiences
Your brain's foundation comes from your most powerful experiences. The things that have most affected you are reinforcement of your baseline/normal.

It's not that you are fated to feel anxious or sad from your negative past experiences, it's that the body and mind will wire for a certain response. This is why when you change the way you see these experiences it can free you from being trapped by them.

In a good way, your brain can be changed and strengthened even into adulthood. There are techniques that teach you to modify the messages sent by your brain and thus change how your body responds in any given moment to traumatic or otherwise powerful experiences. The practice of these techniques over time can bring you back to a healthy baseline where your body and mind work together naturally for positive responses with ease.

Want to change your mental outlook or psychology?

A. Watch your reaction to even the smallest things. Pausing the mental mechanism that kicks in is how you build awareness.

B: Acknowledge that the power of conditioning is in the experience you create (and reinforce) every day. Lean into the places you want to avoid or tolerate.

There's more but that's a start.

Where you are today is a result of what you've been reinforcing for years and months.

tl:dr?

1. Stress isn't just heightened emotional and mental states. It's a physical thing that happens in your body. The brain has developed to prioritize the survival skills that bring the most reward to the physical body. Think fight or flight or freeze.

2. Trauma changes the brain. The stress response is automatic and unconscious.

3. Healing is a process of unwiring the trauma by "rewiring" the brain. Negative stimuli can be rewired into positive responses when you deal with them in a conscious way.

4. Brain rewiring takes place by recalling the trauma (not suppressing it) and then responding with opposite responses (happy, compassionate, relaxed). You rewire your brain by recalling the trauma (not suppressing it) and responding with what you needed at the deepest level. Hint: It's related to your identity.

I've been perfecting a system to help myself and others recover from trauma, to increase mental fitness, and to generally live more awesome lives. I call this Figure That Shift Out and it's all about developing mental fitness that brings you happiness. Some need counseling to get to a level of functioning. SightShift is not counseling.

But for those looking to thrive, coaching can be the breakthrough you've been looking for. If you're at an in-between moment or in limbo and you know it could be better...step-by-step we'll guide you all the way.

You might also be interested in reading...

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