Your brains evolution

Due to evolution, our psychology is not equipped to handle the modern world. The Reptilian (or Primitive) part of the brain is millions of years old, and is responsible for keeping us alive (our survival instincts), our habits, and our impulses.

But unfortunately, our primitive brain in the modern world can often cause us a lot of unnecessary drama. The primitive brain is wired to categorise everything as either life or death, and since most of us are no longer in tribes and needing to fear being eaten by tigers – we end up reacting quite intensely to things like not getting a text back or going for a job interview.

Left unmanaged, your brain will continue to run on its default programming; prone to overreact, take things personally, and keep you hiding in the comfort of your ‘cave’ instead of embracing the life you truly want.

The human brain is more complex than any other known structure in the universe. It’s responsible for everything that exists in our worlds. It creates our thoughts, our feelings, our opinions. It shapes every decision we make, produces our results, and is responsible for the way we interpret our entire existence -  yet we are never taught how to manage it.

For years I would bury my nose in self help books - hoping to find the answers, hoping to find a way to tame the often irrational and unruly organ that appeared to be running the show.

I felt completely powerless over my own mind - it’s thoughts, the feelings it created for me, and the actions it then led me to take.

What I realise now is that I was allowing my mind’s unconscious programming to run my life, and that I actually had so much more power than I ever realised. I just hadn’t learnt the tools to help me take charge yet. 

Neuroplasticity

Every time you think the same thought, you reinforce a neurological pathway in your brain. Your brain wants to conserve energy, so once it’s good at thinking a particular thought, it will continue to think it over and over and over – creating our habits, beliefs, and default thoughts.

In order to change your default thoughts, you have to create NEW neurological pathways - ones you’ve chosen to wire into your mind intentionally! Think of it like a well-trodden path in a forest. The more you’ve walked over it, the stronger the pathway becomes.

But in order to create a new pathway, we have to direct ourselves another way – again and again and again, until this path becomes as strong as the previous path. This is a very simple explanation of Neuroplasticity. By rewiring our brains and changing the way we think, we change the way we feel, which determines our actions and our overall results.

This is where a life coach or mind management coach can help.