Every millisecond, our 86 billion neurons are interpreting and responding to the inundation of sensory input from our bodies and environment. This information is processed and filtered based on what our neurons think it “means”.
Have you heard the saying “what fires together wires together”? These neural connections continually strengthen as we repeat certain patterns, behaviors, habits, and thoughts. The older we get, the more ingrained these get. Every single thing we do reinforces a pattern and a pathway, consolidating our autopilot behavior. How we think, make decisions, and behave is a direct result of past experiences that we’re often unaware of. But what does this actually mean? Let’s say you were skiing with a friend many years ago, and you watched them lose control and get badly injured. While watching this happen, your stress response was activated causing you to feel sick to your stomach. Your neurons “stored” this feeling of being sick to your stomach with the attached “meaning” of something bad happening – your friend getting injured. Now fast forward to today. You pick-up a couple tacos from a street vendor on your way to a meeting. Going to sleep that night, you notice you feel a little sick to your stomach. At 2am you wake-up in a state of stress, obsessing about the next day’s tasks and the huge deadline you have next week. You then begin to stress about not getting enough sleep, frustrated by this wave of stress that seemingly came out of nowhere. Feeling sick to your stomach caused your ingrained neural patterns to start firing. When your friend’s accident happened, your neurons created a connection of “when I feel sick to my stomach it’s because something bad is happening, so I need to activate my stress response”. And then wham. You get flooded with stress which caused you to wake up with all the thoughts that come along with stress overwhelm. This then reinforces the pattern of “feeling sick to my stomach means I need to be stressed”, making it an even stronger response for the next time you feel sick to your stomach. The reverse is also true. The feeling of stress can lead to you getting sick to your stomach. This is why it’s so important to make the subconscious conscious. We often get derailed without a clue as to what is happening. This is how I help. I teach you how to get out of autopilot and take back control of how your life unfolds. Click here to learn more. Cheers to better living - Shannon Think this is interesting? Pass it on to your friends and colleagues.
Shannon Connor shannon@anchorpointperformance.com 720.938.5319
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