Tag: mbraining

What’s Your Emotional Life Actually Like?

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Here’s a question for you –  what’s your emotional landscape like?

 

Do your emotions come, have their say, and go away again, naturally, like the natural life-cycle of a flower? Blossoming and then receding? 

 

Do listen to each emotion and let them teach you exactly which action you need to take? For example, knowing that anger is there to right an injustice? And anxiety tells you something is not quite right and you might need to look into it? 

 

Do you experience the whole rich tapestry of all 80+ emotions, and can name them all when they arise? 

 

Do you experience both the joy AND the sadness?

 

Do you cultivate and enjoy pleasant emotions regularly? And teach this to your kids, too?

 

Are you feeling enough? Could you be a little on the numb side?! What are you missing out on?

 

Are you at the whim of your own reactions, getting triggered by others and outside things and then those feelings dictate the rest of your day/week?

 

Are you out of control with your anxiety or stress, or anger? Like literally feel like you have no control?

 

Do you dumb down your emotional experiences because you’re scared that feelings might overwhelm you? And then you’d never recover?

 

Are you frequently engaged in numbing behaviours to avoid your emotions? Scrolling for hours, drinking too much, over-eating, over-socialising, online shopping, etc. etc. etc.?

 

Without judging yourself, where are you actually at on the old emotional metre? What’s this part of your life like? What could be different?

 

When I had been a parent for about 2 years, I’d been working one-day a week in town with 1:1 clients. I got the opportunity to train in mBraining – or mBit (see previous blog for definition). I was having an issue. Due to my rough start with post-natal anxiety and depression, I was having difficulty FEELING those loving feelings towards my first child. Although I’d recovered and for all intents and purposes I was well, every time I held my child I’d experience a “loving feeling” coming up which I immediately pushed down again (not consciously). I was getting concerned! Needless to say my own personal development while doing this intense training was on the comfort of experiencing loving feelings, allowing them and enjoying them. It was a very worthwhile outcome!

 

It’s likely that you’d fall into one of the categories other than the first five, too. The first five are mostly what I’m coaching people towards and are not usually people’s default experience of the emotional landscape, for various reasons, upbringing, trauma, etc..

 

When you’re numbing or dumbing down and not allowing yourself to feel, remember you can’t selectively numb: numbing sadness or fear will numb joy and happiness. 

 

If you’re at the whim of, or mostly experiencing stressful emotions, then life is going to feel pretty tough. Perhaps you have tears that you can’t control, and this causes some secondary issues for you, like embarrassment.

 

Is it time for a change?

What if you could change just ONE aspect of your emotional life? What would you change? What would that be like?

In the Use Your Body To Solve A Problem workshop, we begin to connect into the body-brains in the heart and gut. One of the competencies of the heart-brain specifically is emoting. If we’re cut off from our hearts and are mostly head-brain dominant (see previous blog) we are not experiencing – or, importantly, regulating – the rich tapestry of our emotions. We aren’t living and experiencing fully.

We are aiming for both emotional literacy AND emotional regulation. This will take focus and work, and won’t be achieved in one workshop of course, but it is a start on the journey at least!  Would you like to start?

 

Want to go deeper and more personal? Fill in an application for therapeutic life coaching here.

 

Why Is Rumination Bad For You?

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I’m not closed about the fact that I’ve experienced mental illness in a major way twice in my life, post-natally, after the birth of each of my daughters. I had post-natal anxiety and depression both times, although my experience of each time was different. The second time I was prepared, and was also introduced to Havening by my lovely friend and colleague Lynley. The first time I was unwell for a whole year before I started to heal, and the second time was done and dusted within 4 months. What a relief that was!  And certainly no more babies for us.

Although the illness manifested slightly differently each time, rumination was a huge problem in both. Was it a symptom or a cause? Who knows. but it needed to get under control.

There’s disagreement in psychology as to whether it’s a mental illness in and of itself, or whether it’s a symptom, or, whether it is a cause of mental ill-health.

As with many things in the understanding of human psychology, there is no definitive conclusion! Most of my undergraduate essays would end with the rough conclusion: It’s considered a bit of both…

What exactly is rumination? Google says:

Rumination is a thought processing disorder meaning that worrisome thoughts or even neutral thoughts are given excess analysis by the person who ruminates.

And is considered to be demonstrated as four different types:

Brooding, reflection, intrusive, and deliberate rumination.

I think regardless, a good way to label it is simply: overthinking.

Here’s the thing: overthinking is absolutely correlated with depression, anxiety, OCD, and phobias. It can also be part of a healthy person’s every day life, they just don’t know that they’re doing it: it can cause sleep issues and, aside from the things I’ve mentioned, it’s also just highly unpleasant being stuck in your head and not being able to turn off your thoughts, which just loop and loop and loop… you burn your friends and partner out seeking a circuit breaker from them… a little wisdom to give you and out. It can be TORTURE! Your head is working WAY TOO HARD and you’re giving it WAY TOO MUCH OXYGEN!

Imagine being able to notice your overthinking patterns, observe them, and have a way of simply letting them go? Not just now, but every time? Come and learn how:

Sign up from my upcoming in-person workshop Use Your Body To Solve A Problem and learn how to get out of your head.

Sigh up to my internal dialogue eCourse – Inner Critic to Inner Coach and get those thoughts under control.

 

 

 

How Head-Brain Dominant Are You And What Can You Do About It?

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No matter who you are, you’re likely to share a common problem with most other people: you’re head-brain dominant.  I can relate to this, as I am too.

Here’s the thing: a lot of us aren’t aware or focused on what goes on below the neck on a daily basis, hour by hour. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that we’ve become accustomed to being in our heads. With the exception of sports, our schools are focused on what the head-brain can do. When we get into university and/or employment, we’re valued for our thinking or our knowledge application, or the basic skills that only a head-brain can generate. 

We love our head-brains, they’re amazing, and of course we are going to want to keep using them, they’re kinda essential!!

And, there are some downsides to doing this at the exclusion of the rest of ourselves. If all our attention and focus is in our heads and on our thoughts and we’re solely relying on our thoughts to guide us, then we are going to run into problems. Some of these are:

  • Cycling or looping thoughts that don’t lead to solutions
  • Getting stuck in your head – indecision
  • Overthinking and under-action
  • Rumination – which can lead into depression
  • Negative self-talk, which feels bad and can also lead to and/or exacerbate depression/anxiety/stress/low self-esteem
  • Overwork / overload / burn out
  • Sleeping issues as can’t switch head off
  • Lack of emotional awareness or emotional numbness
  • Lack of emotional regulation – overblown stressful emotions or under-felt pleasant emotions 

What’s the solution?

Relying on your head-brain to work everything out is like buying a top of the line coffee machine, and only ever using the one basic setting. You’ve got the equipment in there, now let’s work out how to use it!

Modern neuroscience can now demonstrate that we have complex and adaptive neurological centres, not just in your head-brain, which is the biggest of course, but also in your HEART and in your GUT. There are reasons why we have in-built phrases referring to these intelligence centres, which have been handed down to us through the ages: 

What does your gut tell you? 

I had my heart set on it!

I can’t get my head around it….

We’ve always been aware on one level, and now we have the technology to scan the human body and confirm exactly what activity goes on and where. Here’s what we know:

  • Head: Cephalic brain: 50 – 100 billion neurons. Competencies are: cognitive perception; meaning making; thinking. 
  • Heart: Cardiac brain: 30 – 120 thousand neurons.  Competencies are: emoting; values; relational affect.  
  • Gut: Enteric brain: 200 – 500 million neurons. Competencies are: core-identity; self-preservation; mobilasation (action). 

On a more spiritual level, it’s believed that all three of your intelligences have a “highest expression” – meaning that when these brains are balanced and working at their best, they enable you to have access to specific resources, which you don’t have access to when they’re out of balance and misaligned. They are:

  • Head – it’s highest expression is CREATIVITY
  • Heart – it’s highest expression is COMPASSION
  • Gut – it’s highest expression is COURAGE 

(Source: mBraining.)

Who couldn’t do with a little more creativity, compassion and courage in their lives?!

Personally, I have found so much value in very consciously taking my focus away from what’s in my head, and placing it into my heart. Parenting is a GREAT example for me. My head can tell me all kinds of stories about how hard it is (I mean, it IS hard, but it doesn’t mean I need talk to myself about that all day). At the end of the day for me, the way to embrace parenting, is understanding that it’s a heart-led process, guided by love.

If YOU can learn how to acknowledge, connect to and balance out all THREE of your intelligence centres, you can start to solve problems, make decisions and process emotions more EFFICIENTLY, because you have THREE engines available to do the work for you, together, rather than burning out that one engine at the top. Imagine being able to let go of all that thinking, and allow your body to do some of the work for you? If you value efficiency as much as I do, it’s worth some discovery!

In this workshop – Use Your Body To Solve A Problem – you come with a specific life-challenge in mind, and we teach you how to access and align all three intelligent parts of you to get them working together, to process your problem. The aligned yoga postures help the body process this, and tap into your energy centres too. 

You’re allowing your body to DO THE WORK FOR YOU. 

Now, the question is, is your head-brain curious enough to come along and test it out?