Mindful Thought: Thoughts pt3

 Today as like a little chunk of scientific information, I want to avoid that as much as possible, on the other hand it is important to know how thoughts arise because once you know those facts it takes away a lot of their power 😀

Imagine this:

You buy a new blouse, walk around feeling all lit and getting many many compliments. Then someone makes a snarky comment and poof all good comments are gone and you no longer feel proud of your blouse... there is a big chance you never wear it again. 

Or 

You need a medical procedure and the doctor tells you 70% success rate, good right?

What if he told you: 30% chance of things going wrong? Try to get that one out of your head ! :P

It is almost impossible to turn your head when you become aware of the negative outcomes.

So why do we have this negativity bias? 

It is wired in our brain for survival! Not so long ago we needed this to stay alive!

Let's take a look where this is coming from:

We have the base of your brain, the cerebellum, Let's refer to it as the "lizard brain." You might be wondering, "What do I have in common with a lizard?" Well, all the basic functions to stay alive: Reflexive behaviors, muscle control, balance, breathing, heartbeat, feeding/digestion, and reproduction.

Our mamalian brain  (the limbic brain: amygdala and hypothalamus ) maps out safety and danger, it stores where and when to activate the lizard brain for fight, flight and freeze response. It has no concept of time or logic. This explains why your dog (a mammal) may greet you as though you've been gone for 30 years, instead of 30 minutes. 

Past, present and future are all one. Here trauma is stored and it explains why traumatized people relive the past as if it happens today.

Next to that we have the newer part of our brain: the frontal cortex 

here more complex functions are implicated: cognitive behavior, personality expression, social behavior, certain aspects of speech and language, internal goals, creativity

and imagination. 

Here the orchestration of thoughts happens!

Now if it would only be influenced by that part of the brain our thoughts would make sense and be logically mostly, sadly in the untrained mind the little maniac in our head 

is mostly driven by the  lizard and mamalian brain.  It uses the tools of fear and anger and then applies to that the wonderful skill of our newest part of the brain: imagination, the possibility to ruminate on the past and worry about the future. Your mind loves to exaggerate, give you many different versions of what could go wrong and prefers to let you imagine the worst case scenario. 

This is why when you are having a bad day or feeling down it is always associated with thoughts.

Remember the exercise we did yesterday?

It shows how easily our mind drags us through all kinds of different emotions and feelings just by thinking. 

Should you stop thinking then? 

How wonderful it would be if we just could do that, be a zebra and graze on the savanna. 

We get from 15000 to 70000 thoughts a day and there is no way to stop this.

But what we can do is not let those thoughts affect us. 

Become aware of your thinking, of your negative thinking. 

Just see them as thoughts, observe them unravel and then being replaced by yet another thought... 

The 'untrained' mind is what the Buddhists call the monkey mind as it jumps from one tree to another. Becoming aware of our thought patterns and

recognizing them is how we 'train' our mind, and we will practice this together! 

Tomorrow more on this ♥