“Your brain - every brain - is a work in progress. It is 'plastic.' From the day we're born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it." ”
-~ Michael Merzenich, Soft-Wired
As we enter a new season… one that is filled with new beginnings and new energy, many of us are re-immersing ourselves in social dynamics that can trigger old, familiar feelings.
To give ourselves the best chance of navigating the rest of 2024 in ways that align with our highest expectations, it can be helpful to reflect on our own signals and patterns, and tune into our deepest, internal wisdom…
NEW! I'll be releasing weekly Audio Articles through the Mindset Neuroscience Podcast! (these will be on the weeks in between the monthly full-length podcast episodes).
If you'd like to listen to an extended version of this article (which includes much more concrete detail and ideas about how to tune in to our Inner Intelligence), you can listen on the Blubrry media player on this page:
or check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
We can’t help that our brains get built through our experiences and relationships.
We can’t help that others’ reactions and signals will play a major part in the formation of our beliefs and behaviors as we grow up. We are a socially-dependent species. We will always need relationships with others for our own physical and neurological health. We are co-regulating creatures.
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However... as our brains mature, so does our ability to SELF-direct and SELF-regulate.
Self-directed neuroplasticity is one of the first topics that drew me in to study neuroscience. One of the most important aspects of it is that our own neuroplasticity can be ‘self-directed’.
Our individual mind-brain-body system has an intelligence to it that is reserved only for us.
Only our mind-brain-body has experienced what it has experienced and built up the neural and behavioral architecture to integrate our past with what’s happening now. No single other person will have ever had the exact, precise same data to inform our most accurate decisions that align with precisely what we as an individual need in each moment.
What I see happen with a lot of the clients I work with is they have lost touch with that self-directed knowing.
They've stopped listening to their inner guidance. They have been so in search of others' approval, that they no longer even know how to trust the signals their body is sending them.
What I also hear from clients is that the idea of turning inward and ‘listening’ to their body’s messages is that it makes them feel even more confused or distressed. They can’t tell if which internal signals are intuition that will help them, or which ones might not serve them.
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Much of what we think, believe and feel is influenced by others from our past and who we are surrounded by (including online)..
And this makes it hard to know what our actual thoughts are about something versus what is part of just trying to be accepted by a group and the ‘masses’, or what we're doing to avoid certain reactions and try to gain other ones.
This gives us a heightened ability to tune in to our own, very personal patterns. A tone of voice or situation that might trigger a sense of anxiety or defensiveness in one person might not in another.
As you get better at noticing what types of situations and stimuli trigger different sensations, you get better at recognizing patterns. This helps you get better at disrupting ones that don't serve you and enhancing ones that do.
The challenge is that the world is filled with attention-grabbing stimulus.
Many of us, therefore, have a lot of our attention focused on external things.
While that's an inevitable part of living in this world, we can become more masterful of our own thoughts and desired states by turning inward, to our inner guidance - to those very individual-based signals that come from the highest-level intelligence of our mind-brain-body.
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By getting clearer about what our desired state is, we can start to recognize patterns of these internal, physiological sensations that give us clues.
They tell us when we feel aligned and on track, or when something is ‘off’. By gathering more data about these internal sensations, we can get better at noticing what thoughts and actions trigger which sensations.
By doing this, we can incrementally increase our understanding and recognition of our own patterns, and what seems to create our best outcomes and internal states. This builds an internal working model of trusting our own bodies and sensations and the meaning we make from them.
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Reflection
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