How to partner with our brain against stress, anxiety, depression and more: 3 perspectives
Did you know that the main function of your brain is not to think?
In fact, it is controlling all the systems of the body to keep you well and alive. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain produces conscious thoughts and feelings, they are primarily focused on the needs of your body. More than you think.
This could explain why many marriages are made by physical attraction (the brain may be trying to balance all those hormones that are secreted when the body detects a potential partner with the profile of what its “organism urges”).
Many of your brain's activities may go unnoticed. At every moment the brain is imagining the body's upcoming needs and making a plan to meet those needs in advance. For example, every morning when you wake up, your brain anticipates the energy you will need to “get” your body out of bed and start the day. It proactively injects your bloodstream with the hormone cortisol, which will help you have glucose available for immediate energy and getting up.
The example is provided by the professor of psychology at Northeastern University and author of the book “ Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain ,” by Lisa Feldman Barrett, who presented the first perspective on allying yourself with your brain.
According to Professor Feldman Barrett, “Your brain works using something like a budget. A financial budget tracks the money you earn and spend. The body budget tracks sources such as water, salt, glucose as you get them or loses them. Every action that uses these sources, such as standing, running, and learning, would be like taking money out of the ATM. Actions that replenish your sources, such as eating and sleeping, would be like bank deposits.
The scientific name for body budget is “allostasis” which means automatically predicting, preparing for and facilitating changes in order to meet needs before they arise!
Feldman says that, for example, when you feel thirsty and drink a glass of water, even though the water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, you feel thirst relief within seconds. What makes you feel satiated? Your brain. He has learned from past experience that water is a deposit you make into your body budget that keeps you hydrated, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has a direct effect on your blood.
As for our mental life, the brain's input and output function is not so obvious, and prior experience is not really a guide to the brain's inner workings. According to Feldman,
“Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or wonder you experience, every kind action you perform and every insult you endure or hurl is part of your brain's calculations as it anticipates and budgets for your metabolic needs.”
In the book on psychosomatism “Illness as a Path”, a text written by Thorwald Dethlefsen and Rudiger Dahlke in 1962 points out that the brain orders the part of the body involved with the situation we are facing to take over that process. For example: A bad cold caught after a sudden downpour and leaving us feeling unwell all over the body will lead us to the pharmacy or even the general practitioner. But if we feel the same symptoms when we are experiencing problems at work, we would rather go to the Human Resources psychologist. In the general practitioner's office we experience this discomfort due to a physical problem, while in the psychological consultation the same discomfort is called anxiety, a psychological alteration manifested physically.
At the body budget level, anxiety does not cause a cold. Both anxiety and illness symptoms are ways the human brain expresses physical discomfort.
There is no purely mental cause as humans are not just mind and when something overwhelms our poor overwhelmed mind, there must therefore be a physical experience and response. This is why Professor Feldman advises that actions such as deep breathing or getting enough sleep can be surprisingly useful in treating problems that are conventionally considered psychological.
This perspective is useful today because if you feel a lack of motivation, uncertainty, insecurity, this anxiety will be alleviated if you understand this feeling of discomfort as something physical.
Ms. Feldman recommends that when a negative thought like “I can’t stand this anymore” pops into your mind, ask your body some budgeting questions: “Did I sleep well last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I go for a walk and get some fresh air? Call a friend? This could benefit you from a budget allowance or two.”
It's not a semantic game but rather about allowing your physical reactions and what your body is feeling to guide your actions. It also doesn't mean that you will solve your misfortune or instantly eliminate depression. The idea behind this perspective is to better understand what your brain does and that everything it conjures up , from the smallest thought, emotion, and even your dreams, is done in the service of the body's budget. If you understand it well and do it consciously, it can be an excellent source of resilience in these and any other difficult times.
We have distanced ourselves from nature, but the cold is able to bring us back to what we once lost.
#WimHofMethod
We are always wearing clothes, covered and protected without allowing the vascular system to be activated. The lifestyle of Western society has reduced us to shallow breathing. Obviously, to sit down to work or study in front of a computer, it is not necessary to breathe deeply, much less to carry that vital force to the rest of the body.
Wim Hof or “Iceman” has developed a method called “Cold hard nature” that has allowed this man to climb Mount Everest in shorts and submerge himself in ice water for more than an hour, in addition to 20 other Guinness records.
Science has found evidence that this method, which requires breathing deeply and rhythmically and then entering either in apnea or in a bathtub of ice water, has powerful effects on the human body and that you can review in more detail in my article on CRYOTHERAPY here along with the Wim Hof method explained.
On a mental level, exposing your body to cold increases the production of Norepinephrine (NE) in the brain, a hormone and neurotransmitter related to attention and concentration. It also causes an improvement in mood and relieves pain, in part because it reduces inflammation. In addition, NE acts as a signaling molecule to produce more mitochondria in fatty tissue (your main energy reserves); and a byproduct of energy production is heat. That is why when you get out of a cold shower, you actually feel warm.
Wim Hof himself explains this during an interview for Scandinavian television: during the strong inhalations and exhalations he may experience strange sensations such as nausea, dizziness and altered emotions. It is precisely that, confronting those emotions that arise.
His passionate testimony during the same interview expresses how he conquered the fear of death and pain:
“I lost my wife in 1995, the mother of my 4 children when she jumped from an eighth floor building. She was the love of my life. No psychiatric treatment had worked for her.
I was depressed with my 4 children, very little money and… my children made me survive and cold water healed me . Because when you enter the ice water your mind stays still (it doesn't wander anymore), you are simply surviving; you are there (present), you are not thinking about anything else and not even about your pain... for a moment it goes away and that brought me relief. From then on, little by little, entering the ice-cold water every day, it healed me emotionally .
I now work with my 4 children and we have a thriving business around the world spreading this message of happiness, strength and health. TO EVERYONE, yes.” (The interview is in English and if you are interested you can watch it at this link ).
The Wim Hof method involves brief moments of stress, such as entering a cold shower, which are applied to the body so that it stimulates certain organs and systems necessary for the structure and maintain a good quality of life. These are cycles that must be complemented with the corresponding rest or recovery times so that the body experiences adaptation and efficiency when performing any activity it must undertake.
How do I eliminate the hammering in my mind?
There are many trends regarding the absence of thought.
Jaggi Vasudev, known as Sadhguru, says that in many meditation teachings the idea has been propagated that one must stop the mind in order to meditate. But, in reality, if your mind was constantly producing absolute placidity, would you want to stop it? Certainly not.
This means then that, if this is your case, possibly the thoughts you are feeding your mind are causing you a lot of displeasure. That's why you're thinking about how to stop the mind.
When someone is advised to meditate, the person thinks that he should stop the mind. In reality, to meditate, one does not need to be aware of whether the heart is beating, or whether the liver is working, or whether the kidneys are functioning. So, if the mind doesn't work, then we can meditate?
Sadhguru calls it the stupid conspiracy that the brain is frozen so that meditation can take place.
Shambhavi is a process where your body is here and your mind, your essence is somewhere else. Once there is a space between you and your mind, then what the mind is doing is not even an issue.
It's like being stuck in traffic, it's stressful. Suppose you're now floating in a hot air balloon and looking down on the traffic, in the distance, in peace, you still see the traffic, but not the noise and stress. You can even see it pretty.
Sadghuru explains that once there is a distance between your body and the activity of your mind, the mind is not a problem.
“The mind is a miracle, not a problem.”
If thoughts run out of control, it's like having “mental diarrhea.” If you have eaten something that makes you feel bad, you will get physical diarrhea. What this means is that the moment you identify with something that IS NOT , your mind suffers from a continuous diarrhea of thoughts because they disperse in all directions.
We can make every effort, but as long as we do something we do not identify with, we disperse . That is why there are so many people who live miserably: they look for a job for money, out of necessity, but not because they feel identified with it, it is far from their essence and in those conditions, the mind wanders and will not stop.
If you don't identify yourself with anything that you are, you will know how to be with everything, how to use everything, but you will not be connected with it. So, as you sit here, if you want, you can use the mind as a useful instrument, otherwise you will be scattered. The most important faculty in your life is out of control, doing stupid things all the time and not doing what YOU want it to do.
According to Sadhguru, if you don't want this, you must stop feeding your mind with bad food. Wrong food for the mind means you are identifying with what you are not.
If you identify with what you feel and do, you will see that everything is fine.
So your mind will do what YOU want it to do. The mind should not tell its own stories all the time; it should tell the stories YOU want it to tell, otherwise the mind becomes a burden.
(From the talk How do you stop the mind from chattering? If you are interested, you can find it at this link )
Five tips to improve your mental health
The word health comes from the Latin salus, giving it the quality of goddess of Health (Salus) with its corresponding temple. The root is the adjective Salvus “intact, safe”, sometimes used in the expression sanus salvus “safe and sound”. Salvus has an Indo-European etymology present in Sanskrit “whole” and in Greek (Hólos) whole, complete, total.
According to Jaggi Vasudev, Sadhguru, funds (energy) must be allocated within the human being for action. Funds are needed for intellect, a little more for emotions, and more.
This differs from person to person, but in general, energy is needed for both physical action and the emotional dimension, which in today's world are underutilized, this being the main reason for mental illnesses such as stress, depression and anxiety. Here are some tips to find balance,
- If the emotional dimension is not expressed and the physical body is not given sufficient effort , there is a tendency towards depression. The expression of the emotional dimension can be through music and other arts, while physical effort is achieved by doing physical activities outdoors.
- Connect with nature . Losing connection with everything that supports and enables us to manage our lives is becoming the challenge of the present and the future. Both physical and mental health can be easily managed if we are in contact with the elements of nature like water, earth, light and air. The more you expose yourself, the more balance you will find, and this is for all human beings.
- Eat foods that enhance your mental capacity and stability. Previously, people who were physically active ate differently than those who were intellectually active. According to Sadhguru none of us are in that condition at present, in fact, we have to be both physically and intellectually active. So eating the right, natural AMOUNT is of great importance.
- Keep your colon clean . Any detoxification process that occurs in the body, whether it is emptying your bowels, or emptying your bladder, or exhaling or sweating, has different levels of effectiveness. If you are in good health and eat properly, when you go to the bathroom, nothing should be left in your colon.
For Yoga, a clean colon is of great importance and if it is not, it causes disturbances. psychological. You've probably heard that we have two brains.
In the yogic understanding of life, after getting up, within the next 20 minutes, the colon must be completely emptied. If this does not happen, it means that there is a health problem or that things are moving in that direction, both physically and psychologically. It can be either aspect, depending on which one you are more vulnerable to.
The first thing that happens when you go to an Ayurveda doctor, is to prescribe a purgative because a clean colon is very important for all of its organic functions.
5. Design yourself for wellness . At this moment there are only 4 things you can use: your body, your mind, your emotions and your energy. If you manage these 4 things well, a specific kind of life is drawn for you.
If you have a healthy body, you will live a certain way.
If you have a stable and sharp mind, you will live in a certain way.
If you have stable and exuberant emotions, you will live a certain way.
If you have a sense of effervescent energy that is at the same time balanced, you will live a certain way.
If you can take these aspects into account and see that they function well, you can be a reasonably complete human being who can live a full life.