WATCH: Managing your Brain Threat Response
Today, I’d like to talk about ‘Managing your Brain’. And that means, begin to understand how your brain functions. A little bit about how your brain functions. So, you can take care of it more effectively. And the three parts of the brain that I just want to mention today, are the Prefrontal Cortex, which is this very thin sheet over the front of your brain. Where you do all your ‘Understanding’, ‘Deciding – Making Decisions’, ‘Memorizing’, where to put memories it may be able to then recall them and ‘Inhibiting’.
“Amygdala”
A lot of people underestimate how important it is, to be able to inhibit effectively any urges that you have or any desire to say something, which may be inappropriate. And that you need to be able to balance what you’re doing in order to be highly effective at work. Rather than just reacting to everything. So, it’s a lot to do with inhibiting feelings, emotions and reactions. Now, there’s one thing another part I want to mention which is the ‘Amygdala’. And the ‘Ventral Striatum’. The Ventral Striatum is about ‘Reward Response’. We’ll talk about that in another video.
“Threat Response”
Because the Amygdala is your ‘Threat Response’ and that means that it’s a centre of memory for all of your emotions that have had to do with any threats in the past. And that means going all the way back to your childhood. When sometimes you didn’t have the resources required to deal with a situation effectively. So, when something happens and you get stressed. That actually kicks this in and then you begin to search for all the other times in your life when you’ve had that feeling. Which may actually go all the way back to a time when you didn’t necessarily feel resourceful. That can spiral a bit out of control. So, this gets exacerbated and then this begins to shut down. This means that when you get stressed and you really need to become very alert to when you’re beginning to feel any sensation of stress, because you know then that it’s inhibiting your ability to do effective understanding, deciding, memorizing, recalling and inhibiting.
So, you need to calm down a little. And go okay, “What’s going on here?”. “What’s the truth here?”. Rather than what’s this Amygdala trigger. This Amygdala hijack, as it’s sometimes called. It hijacks your thinking and shuts all this down. So, I’d like you to think very carefully about when you notice any sensation of becoming a little bit tense or a little bit stressed. You need to take a breath and calm down enough to regain control of your ability to understand.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts and opinions about any of the above so drop me a line at david@Talent4Performance.co.uk.
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With best regards,
David Klaasen
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