This is the first in a series of articles that is exploring the latest heart research particularly in the fields of neurology, psychoneuroimmunology and bodymind healthcare.
Self-Regulation: What’s it all about?
“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
There is an age-old struggle between the intellect and emotion, between thoughts and feelings. No matter how hard we try, this struggle can not be resolved by the mind having dominance over our emotions. After all, this is how we create more tension in our bodies, making ourselves sick.
What if there was a way to achieve a harmonious balance between thoughts and emotions, and create greater access to our full range of intelligence, both our intellect and our emotions/feelings?
When we want to keep feeling safe and comfortable, we must maintain a “match” between our current ‘reality’ and what we have learned to be normal.
When we encounter a new experience or challenge, this can create a mismatch between the new experience and what we consider to be ‘normal’. In this case, we either will adjust internally to the new experience (self-regulation) or we will try to change (control) our outer experience of reality.
If the new experience happens once or is not that disturbing to us, we may be able to find our internal balance and return to a feeling of safety and comfort. If the brain is successful, it includes the new experience into what we consider ‘normal’ to be.
But if the new experience is too unsettling for us to adapt to it, or if it occurs repeatedly, the brain continues to experience this mismatch and creates emotions to signal that there is a mismatch.
When I was a teenager, I worked on a dairy farm for a few years during the summers and I would stay out on the farm for several weeks at a time. I remember going to sleep the first night and being abruptly woken up by a train that was passing through at the back of the farm at 3 a.m., blowing its horn. It was soooo loud! But after a couple of weeks, I started to sleep right through the night even if the train was blowing its horn.
My nervous system adapted to the new experience and my sense of normal was updated. After the summer, I had a new internal reference for sounds during sleep.
When we experience a mismatch like the train horn, something that we’re not used to, an emotion is aroused within us to get our attention.
This means that we can easily get “stuck” in unhealthy emotional and behavioral patterns. And no matter how hard we try, we seem to not be able to sustain positive changes in our emotions or behaviours from our efforts.
What we need to focus on is creating a new baseline or internal reference that can accommodate that new experience. If we don’t update our internal reference for what we consider to be a ‘normal’ experience, we are destined to live our lives with the filters of the past controlling our reactions.
NeuroSpinal Optimization works to adjust our internal reference baseline, similar to tuning a guitar, so that your baseline is more flexible, changeable and adaptable. We also teach Coherence exercises during our complimentary coherence workshop, so that you can have agency over your past programmed filters, changing them so you can have greater access to your full intelligence (intellect, emotions and feelings).
I hope you can join me at our next Coherence workshop on Thursday, February 27th at 6 p.m.! You can register with Ceci (frontdesk@thehappyspine.ca).