The limbic system is in control of our emotional and behavioral responses, unfortunately, because it is such a powerful part of our brain – it can make or break us.
Limbic friction results in two types of stress.
- One type of stress is when you’re too activated, alert, and agitated. This is what we usually experience when we’re in physical pain or emotionally bothered.
- Another side of stress, wherein you’re feeling another shutdown or when you’re feeling exhausted and you can’t get mobilized and alert enough. This is the stress that gives us the feeling of fatigue.
When you’re too activated, too alert, and you just find yourself too compulsive, do that double-inhale followed by an exhale. We know that is the fastest, and real-time tool for taking one’s state of alertness down. If you’re experiencing the overwhelmed and fatigued type of stress, there are also two ways to approach it. First is: You can sleep. You can get better at it, but it’s a slow tool. It’s not a real-time tool because you have to get up and deal with children, work, and life. So, a real-time approach to feeling the fatigue stress is to bring more alertness into the system. You can do this by studying the direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. When you inhale more vigorously or longer, you’re speeding up your heart rate. When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, causing the brain to tell the heart it needs to slow down.
Breathwork can teach you how to operate your brain and body. Breathwork is a dedicated practice that helps you do away from stressful events. By breathing, you can learn to control your heart rate, and thereby your mind. This is what the yoga community has done over the years. This is the principle behind the Wim Hof breathing method, or TUMMO breathing, or the super oxygenation breathing method.
I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say, ‘Oh, I understand what’s happening to me. Therefore I should go to this particular tool because this is how it’s done. When in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigued stress, I need to look to the body, because there are mechanisms that have been built into and designed to do this’.
We were all born with these neurons and connections in our body. We’re all born with these organs to be able to do these things. There’s not a lot of learning involved once you know how to do it. It works the first time. It works every time.
Senses take the physical entities in the universe, and they constrain our experience of the world. … When we focus on the sensations from our senses, we gain perception. For me, thinking is a lot like perception, which are sensations I’m focusing on. These sensations can be from the past, the present, or the future we haven’t ever had. … Now thoughts are easier to introduce, and assuming that they are perceptions — then they have the power to shape you and the way you see everything around you. Now, because they are perceptions, they are heavily constraining. If they’re repetitive, they are essentially called beliefs. Here’s the thing though, whatever you believe in, whether it’s positive or negative, your mind rewards you with dopamine.
We need to realize that how we view the world is shaping the release of these chemicals. When we have positive thoughts, we get a lift. If we can get a lift from our positive thoughts and then dopamine itself puts us in relationship with the outside world, there’s more possibility that is going to put us into momentum.
You need to attach the dopamine release to the process of effort or goal-setting itself. And if you can attach dopamine release to the belief that you’re at least heading in the right direction, you’ll have more energy to keep going in the right direction. People make the mistake of thinking that the positive thought process should be attached to the finish line.
The Journey is where the true value is.
