Читать книгу Emotional Confidence: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 20

Recent research into the workings of our brains has been very revealing. It is now known that if one of our senses ‘thinks’ that it has spotted a serious threat to our survival, our signal for action is sent directly to our primitive fight/flight/freeze centre. Here, we each have a store of:

i) past memories of emotional experiences

ii) pre-programmed blueprints of emotional responses which have previously been used with some success

Once an ‘emotional emergency’ signal has been received, our brain scans this store to match the key elements of this new experience with ones that have occurred in the past. Once it has found a ‘good-enough’ match it sets off the pattern of action responses.

It is particularly relevant for our purposes of building emotional confidence to realize that this store includes:

• a wide range of very primitive ancient memories and responses which have been imprinted on our genes over many centuries

– we may have our cavemen forebears’ favourite flight response for approaching spiders stored alongside our Victorian grandparents’ choice freeze response for sexual innuendo!

• memories of our own most powerful and most frequently repeated past emotional experiences, plus the pattern of action which we previously used to respond to these

– if we had repeated unhappy experiences as a result of change in our childhood we may have a blueprint of a ‘childish’ fear response to any new experience programmed into our brain