Читать книгу Your Journey to Success: How to Accept the Answers You Discover Along the Way - Kenny Weiss - Страница 16

For our discussion, we will focus on the brain’s role in our emotions. When we experience life, the hypothalamus creates the necessary chemical cocktail that causes us to feel the way we do. For example, when we see our spouse, our hypothalamus secretes a chemical concoction that tells our brain, body, and mind how we feel physically and emotionally. That feeling then generates the thoughts that follow. Simply put, our feelings are just a bunch of chemicals in our brain that get fired repeatedly. We’ll want to keep this concept in mind as we learn about ways to get out of the Worst Day Cycle.

Our midbrain is also home to our amygdala, which plays an essential role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions. The right amygdala evokes negative emotions like fear and sadness while the left induces either pleasant or unpleasant emotions. When our thalamus gathers incoming data, it runs everything by the amygdala first. The amygdala acts as an alarm system, as it reviews all new information and determines whether or not it is a threat. Perceived threats trigger our defensive fear response, which we know as fight, flight, or freeze. In the amygdala’s view, a threat can be anything from someone holding a gun to our head to a memory of something that has frightened us in the past to even learning something new. Further, the amygdala doesn’t differentiate between an immediate threat of danger or perceived danger. Unintentionally, our amygdala can send us a signal that we are experiencing a physical or psychological threat. From there it bounces off of our hippocampus, which is like a secondary smoke alarm to our amygdala. It lets us know what is safe/isn’t safe and what is known/unknown so we can react with a ready-made response. The hippocampus helps us draw on those memories stored physically in the cells of our body as well as in our brain. This can be dangerous, as chronic stress (which is actually fear) or any chronic condition is just the accumulation of these chemicals that are stuck unprocessed in our body’s cells. That is why we will typically have a physical symptom (illness, disease, or even physical injury) in response to an emotional situation. Our body has now found a place to store the chemicals linked to that emotion. The hypothalamus generates the chemicals that trigger the emotion associated with trauma and shuts down the body to enable us to be in the best state to survive impact. That is great if a bear is coming toward you, but not so great if you are entering a business networking meeting and are frozen in fear.