Things I Wish I Learned Sooner: Incredible & Scary Ways Our Thoughts Control Our Actions
Our nervous system is set on comfort, our “soul” aims at growth. That’s why we’re so often in conflict between, what we are feeling and what we are knowing.
Why The Brain Is Important
The Neocortex (front side of the brain) is fully developed within 7 years, before that critical thinking and decision-making are difficult.
If this part is damaged by childhood trauma or some accident, one has the biggest restrictions, especially in the social area.
The brain is incredibly complex and often tries to deceive us with hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline, and endorphins.
It sends trillions of signals per second and millions of kilometers of neural pathways.
Emotions are mainly present in the limbic system to help us survive.
They basically want to communicate two things: attraction and repulsion in all kinds of ways.
We want joy, contact, knowledge and hate fear, complexity, and unkindness.
Nevertheless, most dopamine is released in mild frustration which the news use as their advantage.
Their only purpose is to make you watch longer with bad news. This targets the Amygdala, a part of brain that processes fear and aggression.
How The Environment Influences Us
People are “programmable”, the environment makes a lot of difference in life, and so does mainstream media.
If you hang out with successful people, you will probably end up the same way or you will break out. You must not let it define you, but see it as an opportunity to find yourself.
If you do something often, a subconscious habit forms and decision-making slips into the background.
There’s a study in which pianists play their favorite piece and imagine they are playing it. The brain scans show no differences.
People often have to change their thoughts and attitudes themselves, it rarely helps to push someone to do so.
Everybody has ideals he/she is convinced of. People automatically try everything to support these opinions instead of putting them in perspective, called confirmation bias.
Everything we do, we do to reduce uncertainty. We do it to increase certainty.
So your brain has evolved to make sense of meaningless data, and that’s the process of forming perceptions.
Then we hold on to those assumptions, everything we are doing right now is based on our assumptions.
Questioning assumptions is incredibly difficult though, because questioning assumptions, doubting what you already believed to be true, especially when that assumption determines who you are, is doing what our brain has evolved to avoid, uncertainty.
Here one must also take into account emotions that work against rational thinking and thus make it even more difficult.
The brain always makes small steps.
So when you are in a moment, it can actually only move to the next possible moment.
And the next most probable possible is determined by its assumptions.
We call this the space of possibilities.
What Is The Space Of Possibilities?
You can’t just do everything, Some things are just impossible for you because of your perception or your idea of the world.
Creativity in this sense is therefore only creative from the outside, not from the inside.
For the person who is creative, it makes a logical next step.
The difference is that their possibility space is different.
They have different assumptions, and different preconceptions.
Maybe they even have a more complex possibility space because they have more complex biases and assumptions.
Maybe they had a more open mind when they learned about other cultures, etc., and they assimilated more complex assumptions.
So they have more possibilities to move in their space of possibilities.
The law of attraction states that what you manifest is difficult to shake — therefore manifest the right and important things.
If you want to achieve something, you have to confront:
- thoughts
- people
- fears
- probabilities
- norms
Furthermore, one should think long-term. People are bad decision-makers because of their emotions. It’s completely normal to feel a wide spectrum of emotions at any given instance, the key is to accept these and simultaneously use them as a compass to guide the way.
Always bear in mind: You never exceed your opinion about yourself.
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