How Understanding Neurology Can Help You Cope With Change
Is it time for a change? Here's how to make it happen.
getty When it comes to changing your habits, did you know that you can directly affect your neurology and make your brain work for or against you?
Your self-judgment — saying things like, "I’m not smart enough, strong-willed enough, capable enough" — brings with it a corresponding chemical cocktail of neurotransmitters that reinforces your negative emotional state.
That’s bad news for the body. As its immune system becomes weakened, the effects of stress begin to add up.
This is a preventable situation if you understand just a bit about strategies at the neurological level and what constitutes the neurology of change.
Understanding the neurology of change.
To understand neurology, it helps to know that any skill you possess — from touching your finger to the tip of your nose, to playing tennis — only becomes a skill after you have strong neurology in place.
Strong neurology happens when a task or skill is repeated often. Children do this all the time. They're not only building the physical coordination to accomplish their goal, they're building neurology, as well.
Neuron highways, or routes that are used often and mostly unconsciously, can be thought of as habits. Any learned skill has a strategy or neuron map that accompanies it. This is the area that causes you so much trouble.
One-tenth of your brain is conscious, the other nine-tenths is unconscious, including your subconscious. The unconscious is the storehouse of your major learnings, emotions, strategies and values.
So with all good intentions, you begin to install a new program or strategy with your conscious minds for a skill you’d like to possess.
This installation works well until you forget to remember your new program and begin acting unconsciously in your old program… Which reinforces the fattest neuron path — your old habit.
The connection between strategies and emotions.
Strategies also have emotions attached to them, which can further complicate things.
Let’s say that consciously you really want a new relationship in your life, but unconsciously relationships equal betrayal and devastation.
No matter how much you say you want a relationship in your life, somehow one never seems to appear. Worse yet, they may appear only to be emotionally unavailable or the “wrong type.”
There’s a pattern in place, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t change what you don’t know. In computer lingo, what needs to happen is like a "defrag," with a download of a “patch.”
There are many techniques to aid you in this, and it should be mentioned that sometimes the process does occur spontaneously.
When you feel differently, you behave differently.
You’ve been in challenging situations where you finally got that “aha” moment; that moment where you say, “I get it!” viscerally, emotionally, as well as intellectually.
You have a different perspective on the situation. You feel differently, and so you behave differently.
There are many professional modalities that focus on integrating the unconscious learnings to become conscious lessons. The sooner you achieve the “aha” moment and its accompanying neurological shift, the sooner you will experience feeling and behaving differently.
Clinical healing modalities for change.
Traditionally, the most effective and fastest of these are clinical hypnotherapy and Time Line Therapy. Many energetic modalities that work with the body-mind response and re-patterning are quite effective, also.
You have the power to change.
The important thing to remember is that you have the power to choose to add to your external resources.
Another way of saying this is to ask yourself, “How badly do I want this?” If the answer is that you want it badly, ask yourself, “Do I want it badly enough to change? How I do what I do?”
If this answer is yes, congratulate yourself! You are more than halfway to your goal.
Simply reach out, grab a resource, and experience yourself the way you always hoped that you would — empowered and thriving.
Dr. Kim is a board designated master trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnosis, and Time Line Therapy. For more information on how she can help you, contact her today.