Understanding Your Emotional Brain

Welcome to my 7-part mini series, Understanding Your Emotional Brain.

Today, I'm going to share with you the importance of using your beautiful brain to understand how your body reacts to events.

Randy Pauch, a 47 year old college professor, dying of pancreatic cancer, said, "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want". You can learn about his amazing experience in his last lecture on YouTube.

What is your experience of events in your life? My perspective is: "Life is a series of events. Every event is an opportunity for change. And it's from the most painful events that we change the most."

Every event in your life that happens is interpreted through your brain. External events are received into our brain through our five senses and we are also constantly busily examining our internal environment - what's going on inside of our brain and body - to assess and to work out what's going on in our life.

If in fact we have a positive feeling about a life event, that's a Non-Problem Status. Because when good things happen to us, it's not a problem to us, we don't care. In fact we feel good about it.

And so we really only need to worry about life dramas when they create a negative emotion and when we have a negative experience. Why?

Because every single negative experience that we have will result in us accumulating stress, because every emotion, every negative emotion that you have, is actually an Adrenalin response.

It's actually our body producing a stress response - producing a chemical because of the fact that our brain has interpreted some form of danger to our well-being. Some form of threat.

Let me explain a little bit more.

If I were to draw for you a cartoon sketch of a cross-section of our brain, the two major parts of the brain that are useful to know about is a section that lies just above the brain stem called the Limbic System and the Cortex.

The Limbic System does all the feeling in the brain. This is a primitive part of the brain - animals have a Limbic system also - and it is responsible for our preservation instinct.

The other part of the brain, which does all the thinking, is called the Cortex. Now human beings have a very developed Cortex, so we have a larger brain than most animals. The Limbic System and the Cortex are constantly inter-playing with one another.

The Limbic System is the part of the brain that assesses first, all the different senses that come into the body, through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell.

So even if you're tasting something, that experience is first assessed by the Limbic System for danger to see whether or not there is anything about what you are sensing that is going to cause a threat to this organism that it's looking after.

That's all for today. In my next article, I'm going to share with you the story of the zebra; how it uses its brain to deal with danger or threat. Are we like the zebra? It's all part of what I call the Science of Emotional Wealth.

Till then!