Neuroplasticity and confidence.

Brain

I was reading this morning some research on brain neuroplasticity related to confidence from Mount Sanai Hospital School of Medicine. They call confidence ‘life’s enabler’ or the quality that turns thoughts into action. Taking small steps in daily life adds up, they say in other words. Also, viewing failure as new information to be accepted as part of learning, versus sense of failing.

Good posture, too, plays a part in how confident we feel. This is innately known with practices like Tai Chi or yoga; feeling confident physically imports into feeling confident emotionally and mentally.

And then lastly, monitoring negative, automatic thoughts is important. From the neurofeedback spectrum perspective, this is a bandwidth area known as ruminative catastrophizing; 95% of the negative thoughts we are having we already had yesterday and the day before, and so on and we can see it happening on the monitor in real time, though clients are rarely aware that their brain is generating it. The negative thoughts can cause you to feel defeated but actually, they are happening unconsciously and if we can catch them, we can unhook from them and begin to focus on what we want, not what we don’t want. This comes directly from meditation practice; return to the present moment when we discover we have lost present moment contact.

So these strategies are all important for sure; but my experience tells me that helping the brain at the instinctual level is way more effective and immediate.

NeurOPTIMAL™ neurofeedback bi-passes the defense process and mirrors back to the brain its ineffective energy expenditure in a completely non-invasive way, so there is no need for the brain to protect against this completely non-agressive information. It does it at the level of the hormones and neurotransmitters which is where moods are generated before we even have a thought.

What clients tell me what they begin to notice is that those unconscious and automatic self-defeating patterns begin to drop away because it takes tremendous amounts of energy to sustain negative states, and the brain can learn from its own experience; neuroplasticity. Anxiety, for instance, is something that the brain is generating while we are experiencing it. It takes our reserve energy to keep that anxiety going, or an actively generated stress state. By showing the brain comprehensively what it is doing on a moment-to-moment basis, it is fully capable of learning, thus dropping these self-defeating habits and staying more in the present since there is no past or future other than in our imagination and memory circuits.

Poor energy expenditure is not congruent with an energy conserving system which is the brain’s main task, along with knowing when something in our environment has changed that needs to be solved or challenge met.

See this link to the Independent Survey to see how effective NeurOPTIMAL brain training is based on what clients told us about their experience. And because we use current physics and mathematics, called non-linear, dynamical, we never ever get side effects that the Classical neurofeedback approaches depend on in order to push brain change.

 

Link: http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/you-can-train-your-brain-to-become-more-confident

The Neuroscience of Choking: Thinking too much…

This is an interesting article because it demonstrates what happens when the pressure is on and we enter a fight or flight state and cannot bring ourselves back to a calm, relaxed presence.  In the Oriental Martial Arts, it has been known for a very long time that our worst enemy is ourself and our automatic and mechanical reactions to a current challenge.
Enjoy the article and think about NeurOPTIMAL Brain Training because we can train your brain to recognize that it is producing these negative states that will only work against you since ‘calm’ is our most effective state.  And we can train the brain to not only recognize its spending way too much energy and then DROP the negative reactions and remain present, here, right now.
Enjoy!
June 5, 2012

THE NEW NEUROSCIENCE OF CHOKING

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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/the-new-neuroscience-of-choking.html#ixzz22sPdm1Bz

 

 

Brain-Mind: Society of Neuroscience, Dali Lama’s 2005 attendance…

Learn to function from the ‘inside-out’!

 

 

http://youtu.be/flJnlB4Tgu0

(More Flexible) Brains:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Probing the Partnership Between Buddhism and the Brain Sciences

 

Drop it, and move on? Easier said than done!

 

by David Delaney, MA, CAR, LPC

Johnny’s (not his real name) Mom contacts me to say that he is having anxiety and school is about to begin.Can I help? He is feeling upset in anticipation of the school year and all the stress that that brings with it.He is upset allot and that is affecting the family as a whole.It’s true, if one family member is not doing well, everyone feels it.Whether we are an adult or a child, we all have to deal with the anxiety of anticipating changes that school and life brings, and honestly, some of us cope better than others.

What might cause anxiety?

Anxiety can be caused by major life changes, work, school, social relations, financial problems, being over-scheduled, inability to accept uncertainty, pessimism, negative self-talk, unrealistic expectations are a few of the things that can go with anxiety. And it seems allot to do with our inter-relations with other humans. Our interactions with other humans put pressure on us and some of us aren’t as facile as others in dealing with certain personalities and the social demands that go accompany it.

What is happening inside when we are experiencing anxiety?

When we experience ongoing anxiety (or any negative emotional state), our nervous system is in a fight-or-flight or unresolved stress response mode, or simply said, in ‘arousal’- it is aroused and not calm.We are feeling that we are threatened (even if mild) even though we may not always be able to put our finger on it.In the animal kingdom, when the animal experiences a threat to its survival, it fights, flees, or freezes; thus the term fight-or-flight.When the animal no longer experiences that threat, it ‘shakes’ until the stress leaves it body (called streaming), resolving that fight-or-flight state and triggering the Relaxation Response.The Relaxation Response is the opposite of fight-or-flight, and the way the body brings itself back into a relaxed, secure mode of living in the present moment.

Learning ability inhibited…

But in this fight-or-flight state, learning ability, as well as other mental functions (including problem solving and reasoning ability) are inhibited. Since flight-or-flight is a life saving physiological state for when threatened and need to protect ourselves, it is not meant for more that short periods of time.However, many people experience this response on a regular basis through pressure at work, traffic jams, relationship challenges, social pressures, school and work pressure, and many more situations that are not life-threatening, and thus we are depleted quickly.Again, any state other than clam and relaxed will ask more energy of our body than can be replenished in current time; we use up reserves.

To be in this state (increased blood pressure, shallow breathing, hyper-vigilance, speedy mind, etc.) and not have to fight or run for our life is extremely debilitating and explains why chronic stress is indeed the biggest problem for humans.It appears that our culture is addicted to these arousal states and we are thus unable to bring ourselves out of this protective survival mode into the Relaxation Response where all our body, emotional, and cognitive processes function at a rate conducive to enjoying satisfying work, activities, and relationships; calm, present, productive, alert, and relaxed.

How to orient away from fight-or-flight

Within a few sessions of seeing him, Johnny’s anxiety is gone they tell me.His Mom and Dad seen a big change in his behavior; his brother has noticed it too, and Johnny as well notices a palpable shift in his mood and lack of anxiety in anticipating the start of school.

After seven sessions they decide that he is fine and he no longer comes in for the brain training sessions.They are clearly relieved that another mother who had brought her children to see me, told them about this FDA approved brain training method of providing the brain information about its own behavior and it producing it’s own adjustments.

Natural state of the brain…

Our natural brain state is calm, relaxed, and efficient, able to adapt quickly to the countless adjustments that are demanded of us daily in our technological society.

See the website for other articles as well as comments by clients about the benefits of NeurOPTIMAL™ neurofeedback training.