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