Continued from Part 2 Living Your Dream Life
How the Brain Works and Why You Need to Know
It’s critical to know a little about how our brain works if we want to control the way we think.
The human brain is incredibly complex and powerful, far more powerful than even today, we can fully understand.
And, we don’t need to be a neuroscientist to appreciate how blessed we are to be equipped with such an amazing, thinking machine, capable of feats far beyond our ability to fully comprehend.
Let’s first begin with a basic explanation of how our brain works, keeping in mind, that it’s far more complex in reality.
We in a sense, have a super computer in our head that controls every little thing we do. Our brain is the box, the equipment, like a computer sitting on our desk top. It is connected throughout the body with all the power connections, circuitry, processing, storage and memory power required to function very much like a computer.
Our brain is the hardware, the computer, and our mind is the software or programming. It’s very much like a computer’s operating system that collects, stores and manages information.
Our brain and our mind are one and can’t function independently, no more than a computer can function without an operating system and software.
Let’s look at how our incredible brain functions.
Our brain is loaded up with approx. 100 billion nerve cells, known as neurons. This is part of our central nervous system. These nerve cells send and receive information via electro-chemical signals, which are our thoughts, ideas, emotions, actions and also the signals for the automated functionality of our body.
Our mind has several layers of what we call consciousness. It is believed that the conscious part of our mind only accounts for 10% of our mind’s operational power.
Our Conscious Mind is responsible for gathering, assessing, and processing input data. It handles decision making, it looks for and evaluates patterns, runs comparisons, it enables thoughtful reactions to certain situations and it is responsible for our “awareness”.
The Subconscious Mind, This is Where it all Happens!
The remaining 90% of our mind (software) is our subconscious mind. It’s not readably accessible by the conscious mind because our conscious doesn’t know how to effectively communicate with the subconscious. The subconscious mind is where all the real power resides, and is far more powerful than anything ever created by man.
It runs most of the functions of your body; our heart beat, breathing, digestive system, sleeping, our body temperature, all on auto-pilot without a single conscious thought.
It is where our “flight” or “fight” processes are originated. It tries to protect and keep us safe. It is where our “comfort zone” is created and acts as a gatekeeper when we try to introduce change. It’s this function that requires some re-programming to affect any positive change we wish to make.
It favors familiarity and tends to guide us back to our “status quo”. All while our conscious is unaware this is happening.
Our subconscious is the place where our imagination, our emotions, our creativity originate from and our habits are created. It is where our memories are formed and stored. This accumulation of memories, habits, emotions, creative thoughts is the very foundation of who we are.
Our subconscious responds to instructions from the conscious, which is where logic and rationality exists. The subconscious does not think in terms of right and wrong, good or bad, it can’t make judgements, or think rationally. It regards everything fed into it as true, regardless of whether or not it’s actually true.
Therefore, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions are a result of the information (right or wrong) automatically fed to us from our subconscious. We unconsciously accept the input from the subconscious as true and act accordingly, much as a servant to a master.
We are oblivious to the fact that the information directing our actions could be, and often is, flawed.
So why is it important to understand how our brain works?
Because, knowing how our brain functions gives us far more control over exactly how to use the collective power of both our subconscious and conscious minds to our advantage.
Knowing how the brain works is the key to living an empowered, dream life.
By knowing how to re-program our subconscious mind, and rewire the connections, we can take full advantage of the power our subconscious is capable of.
Change the input, change the output!
By changing the input we create new behaviors, improve our sense of self worth, control our emotions, make positive decisions, and can accomplish anything we want out of life.
So, we really need to think about what we’re thinking. Negative thinking invariably comes back to haunt us, so, not only do we need to stop it, we need to go back into our subconscious and replace the junk with positive thoughts. We need to take out the trash so to speak, and reprogram our mind so we can be the person we want to be, live up to our full potential, and experience life as we dreamed.
As we continue through the series “How to Live Your Dream Life” we’ll explore just how we go about reprogramming our subconscious.
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