‘Science is boring’, or for ‘geeks’ or ‘I could never understand all those words’, I hear you say. But what I am discovering is, that if I take a little time and I find someone who speaks or writes in a way I CAN understand, then Science can be liberating.
Take today’s topic ‘Choices are Real’. Did you know that you are free to make choices and these effect the way your brain wires. What you think and how you understand yourself has a huge impact on how your brain works.
‘Why should I care?’ – Well, there are two ways you can look at the relationship between your mind (the way and what you think) and your brain (the physical grey stuff in your skull).
Some believe that the mind is the product of how the brain is wired. Essentially they believe that the chemicals and neurons within your brain create the mind. For example, someone with depression has a chemical imbalance therefore the treatment is to add the missing chemicals, and presto depression gone.
Others believe that you are a thinking being. As you think, you choose, as you choose you cause genetic expression to happen in your brain. Meaning you make proteins and these proteins form your thoughts.
Thoughts are real, physical things that occupy mental real estate.
Our brain is changing moment by moment as we are thinking. And by our thinking and choosing we are redesigning the landscape of our brain.
Research shows that 75 to 98 percent of mental, physical, and behavioural illness comes from one’s thought life. WOW – hold on a minute – did you want to re- read that. (I’ve underlined it so it stands out – notice). What that means is that ONLY 2 to 25 percent of mental and physical illnesses come from the environment and genes.
We do have a fixed set of genes in our chromosomes, however, which are switched ‘on’ and how they are active relies a great deal on how we think and process our experiences.
We are constantly reacting to circumstances and events, our brains become shaped by the process in either a positive, good-quality-of-life direction or a negative, toxic, poor-quality-of-life direction. It is the quality of our thinking and choices (consciousness) and our reactions that determine our brain architecture and the resultant quality of the health of our minds and bodies.
Now I could get a bit technical here, but I want to just share with you the results of one study by the Institute of HearthMath. It showed that thinking and feeling anger, fear and frustration caused DNA to change shape, by tightening up and becoming shorter, switching off many DNA codes, which reduced quality expression. So we are literally shut down by negative emotions, and our body’s feel this. The same study shows that this effect is reversed by feelings of love, joy, appreciation and gratitude. The researchers found that HIV positive patients with positive thoughts and feelings had 300,000 times more resistance to the disease than those without positive feelings.
That’s nearly unbelievable.
When normal stress goes wrong it produces toxic thinking. Stress (anxiety, nervousness, fearfulness, apprehensiveness, impatience, fear, tenseness and restlessness) is a condition that is the result from a reaction to a situation.
You cannot control the events or circumstances of your life, but you can control your reactions. And controlling those reactions is the difference between healthy minds and bodies and sick minds and bodies.
Choices are Real – they are represented by neurons formed in our brains. The way we choose to react directly results in our quality of life.
Food For Thought.!!!!!
