Have a Way Fun 2016
Give Yourself a Break This Year...Have a "Way Fun" Year!
Claim the Gain...Break the Chain of Pain...
Sing it, Rock out: Gain, Gain, Gain....Chain of Gain.
Repeat: Gain, Gain, Gain, Break the Pain Chain.
Give me the Gain, Gain Gain, Gain of Good.
Like I knew I could ...
Gain the Good, Good Good....Yes I knew I would!
Let your creative inflow take you away.
Sing it, Dance it, Rock it, Walk it (daily walk),
Change it up to suit you!
Add "I am" to the song at some point to increase the effect as in I am Gain, Gain, Gain...I am Gaining...., I am Good. Singing and dancing this and other positive affirmations bursts thru the barriers in the cerebellum portion of the brain that houses our subconscious. The cerebellum contains much irrelevant conditioning and information from our culture and families that no longer serve us.
Claim dominion over your Brain's outdated programming for a rewarding change, using your brains own creative frequency.
Create new networks and pathways in the brain using fun techniques:-) They are so much more effective and support immune system health. Having holistic fun triggers the emotional responses we need to get the limbic brain's influence involved. Joy and positive expectancy are high octane power for any life affirming statements we make.
Based upon Dr. Bruce McEwen’s Herzberg Lecture “The Brain on Stress: Novel Epigenetic Mechanisms of Brain Plasticity”, delivered at Carleton University 19 November 2015
Your body is an adaptive organism. It adjusts to the environment it finds itself in. When that environment includes significant amounts of stress, dozens of important biological changes take place, changes that impact your ability to live your life.
The first, most important thing to understand is that scientists at the cutting edge of this research are nowhere close to having all of the body’s responses to stress mapped out. But many of the most interesting responses have to do with the brain.
The Brain Changes
In people experiencing prolonged stress, the hippocampus, the region of your brain most directly responsible for processing stress, shrinks dramatically. You’d almost think that was good news. The problem is, the same mechanism that gets you worked up about stressful situations is the mechanism that helps stimulate you in general. The more stress, the less you can actually motivate yourself.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the same neurotransmitter chemicals that are released in response to stress are very important in terms of epigenetics- they help to determine which of your genes get expressed in any given cell at any given time. For the brain, this means that cells begin to produce excess free radicals- molecules that are normally part of your body’s immune system but which lead to cell death if they build up.
With prolonged stress, the dendritic connections in that part of your brain, the neural pathways that you depend on to function properly, recede and begin to break down. The only new pathways being formed under chronic stress are ones that are impacted by the imbalanced neurochemical environment created by that stress- in other words, you’re learning how to be stressed.
These reactions are the sort of thing designed to help us survive periods of scarcity- in fact, in some ways they look a lot like the reaction of a hibernating brain. Unfortunately, since most of our stress is human-created rather than anything to do with danger or absolute scarcity, these responses don’t help us much.
Another side-effect of chronic stress is that your circadian rhythm becomes disrupted, usually resulting in insomnia. This in turn reduces your ability to process stress.
The Brain Grows Back
Two definite factors that quickly and reliably reverse the epigenetic process, change the neurochemical balance and help your brain regenerate to a normal state are regular exercise- even studies which involved senior citizens in low-impact exercise for an hour a day over a period of time found vast improvement- and intense learning. Mindfulness meditation has also shown promise, as has a reduced diet. But by far the most powerful positive impact comes from a sense of meaning and purpose in life, combined with social integration.
On the other hand, there are a number of factors known to increase neural impairment over the course of a lifetime. These include a lack of intellectual stimulation, a chaotic or unsupportive/distant home life and lack of exercise in childhood.
For more on the benefits of meditation for stress, check out the TEDx talk below:
Trauma
Sudden traumatic events produce a different impact than chronic stress. In this case, the problem, especially the first time around, is that you may not have the capacity to produce enough of the right neurotransmitter to fully process the stress. When this happens, your body will tend to overcorrect, and after about ten days your brain will be fully keyed in to respond to that kind of stress. That’s why one experimental intervention for post-traumatic stress involves injecting glucocorticoids, the neurotransmitter in question, within a short time after a major trauma, to let the victims physiologically process what happened to them.
PTS, Post Traumatic Stress after a single major incident, therefore, may have a lot to do with not being able to respond to it at the time. Repeated traumas act differently, acting on the amygdala, the part of your brain that helps you control stress. As a result, you begin to respond to different levels of stressor with the same intensity your body has learned to bring to life-or-death situations.
Finding a Way Forward
When we look at the many responses of the brain to its environment, and add to that the wider context of epigenetic change and the sophisticated system of brain-body interaction that leads to the emotional and biochemical state called Survival Mode, we risk getting lost in a system of baffling complexity. At the same time, the options we have for usefully addressing chronic stress may seem both too many and insufficient to the task.
And that is so. If you’ve lived years with chronic stress or anxiety, you will not conquer it by making minor adjustments to your lifestyle. An active mind, exercise, meditation, these are all useful tools, but none of them can replace having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life.
~ Dr. Symeon Rodger
The above article on stress and the brain is taken from The Resilience Blog
Signing off for today with a Big Hug,
Trisha
A good article. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete