What you put your focus on, grows!
Elle X
The brain responds to the pictures and words you create in your head. The meaning you give to these pictures and words is how you will react to a situation.
For instance, have you ever woken up just knowing its going to be one of those days? You’ve stubbed your toe on the way to the bathroom, dropped your toast and got stuck in traffic all before you have even got to work. The day then continues to go from bad to worse, all you want to do is go home, go to bed and get the day over and done with.
This all started from a feeling and a picture you had in your head when you first woke up on how your day was going to go.
In that split moment when you woke up and had that picture and feeling in your head, your brain created a map for the day. From that map you gave the brain the information it needed to go out and achieve the goals of your map. The brain did what it was told to do.
The brain filters, deletes, distorts and generalises the millions of bits of information that bombard the body every single minute of the day to follow the picture of the map you set it when you first woke up.
Are you starting to see how important it is to watch what you say to yourself?! If you tell yourself you are stupid you instantly create a picture in your head of a stupid person, you’ve guessed it, your brain then goes to work trying to find all the bits of information to back that statement up. Why?
Because your brain does what it is told to do.
Exercise 1:
Watch what you are saying to yourself. An interesting little exercise to do is jot down all the things you say to yourself over the course of a day or week. Then look back and ask, are you your own best friend or worst enemy? If it was a real person saying these things would they be your friend for long?
Exercise 2:
Let’s have a play with this. If you say to yourself ‘I am happy’ 10 times what do you notice happening? Do you smile? Do the sides of your eyes begin to wrinkle? Do you feel lighter inside? What do you notice and feel in you? Now how about if you do the opposite and say ‘I am sad’ 10 times What do you notice happening? What does your mouth do? What do your cheeks do? Do you feel heavier inside? What do you notice and feel in you?
Two opposite emotions that you created physical responses inside of you through the words and pictures in your brain. Fascinating, hey!
What you put your focus on grows!
The same can happen with pain. Have you ever seen when a young child falls over it often looks to see the parent’s response before it cries or gets back up and carries on? It’s the picture in the parent’s head which creates the adult’s response, which then the child reacts to.
I’ve experimented with this before on myself. I used to suffer with R sided lower back pain. I wanted to know if I could bring on that same old back pain just by thinking and creating pictures in my head of what it used to feel like.
Hey presto, mission accomplished.
I’d focused on the old pain and it grew. Well I sure as heck did not want to live with the back pain again so I did the opposite I focused on what my life is like without the pain, the things I do adventures I have.
I have to say it took longer to get rid of it than it did to bring it on, about 20 minutes, but I changed my focus and let the new vision grow. It worked, pain all gone, all down to the words and pictures I created in my head. This just goes to show that when you looking at pain you have to take a multidimensional approach.
If you would like to read more on this, check out the works of David Butler and Lorimer Moseley and their ‘Explain Pain’ range of books.
Until next time …
Knowledge is absolutely power but only when ACTION is taken
Ellie x