In a post-class chat this week with some of the JTP family, we were talking about doing things that serve you well, choosing to do
the things that make you feel good, in order for your life to be better, easier, maybe even simpler.
How often do you find yourself when asked to do something, your immediate reaction is thinking that
you can’t or don’t want to do it, but then you start to think about how you could change things around, fit things in elsewhere, to accommodate what you have been asked? Even if this is going to cause problems, difficulties and challenges for yourself and potentially take more time, more expense, basically take something away from your life in order to fit in with others.
The effect of this can then lead to feelings of regret, resentment, even anger, and physically it might make us feel tired, anxious, drained of energy. Often illness, aches and pains in the body can be brought on by finding ourselves in these situations.
So why do we repeat this behaviour, why do we continue to agree to something, when we know it’s not really going to be helpful to ourselves, and how can we change this behaviour and our feelings?
Well if we think about the brain having 3 parts — The Chimp Brain, The Human Brain and the Computer Brain.
The computer part of the brain is where everything is stored/filed so for example, if someone asks the name of a song, this information is stored in the computer brain.
The Chimp brain is responsible for solutions and lessons, and whilst we need our Chimp brain, sometimes it reacts in an unhelpful way, such as when invited for a coffee on a day which is already full of appointments, and you know that you will have to go out of your way to get there at the time suggested, but also you know that it will put pressure on you to get to your next appointment …
the Chimp brain will start to think about what you can do, cancel, rearrange, and no matter how much work it might take, how much pressure it will place on you, and how you will probably not enjoy the coffee, your Chimp brain will say “YES”.
The Human
Brain will be the part of the brain that then will ask “That’s interesting, what am I not learning that is making me repeat this behaviour?” “How can I change what I feel about this?” “How can I control my feelings about …?”
Firstly we need all three parts of the brain, so we just need to get to know them a little better. The Chimp brain is necessary, it's the part of the brain that jumps up and down shouting ‘get out there’s a fire’, so we need it, but if we can learn to work and play with it, particularly in our day to day life, when we don’t need it to take over our decisions and behaviour it will serve us better.
We then need to allow the Human Brain to be more involved in our life. When we are faced with choices and decisions to make, or when we are placed in situations that we have been in before, we can start to listen to the human brain more and learn from what it is
telling us.
The Human brain will tell us what will serve us better, what will make our life feel more comfortable, give us better balance, make us more conscious about how we can control our feelings
about things.
So when the chimp brain starts to jump around and make a noise... take a beat — pause, get in tune with the human brain and follow what will serve you best.
