[Neurons] 2019 Neurons #45 CALM AND COOL THINKING

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2019 Neurons #45

October 7, 2019

 

CALM AND COOL THINKING

 

Of all the things that can stop thinking, hardly anything is as effective as
stress.  As a psychological experience, stress has a disorganizing effect on
thought.  It effects our brain to almost exclusively focus on whatever is
the object of the sense of threat, danger, or fear.  How well do you think
when you're stressed or under pressure?

 

Regarding stress, there are two major kinds-acute and chronic stress.  Acute
stress is the obvious one.  It occurs whenever there is something that you
define as dangerous or threatening.  The "danger!" message is what then
activates "the general arousal syndrome."  Most people know this as the
"Fight/ Flight, Freeze" of the nervous system.  And when that occurs, blood
is literally withdrawn from the brain (no wonder we can't think as well!)
and stomach (and feel queasy) and sent to the larger muscle groups to
prepare for fighting or fleeing.

 

Yet while these facets of acute stress are obviously physical and dependent
on the anatomy of the  brain (and body), they are completely relative to
your definition of what's dangerous.  This explains why what is stressful to
one person is not stressful to another.  It also explains why there's
differences in the stress intensity of an experience.  The more a person
knows how to think about the experience and has resourceful skills for
dealing with it, the less she will find it stressful.  For the person who
doesn't know how to think about it or what to do, the same experience can be
extremely stressful.  Like beauty, stress is in the eye (and mind) of the
beholder.

 

With this understanding, we can now recognize how it is that stress is
psychological.  A memory of a traumatic moment with an experience can make
one especially sensitive to experiencing something as stressful.  So also
the more you think about it using the various cognitive distortions.
Whether you over-generalize, awfulize, emotionalize, or use some other
cognitive distortion, doing such amplifies stress so that the emotion
triggered (fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, etc.) then undermines calm and
cool thinking.  You cannot think at your best when stressed.  No one can.

 

The fear response that leads to stress physically and literally shuts off
your higher executive functions in the prefrontal cortex so that you can
react to an immediate danger that is threatening you.  Flooded by the
emotions, you have knee-jerk reactions that are hardly within your control.
If you do not go into reacting, you might freeze up and become inflexibly
rigid.  Now you might be going blank, "can't think," can't focus, and so
feel that you are losing your mind.  And if your mind doesn't freeze up,
perhaps you are responding by fleeing- literally and emotionally running
away from the stress trigger.  In every one of these ways, you become cut
off from your best thoughtful, mindful, and rational thinking.

Chronic stress creates the same kind of responses except that because it is
chronic, the stressful overload comes gradually and usually comes upon you
at unawares.  This means that you will not even aware when it is happening.
If you do become aware, it is the "last straw phenomenon."  You now might
think that the final trigger that set you over the edge was the cause.  But
it was not.  It was simply "the last straw."  You hit a threshold point and
couldn't take any more.  Physically your blood pressure may have been off
the charts, but you didn't notice.  You couldn't.  Amazingly, high blood
pressure is not something that you can feel.

 

Chronic stress is an overload.  It comes from another message, "too much."
It arises from a sense of "enough, no more!"  Its subtly arises because
everything habituate.  That means that you can get used to living in high
levels of stress, taking on far too many things, never feeling like you get
a break from things, and then one day, one thing pushes you over the top.
Chronic stress is much more a killer than acute stress precisely because it
is so subtle.

 

If you want to be a great thinker- clear, concise, thorough, accurate, wise,
etc.- you will need to learn to be cool and calm under pressure.  You will
want to develop the emotional intelligence to monitor and regulate your
emotions.  You will want to cultivate your meta-cognitive powers for
mindfulness.  You may also want to get to Brain Camp when it comes to a city
near you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, Neuro-Semantics

P.O. Box 8

Clifton CO. 81520 USA

www.neurosemantics.com   look for the special offer

 

Author of the stunning new history of NLP--- NLP Secrets.  

Investigative Journalism which has exposed what has been kept secrets for
decades. 

http://www.neurosemantics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/NLP-Secrets-2_sml2.
png

 

 

 

 

 

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