Tara Klassen
RN, DipCBH, RYT
How our brain and nervous system shapes our life experience
Thinking brain:
Our upper (higher) brain is where thoughts, judgements, analysis and interpretation come from. The thinking brain is always producing thoughts, but all of the thoughts are useful or helpful. When we become flooded with negative thoughts, it affects our emotions and shapes the way we act and react in our environment, often causing us to behave outside of our values.. With Hypno-CBT, I can help you learn to control which thoughts you focus on, believe and act upon. You will also build greater awareness through meta-cognition, which means looking at or thinking about how/what we are thinking, as if watching the thoughts with out judgement, reaction or emotional response, simply to understand. When you are functioning in awareness, you find the space you need to decide what thoughts to keep and which ones to let go of.
Emotional & body brain:​
Our emotional brain, which contains the amygdala, hippocampus and pituitary gland, reacts instantaneously and unconsciously to stimuli, releasing hormones and chemicals to stimulate the body. Our emotional brain creates emotions, pictures and visions that we then react to with our thinking mind. our body brain is our organ's responses to stimuli - automatic shifts in digestion, heart rate, breathing, urinary function, reasoning ability, visual acuity and more (see diagrams below about the autonomic nervous system).
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When we are healthy, our emotions are balanced and we can cope with emotions that rise automatically from the stimuli that we encounter. Emotions are simply information from our mid and lower brain - they are neither good nor bad. With Hypno-CBT, you can learn to receive emotions as information without creating stories around what the emotion means. I can also help you to learn to recognise, accept and manage your emotions.
Autonomic nervous system:
When our brain is subjected to repeated stress stimuli, it can get stuck in a high cortisol (high stress) state where the sympathetic nervous system overrides the thinking mind. When this happens, we react emotionally and unconsciously to the world around us without the benefit of our thinking brain.
The autonomic nervous system has two parts, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) which activates our body in response to stress, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) which kicks in to rest and repair mode when we are relaxed. We need both to work in order to live.
In ancient times, the emotional brain and the autonomic nervous system dominated the processing of life events, as people faced danger at every turn. When a person saw a tiger coming at them, they ran without thinking. When the weather was miserable, the ancient human would go back into his cave and not come back out till it was better. The fight, fight, freeze and fawn responses associated the SNS have not changed since our ancient ancestors roamed the earth with little to protect ourselves. Our emotional brain often interprets things in our daily life as life-threatening EVEN WHEN THEY ARE NOT, hijacking the thinking brain and kicking the SNS into gear.
Modern life is full of constant stimuli for us to process, leading to the SNS working overtime. When the SNS is in full action mode, the stress hormone cortisol circulates through our body to keep us on high alert. This leads to hyper vigilance, over-reacting to things, decreased organ function and eventually burnout and illness. When we are stuck in SNS action, our body cannot go back into the rest and restore mode of the PNS. Without this recovery on a daily basis, our bodies and mind will suffer. We cannot control how our autonomic nervous system reacts, but we are definitely affected by its activity.
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Our thoughts are real, but not always true. In addition to the stimuli outside of ourselves, our imagination (the pictures, smells, stories, feelings that come with thoughts) can stimulate the autonomic nervous system as if the imagined event is actually happening. When we ruminate about a past event or worry about a future event, we create scenarios in our mind that our body interprets as real. This causes activation of the SNS, just like when you perceive a threat from your environment. When we think about the same issues over and over, we repeatedly relive the negative scenario, and our brain responds by creating patterns of thinking and judgements about those thoughts, storing these imaginings as memories. When we repeat a negative scenario, we ingrain the negative idea into our minds. These negative thoughts lead to anger, anxiety, depression and phobias.
Working together in Hypno-CBT, you can learn to positively adjust your thoughts, emotions and behaviours and move toward mind-body health.
Imagine your body has a bucket that holds stress and love. Our bucket needs to be regularly filled up with love in the form of self care and rest, interpersonal connections and positive action like exercise you enjoy. These things help to release the stress out of the bucket. If we keep piling on the stress and do not take time to nurture ourselves, we will eventually end up with a bucket full of stress. When that bucket is full of stress it becomes very difficult to handle anything coming our way. When the bucket gets so full that it runs over, it starts affecting those around us. This is often the point at which people come to therapy.
I can help!
Learn how to relax more effectively, develop metacognition (the ability to watch your thoughts and feelings in a detached manner in order to develop self awareness), break habits, confront and let go of fears, change the way you think and behave and many develop many more positive skills with Hypno-CBT.