The interest is in the details

What can you save, spend, and earn but never see?

-interest

  • Neurogenesis 

    I am becoming more and more interested (read obsessed) with understanding how I can rewire my brain. I’ve talked before about mindfulness and minding my breath. And that work is really to help me observe the reactions my body is having, what they feel like in my body, and coaxing myself to have better reactions to the people around me.

    This is especially pertinent as I have a four year old and I’m trying to undo some familial behaviours. And, while it’s taken multiple years at this point, I can observe the moment when anger or annoyance flushes my body and pinpoint it as the turning point when I inevitably lash out (something I am working on stopping). But it’s so hard, and I think that comes down to the path of travel in my brain, and how my body has responded (and how it has been taught) to respond to these types of situations.

    Mainly I’m thinking of my mother, who would lash out seeming randomly and then the whole rest of the day we would be walking on pins and needles around here, never experiencing any sorts of reconciliation. All that pain and frustration would slowly slide away leaving me without the means to experiencing similar sensations in my body and acting differently.

    So, I’m happy to say that my work in mindfulness has lead me to the ability to at least reconcile with my kiddo when I do lash out and it allows me to feel that feeling in my body prior. Sometimes, even rarely I’m able to not lash out and work out those feelings in another way. I’m super proud of myself.

    They make it look so easy

    But on to more neuro-talk. I love me some NYT, and I found this article here talking about how running increases cell proliferation and neurogenesis in adult mice. Dr. van Praag’s findings show that voluntary exercise is sufficient for enhanced neurogenesis in adult mouse dentate gyrus (I don’t know what those words mean, but I think they just mean adult mice).

    Now, I’m no mouse. But no one is really going to argue that exercise is bad for you. But typically we think that all the benefits will only extend to your body. But now… I’m not surprised at all that there is scientific evidence that exercise can allow people to perform better on tests of working memory and other executive functions. Alas, there is no scientific proof about exercise preventing the degenerative brain diseases. But…. BUT… I’m not ruling it out of the question.

    Sometimes it seems like good ole common sense comes to the same conclusions that science later brings to the table. I can totally here my grandparents saying the exercise is good for the brain and the body and now I can read about how their intuition is supported in a scientific journal. Pretty Cool.

    So that means I’m off to the gym, for better or worse I think that along with my mindfulness practice I need to add some running and strength training to benefit all parts of this squishy human body. I also like that Beyond Fitness specifically targets those of us who are a bit older, I would feel a bit weird trying to workout amid the beautiful 20-somethings that are also working on their bodies. No shame to them! But I think I would feel self-conscious.

  • Daily Struggle

    Im my last post I talked about adapting our minds to leadership and about re-wiring our brains’ neuropathways to overcome old negative self talk. Ever since that post I’m still doing my accomplishment journal while speaking out those next day accomplishments.

    Something I’ve written for today is to “mind my breath”. What this means is to pay attention to my breath and y body during the course of the day. Which, if I’m being honest is something I write down each night, it’s an ever-present goal of mine. Mainly because it seems like I feel the day slip away before I ever have a intent to be mindful about it.

    Take for example trying to get this blog online… man I was having trouble finding the right WP theme for it. I cycled through maybe like three today trying to figure out which one I liked the vibe most of all. And holy crap was it hard! I could not figure out for the life of me how to get my posts up on one of the blogging themes. It should be waaaay more intuitive than what is was. Then the theme was trying to get me to download more plugins to get it going?? I was like, nope. I just wanted to find a theme that works and looks pretty. But I could not get it to work and a after a couple quick google search I could not find an answer. I felt my body become more and more tight, my shoulders gradually crept closer and closer to my ears, and I felt stressed!

    But moreover I had some extremely negative self talk about the whole experience. So I took a break. But like damn. Why does something seemingly so simple have to be so difficult. I stepped outside on my balcony to catch a breath and tell myself that there was no rush. And now I’m back at it, but like damn!

    Looking back on the previous twenty-five minutes I can see how much of the work I’ve been doing is starting to kick in. Previously I would have continued to spiral and eventually probably given up. But now I’m able to feel the stress in my body and more importantly change the course of that stress. The interest is really in the details.

    Now onto another experience I had recently. I went to a networking event and there was an opportunity to give an elevator pitch. One woman stood up who was selling… I don’t know quite what it was, but it felt like snake oil. She talked a lot about energitecs, about leveling up your energy and about manifesting your future. Honestly, I zoned out much of it, but an interesting thing about it was that she had all our attention in the beginning.

    It’s because she was also beautiful. And I was like, yes this is how cult leaders are formed. She had this way of talking about her business but at the same time actually did not say anything of substance. Do you know what I’m talking about?

    Thankfully I was there with my friend. She’s a scientist and does some pretty cool stuff with biologics, here is her site. We talked about her later and both agreed that it was a bunch of nonsense. But what was interesting was that she could tap into this desire so innate in us humans. The desire to transform your internal-working model, to be more present in our lives, to be mindful of the fleeting thoughts that constantly barrage our brains day in and day out. But she had no substance. She should have studied Neurobiology; I would have paid a lot more attention to her if she had a degree or two in the sciences. Oh well.

  • Email Bank: Eager minds adapting (to) leadership

    This bog will be a bank of ideas on how a person can adapt their life to live as wholehearted as they can. It’ll be about my personal experience re-wiring my neurons to activate a different neural pathway to create a better internal working model.

    It’s not quite manifesting, which I believe is mostly snake oil. But it’s about re-wiring your brain to limit negative self talk, achieve your goals, and live your life how exactly you want to. This is something I’ve been working on for a long time. First, I started with mindfulness, a practice that I began after watching a show on Netflix. In this show, unfortunately I forget which one it was, there was a Buddhist monk sharing how he incorporated mindfulness into his own life. He was talking about his youth, living in the shadows of the Himalayan Mountains sharing about his anxiety sudden weather-related catastrophes. It was really interesting to me and ever since I’ve set out to try to observe my mind instead of subjected to it.

    This journey has led me to achievement journaling. This process is something I do every night; I have a small paper-bound journal where I write down (with my favourite pencil) the accomplishments of the day. The trick here is to widen your conception of what an accomplishment can be. Trust me, I’m not writing down the fact that I’ve run marathons or scaled mountains. It’s more like, “ I paid attention to my breathing”, or “I enjoyed time spent with K (my kiddo)”. Things like that. But here’s the kicker, after writing three accomplishments of the previous day, I also write down three accomplishments that I would like to do for the next day. AND I have started speaking out these potential accomplishments every night.

    I think this new development has really started to have an effect on my life. It’s almost like mirror work, where you look into the mirror and verbalize certain things. What I want it to do is to help me pay more attention to my potential goals for the next day, and what I find myself doing is that each night when I am ready to sit down and write the goals that I am working on are at the forefront of my mind. This way I keep writing down the same goals I have (and verbalize them!). Then something else that I’ve noticed is that now in the daytime I can remember what my prior goals were and then keep them in mind for the day.

    I feel that this has been huge, mainly because most of my goals are me actively trying to re-wire my neural pathways. This has taken about ten months, so it’s a slow process but I’m started to find some success in it! I’m so please with myself. So stay tuned for more techniques to adapt our mind towards leadership! Cheers.