The Design of the Mind and Body Part 4
Your mind is designed to take in all the information that your body is experiencing. This information comes in the form of the foods you eat, your environment, your social relationships, your movement patterns, your sleep, stress, emotional states, and many other influencers. All of this information is processed, and then your mind directs your responses to this. It does this by creating experiences that you feel, as well as sending signals to your body for how it should function.
The Divisions of the Mind
Reptilian Brain
You can think of the human mind as having three divisions. The most primitive is the reptilian brain. It’s a reactive brain. It is just survival oriented. There’s really no emotion to it—only reactions.
Your higher mind is what allows you to choose the behaviors that will give you your best health.
Mammalian Brain
The next is the mammalian brain, where memory, emotions, and feelings are experienced. This is an oversimplification but it’s true to some extent. This part of your brain allows you to experience fear, anxiety, mood disturbances, or euphoria and pleasure. It’s also the part of your brain that has a fight or flight system to help you respond to threats. It has a reward system to help you experience pleasure with certain behaviors. All of this is tied deeply into your memory so that you can begin to reproduce behaviors that are consistent with your survival.
Neocortex
The next division of the brain is called the neocortex. It’s the most evolved portion of the human mind. Human beings have the largest neocortex. It’s a heavy processing center. This is where our executive functions are housed. This is where we develop willpower, emotional regulation, rational thinking, planning, examining our past, setting goals for our future. It’s where our brain manages very complex processing. This is the part of our brain that allows us to experience our deepest and truest self and to become self-directed individuals.
In our time, if you’re not using your higher mind, you will always be reacting based on either your reward system or your fight or flight system.
Using the Higher Mind
The mammalian portion of the brain is focused just on survival. It’s reactive, not proactive. Your higher mind is capable of being proactive. Your higher mind is what allows you to choose the behaviors that will give you your best health. You must use it if you want to experience your best health.
In our time, if you’re not using your higher mind, you will always be reacting based on either your reward system or your fight or flight system. This will actually inhibit your higher mind and cause you to simply stress out and experience negative emotions, or just try to eat and drink or do whatever helps you feel better for just a moment.
This will ultimately create sickness because our current culture sells us a lot of pathways of escape that are not good for us. The only way to experience your best health is to become the master of your own mind. This is doable, and I have resources that teach people how to do this. It’s actually simpler than they can understand.
But for now, just recognize that in order for your mind to work for you, and in order for you to become the master of it, you must provide it with the right information. I’ll discuss what this information is in the next post.
There is an uncomplicated and understandable truth about health. I want to make it easy for you. Join me. Follow me on Instagram and like me on Facebook.
