Understanding some of the ways your mind works will help you understand your tendencies, your strengths and weaknesses, your perceptions, thought processes and reward systems. This insight will contribute to your ability to maximize your potential in all realms. Our brain has conscious self awareness, as well as subconscious, instinctual processes that both contribute to decision making and behavior. We have capacity for logic and reason, as well as for emotion and feeling. We have the ability to communicate through language and non-verbal action. We perform abstract reasoning and creative expression. We have sensory awareness and functional motor capacity. We can learn and change, both thinking, emotion and behavior. We all differ in the degree to which these cognitive abilities are developed and utilized in our daily life.
We are all endowed with an evolved psyche, much of it unconscious, that guides and influences our decisions and preferences. Because of this evolutionary influence which aids in our survival and reproductive capacity, we naturally are attuned to beauty, strength, kin survival, social status and sex. We are often driven to seek out things that enhance our standing with respect to others in our community and beyond. We have inherent but unconscious reward systems in our brains that affect our emotional response to situations and drive our behavior toward things that make us feel good. These mechanisms actually use emotion as a tool to influence our behavior. These subconscious motivators can be in conflict within different parts of the brain and make our conscious decision making process difficult or confusing. These subconscious emotional drivers of behavior sometimes contradict our values or our ethical sense of right and wrong. We also have systems that are especially attuned to environmental threat and can induce excessive anxiety when they are activated. We have a natural negative bias which evolved as a survival mechanism, but can cause errors in judgment that overestimate the danger in certain situations.
Because these systems can be altered and affected by chemicals we consume, there is a powerful incentive to utilize such substances to enhance our positive feelings and reduce negative ones. We are especially susceptible to these means of altering our chemical reward system if we are feeling down, sad or anxious. The problem with these artificial means of boosting our feelings is that they are very temporary and also in many cases set up a cycle of dependency or addiction which are eventually destructive. By understanding our unconscious drivers of behavior as well as understanding positive ways of enhancing our emotional states we can heal our dependencies and strengthen our ability to make choices that enhance our health and emotional well-being. This ability in turns gives us more power to control our choices and direct our behavior in the direction or our choosing, consistent with our values and purpose.
Acquiring the awareness of our thought processes can be done through study and learning, but a powerful method to actually put this understanding into practice and improve your ability to act on this awareness in real time is the daily practice of stilling the mind. Spending several minutes of quiet breathing in a comfortable posture, while focusing the mind on stillness has tremendous therapeutic effects on your whole body, but also on your understanding of your thought processes and motivations. The ability to momentarily step away from our immediate thoughts, to recognize them without judging or reacting to them, coming back to quietness and stillness translates into an amazing sense of peace and insight that will transform your life. This practice will remarkably enhance your ability to recognize that instant between stimulus and response, which, according to a great philosopher, is where our freedom of choice and growth lies.