Neurological Therapies for Minds & Bodies Under Siege
It’s an understatement to say that any physical challenges you face have made you more vulnerable to negative thoughts and frustration. The problem, though, isn’t necessarily that what is going through your head is negative; the problem is what the “stuff” or physiology of your negative emotions is doing to your responses to life and, more importantly, to your body.
Thoughts and emotions are made up of electrical and chemical reactions within your brain and body. These reactions are the “stuff” of mental activity, and they are what the mind-body connection is all about. What the electrical and chemical activity of thoughts and emotions does to how you feel and how you respond to life is important. What that activity does to your body, though, is of critical importance to your health, especially if you are living with a disease. Focusing on lessening the amount of mental activity rather than concern over what, specifically, you are thinking or feeling emotional about can offer a simpler and yet very smart way of improving your health and your life. That is the focus of newer, neurologically based therapies like NeuroTherapy Training.
No Ordinary Life
You are facing a physical challenge; you are no longer a person leading an ordinary life. The focus of your frustrations and negative feelings are clear. Your brain must deal with immense amounts of information daily, all the aspects of your life…plus all the aspects of the physical challenge you now face. “Feel guilty”, “feel afraid” or “feel inadequate” messages come at people all the time. Your “feel afraid” messages are now more insistent. The chemistry of those thoughts and emotions takes a daily toll on the body and can even cause you to respond in unhealthy ways.
The central nervous system (the brain, spine and nerves) is a key part of the complex machine that is you. The busy, often frantic lives of people living in today’s modern world create heavy traffic in the central nervous system in the form of electrical impulses that propel chemicals, called neurochemicals, from cell to cell throughout the brain. This electrical and chemical chain reaction travels down into the body to direct how people respond internally and externally.
This frantic activity is wearing enough on the cells of the central nervous system but it doesn’t stop there. This electrical and chemical hopscotch from cell to cell occurs on every cell of the body. As famed neurological researcher Candice Pert commented, “Even your big toe knows you are angry.” This is because the cells of the big toe and every other part of the body “soak up” some of the neurochemicals, the chemicals of thought and emotion.
Limitation of Traditional Therapies
Given the inevitable rise in stress or frustration accompanying any challenge to the body, understanding of how thoughts and emotions move throughout your body may enable you to understand why you may need a different approach than just talking about your problems. Most current therapies are focused on the content of thoughts and emotions. People talk over their problems with a psychologist or a counselor. These professionals help examine the roots of a problem, suggest new ways of responding to a problem or help in reframing ways of thinking about a problem.
There are many theories, models and methods that make up the field of psychology, so many that sorting out the best type of help to seek can, itself, be stressing. To help think about what psychology does in a more workable way, you can distill it down to the basic things all those theories, models and methods are designed to do.
People seeking help from a therapeutic professional do so to improve:
- What the activity of their minds is doing to their responses to life situations.
- What the activity of their minds is doing to their bodies.
To distill this further, it is because the activity of the mind is doing something to the body (making it uncomfortable or even unhealthy) that people respond in ineffective or inappropriate ways. So, a prime element of ways of helping people improve must be one of teaching about and improving what the activity of their minds is doing to their bodies.
This way of thinking about emotion, as an eruption in the body that wears on the body or stimulates unhealthy responses to life is rarely talked about directly, and should be. Prescribing drugs is a common way psychotherapists use to help people control the eruption of their emotions. Many people, though, want to feel better emotionally but don’t want to take drugs; especially in the face of a physical challenge that already requires invasive medications. A second common way of help is counseling. The things that counselors and therapists do are directed at the events of life that stimulate the emotional eruptions. People, though, have new perceptions and events occurring continuously. Talking through or analyzing each one feels to many people like a seemingly endless task. More importantly, the eruptions of emotions speeds deterioration of the body and people suffering the challenge of a disease do not have the luxury of time to psychologically work through the issues of their lives.
New Methods of Help
There is another way for you to lessen the damage all the mental activity and its resulting stress is doing to your body and how you respond to life’s challenges. You can learn to effectively slow down your brain and diminish the physiology of your emotions. NeuroTherapy Training makes that a prime focus.
It is a method of help that teaches you, in more basic ways, how to concentrate, relax and train your brain. It teaches you about the importance of improving mind body interaction as part of the healing picture. You can learn to effectively slow down the eruptions of emotions naturally. These methods give people training in dramatically quieting the electrical and chemical eruptions that cause their negative emotions, their stress and result in unhealthy ways of responding.
You know you could benefit from a reduction of the amount of brain activity and the reduction in stress and emotions that result, especially at 3:00am when your mind is spinning with fears and uncertainty. Learning a way of effectively concentrating is a key. Slowing your brain and clearing your body of the physiology of thoughts and emotions is the new way of finding the help you desire. Regularly training the brain can improve your responses to any learning or counseling, lessen the need for drugs and improve mind body interaction to help in the healing process. For a more modern approach to the constant assault on your mind and body, choose a method, like NeuroTherapy Training that is focused in those ways.