Make your brain bushier!

What are the priorities in your life? Wellbeing, Health, Wealth, Happiness, Family, Friends, Work, Hobbies? Do you prioritise the things that are important to you? Are they the things you spend most time and effort on? How has 2014 been for you? A good year? Mixed? Not so good? Was this a year that you will look back at in your old age and savour the memories, or one you would rather forget? Were there things you could have done to improve it for yourself? And how well did you cope with the challenges?

Sometimes things happen to us and we don’t have any choice; we do have some choice in how we respond to them though. Other times, we create what happens to us – good and bad.

I guess for most people quality of life is important. No one wants to struggle, to be unhappy, to feel stressed or overwhelmed and yet I wonder how often we, consciously or unconsciously, set up situations that result in these things. We will also face difficult times in our life; we all have challenges and we all have personal issues that hinder us. When we experience these it can feel like climbing a steep and rocky mountain.

If you are physically fit and climb a mountain it is easier than if you are not. Psychological health and strength are the same. If we are in good shape we will manage the challenges more easily and they will not last as long. Psychological health is an interesting area because you generally can’t see it. We can’t look in the mirror in the morning and see that our brain is looking a bit peaky. We don’t see that it looks a bit tired and run down and needs a holiday. Our brains are hidden underneath our skull and it’s so much easier to ignore something that we can’t see and so neglect it. Also, human beings are very good at coping – you don’t need a sense of wellbeing to survive, to work, to shop, to cook, clean, run errands – however you might want it. You can directly affect your psychological health as you can your physical health: The choice is yours.

There are lots of things that we can do to improve our psychological health and feeling of wellbeing in our lives, and like many other things in our life it’s about motivation – how much do you want quality of life? How much do you want to build your resilience so when you face those mountains they are not as challenging for you? And are you willing to do anything about it?
Your life is your life – you own it – it’s yours to do whatever you please with. Your body and your mind are yours and no one else’s – they are completely your responsibility and how you choose to treat them is up to you.

If we consider the makeup of our brains, both sides of our brains are important. New research shows that the right hand side of the brain is more to do with survival and the left hand side is more to do with wellbeing. To survive, human beings need to learn lessons and remember things that are threatening to us. If you have been let down or hurt by someone, if you have been assaulted, threatened or had bad experiences, you will remember them. These past experiences help us not to put ourselves at risk again. This side of the brain is more suspicious and negative and can be very useful to us. Of course, there are also times when it isn’t.

The left hand side of the brain is more to do with a sense of wellbeing. The bushier the dendrites are on the left hand side of the brain, the more of a sense of wellbeing you will have in your life. The more we trigger this side, the better we will feel and the easier it will be to climb those psychological mountains.

The VERY exciting news is that we can change our brains! We can create new neural pathways, new connections in the brain, and we can create fertile ground and cultivate the bushiness on either side of our brain. If you spend your time triggering the right hand side of your brain, then that is what will grow and flourish: more suspicion, more negativity, and more protective mechanisms. If on the other hand you spend time triggering the left hand side of your brain then that is what will develop and grow.

There are many ways that you can trigger your brain. You can make yourself think happy thoughts or bad thoughts. You can focus on the good in your life or the bad. You can take care of yourself and get enough sleep, meditate, provide opportunities in your life for pleasure and/or engage in successful counselling or psychotherapy. All of these things, and more, are likely to help cultivate more of a left hand shift in your brain action.

Maybe 2015 will be the happiest year so far for you and maybe it won’t. You don’t have ultimate control, but there is a lot you can do to improve your chances – you choose!

words: Leilani Mitchell Dip. Couns. CTA (P) UKCP Reg. Psychotherapist, TSTA (P) Chair of UKATA (United Kingdom Association for Transactional Analysis ).

Leilani is an internationally qualified trainer, supervisor and Psychotherapist; she is Director of The Link Centre – www.thelinkcentre.co.uk – a training centre based in Newick, Sussex that offers courses in personal and professional development, as well as longer term courses in Counselling and Psychotherapy. Leilani’s passion is to facilitate people’s self-awareness to enhance their quality of life.