11/20/24
Last week, I told you how I hit a wall, and I just couldn’t think straight. My emotions were overwhelming my brain’s function. This is a normal brain function, albeit unhelpful. In the middle of the overwhelm, though, all I could hear were my emotions talking. I couldn’t hear God speaking love to my heart in that moment. I couldn’t hear Him singing songs over me as Zephaniah 3:17 says. My brain was so unbalanced that I couldn’t hear the truth.
This is the predicament of the believer with a human brain living in a full, chaotic, busy life. We allow the things we come up against or the things we worry about in the future to emotionally overwhelm us to the point that we can’t hear God’s truth. Our emotions are being way too loud and demanding of our attention.
But God has given us the ability to change our lives by taking control of our thoughts. To take them captive so that we can feel better, be happier and more at peace, to improve the way we are experiencing our life, to increase our faith and hope, and to walk in our God-given purpose.
Today, I want to give you some tools to balance your brain and get out of emotional overwhelm.
But first, it’s necessary to become aware in order to change, right? We must become aware of just how much our emotional brain is running the show. I think most of us are so busy in life that we don’t have any time, or we certainly don’t make the time, to notice the emotional overwhelm. Oh, we know we’re overwhelmed, alright. We just don’t know why. We don’t recognize that our brain is not balanced in its processing. That is, that we have emotional responses to things and we allow our thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, to bring logic, reasoning, and truth to the situation. There are several reasons why this is not a natural process for us, and bottom line, it’s vital to understand that since it’s not natural, we must do something to purposefully get ourselves out of the chaos and overwhelm.
So, let’s identify a few tools that you could use in the emotional overwhelm to balance your brain. I’ve mentioned a few of these in past episodes, but they bear repeating. And, of course, how great to have them all in one place in this episode. I have a list of 18 tools for my life coaching clients’ tool box. I’m not going to be able to give you all 18 today, because most of them need deeper context to be able to understand. But I will give you enough that you can put in your tool box.
Let me tell you why these work before we get into the list. I mentioned it last week, but in case you didn’t hear last week’s episode, let me tell you again. The primal brain, or emotional brain, is going to have the first, quickest response to our experiences. The adult brain is secondary. By design, the primal brain suppresses the adult brain’s activity of logic and reasoning. That’s why it’s easy to get into overwhelm and why our emotions can run away with us. But to have an integrated, balanced brain, both must be working. These tools I’m going to suggest elevate the suppressed adult brain, and then that allows it to monitor the actions of the lower brain, or primal brain, and calms strong emotions, reactions and impulses, resulting in a balanced brain.
The first is a Thought Download, which is a five-minute writing exercise. It’s a thought dump, as some of my clients affectionately call it. You just write everything down that’s on your mind for five minutes. The act of writing itself requires the prefrontal cortex to be engaged.
The next tool is Box Breathing. To make yourself breathe requires the executive brain. To do this, you can imagine (again, this is using your frontal lobe) drawing a box with your breathing. The bottom of the box, you breathe in 4 counts. The side of the box, you hold your breath 4 counts. The top of the box, you exhale 4 counts. And the final side of the box, you hold your breath another 4 counts.
Another tool is Pause. I've talked about this in episode number 111 - The Power of Pause if you’d like to do a deeper dive here. You use this tool when you're in the moment of a negative encounter with someone. Maybe someone yelling at you or being passive aggressive or just rude. You can pause. This is an exercise in what we call “becoming the watcher.“ We pause and pull ourselves out for a minute. We start getting curious about the other person. We may start asking questions internally, like why are they doing that? Where are they coming from? What's prompted that from them? As opposed to taking it and getting offended by it, and then finding ourselves getting defensive.
Intentional mindfulness is another tool in your toolbox. If you have regular anxiety and panic attacks that keep you in emotional overwhelm, you could use this. The practice is intentionally putting focus on a body part. For example, if you are feeling panic and anxiety rise, you can intentionally put your focus on your feet. How do your feet feel? If they're in shoes, how do they feel in the shoes? Is it comfortable? Can you wiggle your toes? Are your toes crunched? And then, notice, what do you think about your feet? Do you like your feet? Do you wish that they were smaller or bigger or somehow shaped differently? In doing this, we're pulling ourselves out of an emotional situation and we're elevating our prefrontal cortex, our thinking, processing brain, to that that situation that we're in, and it calms and controls the emotional brain.
Another tool is a list of Questions to Break the Brain. You would use these questions when you're stuck in one narrative, or one way of thinking that you’re convinced is true, and you need a new perspective. If you're confused, if you feel overwhelmed, if you need to get out of a spinning cycle, you can just have this printed out so you can just read the questions. Many times our brains get stuck in a thought rut that’s just not true, but it cannot, will not, consider anything else. And we can help it out by prompting it to consider another perspective, another truth. It includes questions like, simply, “What else could be true?” and, “What assumptions am I making?” and, “How is my brain trying to keep me safe by thinking this thought?” These are questions that gets the brain working on the answers. Our brains love to solve problems and answer questions. Once a question is posed, it loves to go find an answer. This is elevating the adult, thinking brain and balancing the brain. Plus, you’re about to get some truth deposited where lies once were. If you’d like a pdf download of these Questions to Break the Brain, I’ll put a link in the show notes where you can get it sent right to your inbox for free. My treat.
Okay, these 5 tools ought to get you started. And actually, these five are guaranteed to elevate the suppressed prefrontal cortex, balance your brain, and get you out of the spinning emotional overwhelm.
Friend, these are your tools. And when you find yourself in emotional overwhelm, I suggest you get all your tools out set them in front of you. In the moment, decide which one or two, or even three tools you feel like you can easily pull out to move you towards a balanced brain. Maybe you start with the easiest one, reading the Questions to Break the Brain, and let the brain’s natural function work for you, not against you. As your brain gets used to pivoting out of the old thought rut to create new ones, then using some of the other tools will become easier and easier to do in the heat of the moment. Friend, you’re in charge of balancing your brain, and you can do this with these tools to get out of emotional overwhelm.
If you’d like to learn more tools for getting out of your emotional overwhelm, I’d love to talk to you about Life coaching. There’s a link in the show notes for a free 30-minute call.
Don’t forget to grab the Questions to Break the Brain pdf sent to your inbox. I know this will be a helpful tool for you.
Have a wonderful week, friends. See you next Wednesday for the next episode of Another Beautiful Life.
SHOW NOTES:
When your emotional brain and your adult brain are not integrated, you will be carried away by emotional overwhelm.
Today, I give you 5 powerful tools to bring balance to your brain and get you out of the spinning, emotional chaos that keeps you from moving forward.
Grab the Questions to Break the Brain pdf sent to your email: https://www.triciazody.com/questionstobreakthebrain
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