Mindset for Leading a Healthy Lifestyle – Emotions and Subconscious Brain

  • Our subconscious mind (we can also call it as emotional brain) chooses easy over hard, pleasure over pain, inaction over action, energy saving over expenditure. These are human evolutionary traits. This does not mean there is something wrong with us. Stop feeling guilty about it and stop saying to yourself that you lack self-control. Instead stay conscious of our evolutionary instincts and do what you are supposed to do.
  • Our subconscious brain looks out for our safety and survival. Evolutionarily this is how our primitive brain is supposed to work. It is evolved to keep us safe and save energy for critical requirements in future. We survived as a human species because our brain’s most important task is to keep us alive no matter what.
  • It keeps looking out for all the problems externally to complain, put blame and gives a soft treatment to our ego. Basically if you give a lot of heed to your sub conscious chatter, you might most probably fall into your repetitive patterns of self-limiting beliefs and stay where you are.
  • Just do a self-assessment on how many times you had fallen prey to your mind chatter. How many times you did you do something that you did not want to do, how many times did you say something that you regretted later etc. This is all because we unknowingly listened to our primitive emotional brain instead of listening to logical prefrontal brain.
  • Our primitive emotional brain wants to stay in familiar places and situations. It would not allow us to enter some unknown experience even though it is beneficial for us. It would force you to stay where you are because it is a known territory to you even though it is average and mediocre. Just because it is familiar, we would prefer to stay in pain even though we know what to do to get out of the suffering. We prefer to stay in known hells instead of venturing into unknown heavens.
  • Our emotional brain always wants to seek pleasure, choose easy, avoid pain, be comfortable and save energy. But our rational and logical brain is critical and analytical. It questions our instinct of choosing instant pleasures over long term satisfaction. Our logical brain tells us what is the right thing to do. Unless we are conscious of this tug of war in this two regions of our brain, we make decisions based on our emotions and impulses. People who stick to their resolutions give more meaning to the rational and logical part of their brain and try to make a compromise with the emotional part of the brain.
  • Should I go out and exercise or hit the snooze button, should I spend some quality time with family or binge watch on videos, should I have one more beer or call it a quits, should I binge eat on desserts because it is buffet or enjoy moderately, should I buy something because there is discount or save the money for later, should I give everything after taking a decision or look for an excuse to give up. We have to constantly be managing ourselves to take action against a dynamic enemy that is perpetually working against us. It is our limiting self-talk, self-defeating patterns and habit of constantly delaying the things that gets us into trouble.
  • If we make an easy and comfortable choice now, we might most probably have a difficult time later in life. If we make tough yet right choices now, we would have the liberty to have the life we wanted later.
  • The health issues we delay and ignore now would become exponentially severe later. The hard work we are putting in now, the difficult things that we are doing now will make us happier and give us more freedom later.
  • In the absence of conscious supervision and critical thinking, our mind takes us on a wild ride. Majority of the times our mind acts against our good intents.
  • We attract and become what we think and what we say to ourselves. It is the power of subconscious mind. The reticular activating system in our brain becomes sensitive towards the opportunities around us when we have a tunnel vision.
  • Our beliefs influence our thoughts, our thoughts define our feelings and emotions, our emotions define our behaviour, our behaviour impacts our actions and our actions impact the results we get.
  • Is it hard to make some choices against our subconscious emotional brain – For sure YES.
  • Is it worth to make compromise with our emotions and fight for our resolutions – For sure YES.

Interesting articles in this series :

~Praveen Jada

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