BR__Your mind is what your brain does for a living--Steven Jay Fogel Flashcards
A book report on the salient passages.
The reality is that the coping strategies we learned as children, many of which we may not even be aware of, are so ingrained and powerful that until we learn to focus our attention in the present to make mindful decisions, these habitual coping strategies are the source of what we think and how we act and react. I call these ingrained childhood coping strategies our default programming, or our machinery.
When our default programming is running us, even though we think we are in the here and now, we are not in the here and now at all; we are just repeating past behaviors that keep us in the past and rob us of what we want in the present.
The process of recognizing your dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaving and replacing them with healthier ones that make you happier and more fulfilled is self-transformation.
Look at each day’s elective experiences and see whether each particular experience is enhancing your life or diminishing it. If it is diminishing it, do not do it, do only those things that enhance your life.
{MN: This can apply to weight-watchers. Eating ice cream will not bring me inner peace. It will start an addiction and make me more fat and less healthy because of the fats and sugars. None of this brings me inner peace.
Do not let my program run me. Be in charge!]
The voice in your head is not you. It is only a part of you It is also not your boss.
The voice in your head never intentionally lies to you, but what it tells you is its interpretation of the truth. All of its interpretations are viewed through the filter of your mind’s programming.
[MN: In ancient times, the voice people heard was thought to be a God communicating with them.]
In old times, people needed to live in tribes to survive. As a result, the human mind became programmed with techniques designed to keep one’s place in the tribe.
Remember that everything the voice tells you is based on its interpretation [which is filtered from past experiences and part of your machinery]
It makes you realize that your mind’s programming with its multitude of beliefs and interpretations should be questioned, that some of your most basic beliefs could be false.
For years we believed that we only use 10% of our brain; now neuroscientists have discovered that we use all of our brain.
“Impulse control” Good buzzword
The power of habit. Habit is so powerful that it can lead to our persistently doing things that are self-defeating, even self-destructive.
The experiences that have a psychological effect on us also shape our brain and influence the particular ways our brain tends to function from that time forward.
[MN: This is tricky because most of the time you “learn your lesson” and do not make that mistake again! This is how your machine develops your program and you blindly follow it subconsciously for life. Now this book is calling for future evaluations on which decision fork to take.]
Brain research has revealed that our brains are malleable, with the capacity to be shaped and reshaped. Scientists refer to this as the brain’s neuroplasticity.
You can change your brain throughout your life!
The traumas we experience as children, and the lessons we draw from them, shape our programming.
Chapter 3
Remember: The present is where potential and possibility live, not in the past or in the future. Your automatic pre-programmed responses are based in the past, and they block your ability to be in the present. So if you let yourself be controlled by the past, you will never be in the present; you’ll just repeat the past and turn your future into your past, where there is no potential, no possibility for something new.
Chapter 5
[MN: This chapter ties a lot of what I have previously learned in psychological behavior together. It explains how our machinery is nothing but Memes letting the Amygdala call the shots in life without us doing any critical thinking if this this is good or bad for us. I like studying psychological behavior and emotional intelligence.]
You have learned that you can interrupt your machinery so you stop running on automatic pilot, and in so doing you can make mindful choices to think and act in healthier, more productive ways that will help you to fulfill your goals.
The first and oldest layer of the brain is the reptilian complex, which contains the brain stem and the cerebellum. It functions for our physical survival, regulating digestion, reproduction, circulation, breathing and fight or flight response.
The second oldest part of the brain is the limbic system, which contains the brain’s major emotional centers. One of its primary components is the amygdala, the part that associates events with emotions. The amygdala is the fear center. In addition to fear, it gives rise to emotions such as anger, rage and pity.
Another part of the limbic system, the hippocampus, changes short term memory to long term memory and is involved with recalling memories.
The most recent part of the brain to develop is the cortex. [MN: The cortex is where you do planning and thinking. Early hominids developed the cortex and learned from experiences how to be the most intelligent animal on the planet.]
Making up 5/6 [83%] of your brain, the cortex is the outer part of the brain and works the higher function cognitive capabilities of language, logic, and planning.
When you are on autopilot, you are under the control of the primitive reptilian brain and the emotional responses of the limbic system [MN: your subconscious zombie mode.]
“Emotional intelligence”. {MN: Love that buzz word!] Our goal is to control emotional intelligence, comfort foods, drinking, eating healthy, religions and theologies etc. Evaluate our machinery and revise memes that are bad for us and replace them with smart memes that promote happiness and well being.
Knowing how your brain structurally contains and controls behavior can help you heal yourself. Let’s start with the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system and is the brain’s fear center. This is where we get our fear of death and develop our immortality plan. //The amygdala can cause you to act before you think. If you were to react solely from your amygdala, you would be operating mindlessly, responding with reflexive actions to everything you experience. In other words, you would be oin automatic pilot, allowing your machinery to run you 24/7.
Until you begin to observe and reflect on your mind’s thoughs and actions, you may have no idea that your amygdala is cueing actions based on a past experience. This is why the amygdala is often emotionally unintelligent.
Hebb’s law: “Neurons that fire together wire together”.//The malleability of your brain is what neuroscientists refer to as neuroplasticity or brain plasticity. [Pronounced Plas tis a T]//To interrupt your machinery, focus your mind on the present, observe your behavior, reflect on it, and make mindful choices about how you will act.//Identify the self-destructive behaviors that you unconsciously developed. Like mindlessly snacking on comfort foods while watching TV.
Remember, every time we repeat these behaviors, we are reinforcing them. This works for creating good habits as well.
Chapter 6
“THE MIND USES THE BRAIN TO CREATE ITSELF. THE MIND AND THE BRAIN REINFORCE EACH OTHER.”//The more attuned we are to other people, the better our relationships will be.//The following three situations always result in upsets:
- Unfulfilled expectations
- Thwarted intentions
- Incomplete communication.
- COAL state of mindfulness is so beneficial: When you are curious, open, accepting, and loving.
When you are mindful, you are actually experiencing the present and are able to respond the way you choose to respond in the moment, rather than the way you have been wired to respond automaticlly.//By making mindful choices, you are productively using Hebb’s Law, neurons that fire together wire together, and also starting to rewire your brain.
Chapter 7//Mindful awareness: the key to disengaging from your dysfunctional programming. // The first step toward enlightenment is recognizing that the voice in your head isn’t you. It is not your boss!//[MN: The voice in your head is your machinery running. Evaluate it and edit it as necessary. It is not you.
I was believing that the voice in my head was me. I did not understand that my mind’s chatter was just activities of the mind.//
Once your identity is formed, your machinery keeps you stuck, repetitively playing the same roles that are part of your identity.//Your acts are fixed. When you are doing any of your acts, you are not in the present. You are doing a routine that keeps you in the past.//Whether you remember your childhood experiences or not, they influence the physiology of your brain. This is how your identity and all its acts become hardwired. It is why you need to be mindful to learn to recognize them and disengage from them.
All of our acts have three payoffs:
- We get to be right and make others wrong.
- We get to dominate others or, at the very least, avoid having them dominate us.
- We get to justify ourselves and, in the process, often invalidate others.
Looked at from this perspective, my “poor me” act was my programmed strategy for making myself right because my machinery perceived the other person as trying to make me wrong.
My poor me act also was aimed at fending off what my machinery perceived as another person’s trying to dominate me by shaming and blaming me into a subordinate position. [MN: Geri does this to me a lot}
Chapter 8
Let go of self-Defeating beliefs.
Your beliefs keep you trapped in the past. [MN: Stubbornly clinging to religious beliefs learned as a child and not doing background checks and listening to the other side to see why they hold opposing views. Also, refusing to study science and history to learn of news and developments, such as DNA and evolution proofs we evolved millions of years ago.
The beliefs that I refer to as your organizing principles are so embedded that when you are on automatic pilot, they create the way you perceive whatever is happening, even though you think that you are perceiving it objectively.
The brain is “an anticipation machine” structured to take experiences that happened in the past and use them to come up with expectations about what will happen in the future.
Chapter 9
How to change your wiring to improve your life.
As we are growing up we develop templates that help us modulate the responses of our amygdala.
Chapter 10
Practicing mindfulness.
You can practice and develop mindfulness just by doing everyday things mindfully.
Now when I feel fear coming up in circumstances where I recognize that it’s inappropriate, I become my own mindful parent: I interrupt my machinery, manually override my programming, and mindfully remind myself that the fear is only an activity of my mind [my amygdala firing]. I then take a deep breath and keep breathing fully, and I remind myself that using mindfulness to calm down my fear is not only helping me at that moment but also creating changes in my brain that will make it easier for me to modulate fear in the future.
How a memory changes each time we recall it: What actually happens is that every time we recall a memory, the memory reconsolidates itself in our brains through specific proteins at certain synapses. In fact, each time we remember it, the memory can be slightly different, and it is actually changed by the very act of our remembering it!
The emotional parts of our memory are stored in the amygdala. The part of a memory that is most vivid to us at a particular time is influenced by our thoughts and feelings at that moment.
The neurochemistry of the amygdalas’ activation is the basis behind the strategy of “Time Out” with children, calming them down before talking to them about changing their behavior. This same neurochemistry, and consequently, the same strategy, applies to us as adults. “Going toe-to-toe with any individual who has already lost it is only going to wind the situation up further. Back off, take your time, and calmly contain the situation.
Siegel refers to acting mindlessly in this hyperactivated way as reacting to a hot button issue and flipping our lid. He emphasizes that by mindfully using the adult version of the time out technique during the incident, if possible, and by mindfully reflecting on the incident afterward, you can take responsibility for your actions and repair a rupture in a conversatioon and a relationship. This has become my method of parenting myself whn I flip my lid.
I have made it a personal practice to wait at least thirty minutes before responding to texts and emails that can be activating for me. Giving myself a Time Out has saved me from many self-defeating actions.
Remember, that we as humans are designed to react, react, and react! We have no choice but to react; the trick is to react mindfully. So Time Out before you react in a hurtful manner.
If you see that you have acted in an inappropriate way that upset or hurt another person, apologize for it.
Chapter 11
Guiding principles to help you act mindfully.
Feelings are not facts. [MN: letting your emotions call the shots is a horrible strategy!]
Conflicting feelings:
When I find myself in disagreement with another person. The fact that my feelings about something are in conflict with those of another person won’t lead to war as long as we don’t act out this conflict of feelings. We can express our feelings, but if we start verbally attacking each other, trying to dominate each other, or, on the other hand, withholding ourselves to punish each other for having feelings that conflict with the other person’s, we will create a state of war that can damage the relationship.
Every time something new happens, I go back to my old ways.
Sometimes I am off-guard and my amygdala will generally kidnap my common sense and cue me with my old default programming.
We can put our bad feelings into others just as they can put theirs into us.
People often dump their problems onto one another. It reminds me to not allow other people to put their bad feelings into me so that I am stuck with them. This reminds me not to dump my bad feelings into other people just because I’m feeling bad and want to relieve myself of those bad feelings.
When my machinery takes the driver’s seat and I give my bad feelings to others or I accept their bad feelings into me, I am acting unconsciously. This guiding principle keeps me mindful so that I wont allow this to happen.Life is lived in the little things.
Terminal patients rarely talk agout large business or personal triumphs or failures; rather, they speak of the little things that brought them happiness.
When my grown-up children remind me of meaningful moments from their childhoods, they mostly talk about small things like our riding a bike together and rarely mention the material things I gave them. Life is lived in the little things.
One of the goals all of us have is to experience more joy in our lives than pain.
Next: Part III. Long term patterns that create frustration and suffering and how to break them.
Chapter 12
Apocryphal ADJ. A story or statement although widely circulated as being true is of doubtful authenticity. “While Catholics consider these verses true, the Protestants consider them apocryphal.”
There are always three ways to end your suffering in any circumstance in which you are in pain:
- Door 1: Accept the situation exactly as it is, warts and all
- Door 2: Change the situation
- Door 3: Remove yourself from the situation.
Chapter 13
Recognizing your resistance to change and what you can do about it.
It is generally a struggle for new ideas, bottom up information, to get through because our defense mechanisms tend to give our brain a bias toward top down processing that blocks the new information by stonewalling it.
As long as you are on automatic pilot you will continue to use your past based strategies even if they haven’t worked and even if they are useless and destructive.
I did not yet see that all the understanding I had of my programming did not mean a thing if I did not continually interrupt my machinery and make mindful choices.
SKIPPED TO CHAPTER 16
Chapter 16
The only way for us to move toward healthier behavior is for a force to be applied to set us in motion.
I needed to feel the pain from my marriage in the marrow of my bones before I could find the resolve to alleviate the pain by being mindful instead of allowing my fears, my organizing principles, and the rest of my identity to keep me imprisoned in repeating the same old behaviors that had sustained me as a frog in hot water for so many years. It took that critical mass of pain, so much that it totally overcame my amnesia for pain, to make me focus on the fact that through mindful awareness I could change, and that it was up to me to decide if I wanted to apply the resolve I needed to do so!
By the following year, the change did not happen and instead the pain continued to intensify, I moved from Door 2 to Door 3 and left my wife. This was very painful. I survived the awkward pain of being alone that I had feared for so long, gradually accepted the fact that I was on my own, and, over time, began to experience a sense of possibility. By choosing to no longer be a frog in hot water, I’d finally changed and made choices with mindful awareness.
If you are in a frog in hot water situation or relationship, it is up to you to recognize how much pain you need to feel before you have the resolve to be mindful and choose a door. There is usally a breakdown before there is a breakthrough.
Chapter 17
Seven lessons I learned from being a frog in hot water and finally choosing a door.
The reason we stay in an unsatisfying relationship is that our machinery cannot choose any of the three doors.
You cannot expect the other person in the relationship to give you what you are not providing for yourself, and if you do, you are going to be a frog in hot water.
The five stages of grief
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Denial:
My machinery used to block my experience of pain, which held me captive as a frog in hot water.
Anger:
The disappointments that arise in relationships can always be traced back to unfulfilled expectations, thwarted intentions, and incomplete communication.
Bargaining:
I see bargaining as a handmaiden to denial because it is a strong desire to alter the painful situation by negotiating. The clue to why this doesn’t work is in the words magically change. Bargaining is an activity of your machinery bargaining with itself. While you are hoping and praying for a change, you are remaining on automatic pilot and letting your default programming run you so that you are not making mindful choices about your behavior. I did this a lot, and each time I did, I would tell myself everything would be okay.
Depression:
It is normal to be depressed when you are a frog in hot water.
Acceptance:
Someone you love is no longer present and this is how things will be from now on.
So be sure to evaluate and make mindful changes to build neural pathways for healthier behavior.
A fulfilling relationship is characterized by these three opposite qualities:
Both parties are having their needs met.
Both parties enjoy the relationship.
Both parties can resolve their conflicts.
For a relationship that has had difficult problems in the past to change from unfulfilling to fulfilling, both people have to forgive each other for past actions.
Being mindful is a never ending process of disengaging from your machinery.
Chapter 18
My default programming is fabulous at makng me worry rather than focusing on all the good things to be grateful about. Practicing feeling gratitude is part of learning to be mindful and to feel good about myself and the world, to be in the present instead of remaining in my fear dominated past.
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Wisdom
- Put the past in the past. Create a future to live into or else I will just relive the past!
- Life is filled with possibility
- Possibility has no shelf life. Act mindfully to create possibility today!
- Experience joy by allowing yourself to actually feel pleasure. Let it fill you up, bring it to every cell of your body.
- You get what you want by enrolling the other person in your point of view by sharing yourself and the possibilities you see in a way that inspires!
- Do one thing every day that scares you.
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