Who's Really In Charge? It's Not Who You Think.

 The final installment in my Hacking Your Brain Series involves Level 3: the Logical brain or Neocortex. 

This level is what people generally mean when they refer to your "brain". However, this level is involved less than you think in your day to day life!

The Neocortex or Logical brain controls math, language, reading, writing, planning, problem solving, and self-awareness.

I bet you're thinking, that's most of what you do every day, right?

Wrong! As we've already discussed, Your Survival and Emotional brains (Levels 1 and 2) control up to 80% of every decision you make. Yes, the Logical brain makes the final decision (except in life-threatening situations), but the input is directly from your unconscious and subconscious brains. Your conscious brain (Logical) has very little to do with WHY you do the things you do! Pretty mind blowing, right?!

This is why you can have every plan imaginable to succeed, but blow it at the last minute. For example, how many times have you tried to change your eating habits? You pack a healthy lunch, say your affirmations and head out to work. However, someone brought doughnuts and left them in the break room. Suddenly, you can't get the doughnuts out of your head. You walk by them several times, give yourself a pep talk about staying on your diet, but then boom! You eat one...or two...and then you feel terrible! You blew it! Now, you feel guilty too!

So, what REALLY happened in this scenario? Your Logical brain made the decision to eat healthy. Your Survival brain is designed to make you eat (Food is life, remember?), and it wants you to eat as many high calorie doughnuts as you can to protect you against starvation or future famine (It's not logical!). So, it tells the brain to eat the doughnuts! The Logical brain tries to fight back with every reason in the world why you shouldn't. Even the Emotional brain gets involved to tell you how bad doughnuts are, but in the end, you eat them. The Survival brain wins (as it's often designed to do)! The Emotional brain makes you feel guilty for breaking your (logical) plan of healthy eating and the Logical brain is left wondering what the heck happened!

This little scenario plays out ALL THE TIME with anything going on in your life. It's important that you understand how all 3 levels of your brain work together (and separately) to really know the how and why things happen in your life. You constantly have 3 people with different motivations and personalities in your head vying for control. Sometimes, the winner is not the brain you want it to be! When this happens, you can experience procrastination, guilt, self-sabotaging behavior, feel like you're a failure, lost, and stuck.

The beauty of emotional strength coaching and emotional release work is that it quickly accesses EVERY brain to give you the results, closure, and peace you crave. It can help you understand issues you've been struggling with, get to the REAL source of any problems, and we can work together to help you change your mindset to something more positive. In this way, you can quickly move forward in your life with a sense of peace, understanding, courage, and relief!

April Darley N.D. is an Emotional Strength Coach specializing in helping Empaths/HSP's feel better, and function better by releasing stress, anxiety, pain, and sabotaging behavior. Through the combination of coaching and emotional release techniques, you'll learn how to step into your own power, comfortably deal with life's challenges, and stay calm and balanced.