Renew Your Mind

How to Rewire Your Brain for a Happier, Healthier Life

Chantal Hofstee

• Publisher: PublishDrive
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781925335866
• eBook ISBN: 9781775593850
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Developed from clinical psychologist and executive coach Chantal Hofstee's highly successful book, Mindfulness on the Run, Renew Your Mind is the essential guide to rewiring your brain so that you can lead a rich and rewarding life that leaves you energized, healthy and happy. Incorporating the latest neuroscience as well as aspects of mindfulness, the result is an effective program that leads to a calmer, more focused mind; greater productivity; enhanced creativity; and improved relationships.

CHAPTER 1:

Understanding your brain

When you want to make changes to the way you think and feel, it is important to understand the very thing that is making you think and feel: your brain. Your brain is your most important asset, a power station that connects your every thought, feeling and action. Yet people tend to take better care of their teeth, their hair and even their car than their brain. Understanding how your brain works helps you to take care of it and make it work better.

Your brain is made up mostly of water, about 10 per cent fats and 100,000 miles of blood vessels. The brain’s basic building blocks are called neurons, and your brain has around 100 billion of them, each with between 1000 and 10,000 connections with other neurons. Information is passed along these connections through chemical messages and electrical impulses. These connections are called neural pathways and I will also refer to them as pathways or roads within the brain.

Neuroplasticity

Scientists used to think that the brain is fixed and hardwired by the time we become an adult. Research in only the past decade tells us that this is simply not true. The brain is flexible and changes throughout our lives, and this process is called neuroplasticity.

You can think of your brain as a dynamic power station, with many neural pathways that light up each time you think, feel or do something. The more a pathway is used, the thicker and stronger it becomes. This makes it easy for your brain’s signals to travel that road. If you make a conscious effort to think, feel or do something differently, your brain begins to carve out a new road, which means a new pathway is established.

Brain training

Your brain is constantly changing and adapting based on your experiences. Changing old habits and creating new ones comes with directed and repeated practice of the new way of thinking, feeling and doing. By practising the Renew Your Mind techniques described in this book, you will literally rewire your brain. The techniques function as a circuit breaker that stops old, unhelpful patterns from being reinforced. They allow you to introduce and build new, more helpful roads. By doing this over and over again, the new pathways will become strong and take over. Eventually this new way of thinking, feeling or doing becomes second nature.

This process is not very different from physical exercise. Let’s take push-ups as an example. Every single time you do a push-up you are changing something in the structure of your muscles. The more you practise, the stronger the muscles and easier the exercise becomes.

It takes six to eight weeks of daily practice for a new way of thinking, feeling or doing to form a strong new neural pathway. The good news is that even if you don’t practise on a daily basis, you will start to notice changes within just a few weeks. The only requirement is that you do the exercises regularly.

The learning process has the following four phases.

Phase 1: Unaware unskilled

When you decide to start renewing your mind and training your brain, you are motivated to make changes. For most people at this stage, the desire to feel different is what drives them. When it comes to skills, at this stage you are unaware unskilled because you haven’t yet been introduced to the techniques that allow you to train new skills. Your old pathways and habits are strong and no new pathways have been built — yet.

Phase 2: Consciously unskilled

In the early days of your practice, your brain begins to form new pathways. It requires effort and conscious attention for your brain to build and use these new pathways because the old pathways are still dominant and therefore easier to use. In this phase it can be a real challenge to keep practising!

Phase 3: Consciously skilled

After some weeks of doing the exercises you will notice that your practice becomes a lot easier. New pathways have been established and are strengthening. At some point the new pathways will become the dominant ones. But be aware — in times of stress, the old pathways can still take over quite quickly!

Phase 4: Unaware skilled

In the last phase of retraining your brain, the old pathways have become dormant. New pathways have become ‘roads well-travelled’. Your practice is still important to keep the roads maintained, but you will notice the techniques have created a new way of thinking that now comes without conscious effort. You have become a more mindful person. At this point, a mindful way of thinking, feeling and doing has become second nature.

The green brain and the red brain

The way your perceptions, thoughts and emotions work and interact is quite complex. They are constantly changing and consist of many different layers. Some are part of your conscious mind, while others are part of your subconscious mind. At any given moment, when you peel away the different layers of thoughts and emotions all the way to the bottom of your subconscious mind, there are two options: your brain either feels safe or unsafe. Throughout this book I will refer to the unsafe state as the red-brain state and the safe state as the green-brain state. All of your thoughts, feelings and actions in that moment will come from either the safe (green) or unsafe (red) brain state.

There are various levels of safe or unsafe — you can picture this as a spectrum: at one end is the extremely safe green brain, and at the other end is the extremely unsafe red brain. Where your brain is on the spectrum depends on the situation, as well as your current thoughts.

The red brain

The red-brain state is a state of stress. You can see the state of stress as a fire alarm. Stress is activated when the mind perceives a threat; this activates the fight-or-flight response. The fight-or-flight response makes you faster and stronger. I sometimes refer to it as ‘the Hulk mode’. Having red brain available to us is actually very useful when there is a physical threat. Speed and strength are, after all, what keep you alive when you are faced with physical danger. When the fight-or-flight response kicks in, your brain and body are in the best possible state to deal with a threat, hence ensuring the greatest chance of survival.

The red brain can be triggered when there is no actual physical threat. Your brain reacts to how safe or unsafe you perceive a situation to be. Therefore, your thoughts are the most important factor in determining how your brain assesses a situation. For example, if you fear public speaking and say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘This will be a disaster’, your brain perceives the situation as unsafe and the stress response is activated. In this state, the hormones cortisol and adrenaline are released, creating the following effects.

Physical effects:

» Tunnel vision

» Shallow breathing

» Stopped or slowed digestion

» Increased blood pressure and blood sugar

» Increased heart rate

» Suppressed immune system

» Tensed muscles

Psychological effects:

» Judgmental and black-and-white thinking

» Feeling stressed

» Narrow or fixed point of view

» Unkind manner

» Disconnection from others

» Loss of the ability to think creatively, be flexible and see other perspectives

The consequences of these effects include:

» Overlooking information

» Referring back to old patterns

» Poor decision-making and prioritizing

» Approaching problems with familiar solutions

» Miscommunications

» Decreased compassion and empathy

» Emotion-driven action rather than well-thought-through action

Having the Hulk mode available is essential for you to be able to deal with extreme situations — such as being attacked by a snake, running from a fire or seeing a child run onto the road. When you are running from a fire you n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Understanding your brain
• Chapter 2: Renew your mind with mindfulness
• Chapter 3: Navigating emotions
• Chapter 4: Green-brain connection
• Chapter 5: The power of thoughts
• Chapter 6: Renew your mind, change your thoughts
• Chapter 7: Mantras
• Chapter 8: The mind–body connection
• Chapter 9: Creating success and happiness
• Chapter 10: The beginner’s mind
• Chapter 11: Improving relationships
• Chapter 12: Solutions for conflict
• Chapter 13: The purple brain and courage
• Chapter 14: Self-compassion
• Concluding thoughts
• References
• Index
• Copyright
• Back cover