How your brain functions has everything to do with your emotional life and how you manage it. In fact, your emotional health and well-being is one of the greatest assets you possess - more precious than your financial bottom line, even.

How is this possible?  Quite simply, it's how your brain is designed.  The center of your brain is called your limbic system, which is your emotional brain.  Absolutely every bit of information your brain processes - from your lower brain centers up to the higher ones, and from the higher ones down to the lower - goes through and is processed by your limbic or emotional brain before it goes anywhere else.

What this means is that your emotional brain colors, or puts its mark on - every piece of information from anywhere and going anywhere inside your skull.  Therefore if your emotional brain refuses to process certain information, or says 'no, you're not going anywhere' to some neural message, or attaches importance far out of proportion to the actual message that came in, then that 'becomes law' before you've even had a chance to become consciously aware of it.

Then, if that's not enough, those emotional brain (or limbic brain) interpretations are channeled directly over to your hypothalamus, which then sends its' marching orders to your pituitary, the master gland in charge of your whole endocrine system.  In turn, your endocrine system sends hormonal messages to any organs or systems or tissues to carry out the directions that originated in your emotional brain.

So you can see how incredibly important your emotional brain is to all aspects of your health - including your physical health and brain functioning.  Unfortunately as an adult, you may have been trained away from - negatively conditioned, even - from including your active, conscious participation in your emotional life as a central, even essential, part of taking care of your health.

You weren't born that way, however. As an infant and child, your emotional life was just part of what you dealt with moment-by-moment-by moment. You tended to 'emotional ouches' in each moment just like the physical ouches that are part of every child's experience.

Instead, you might have had to unlearn that natural integration and wall off your emotional life so it was at the very least separate from the rest of your self, and sometimes even buried so it was totally disowned.

By the time whole cultures do this to children, it makes for a pretty dysfunctional world!

What is needed to turn this around is a map of how healthy emotional lives evolve. This provides a way to understand what to do in each aspect of emotional life. Using this  as a guide, not only will you improve your own individual emotional health and well-being, you will also have ways to support it in children, grandchildren, partners, friends, parents, co-workers etc. In short, you are contributing to a better life for yourself, and for each individual with whom you come in contact - everyong in the world in which you live.

With a map of the emotional territory of life, it's straightforward to re-integrate your emotional life. It once again becomes a normal part of your life, something you attend to every day, automatically, like you attend to needs for hunger, food, rest, companionship, exercise. And you are removing one of the most potent negative influences on your brain function - emotional stress.

Here's an overview of that map: click here.

BetterHealthBytes is a free, independent, online newsletter with insider tips for greater health and well-being of body, mind, spirit, emotions and relationships. We welcome topic requests at http://www.betterhealthbytes.com

Pamela Levin, R.N.
September 29, 2011

Source: http://betterhealthbytes.com ↑ 

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 Tags: what causes stress brain functions cognitive brain function human brain functions emotional health brain memory emotional stress brain and memory