Mind, Heart, and…Stomach?

It means that your body has centers other than your brain that are capable of processing your experiences in life.  “Listen to your gut.”  “Listen to your heart.”  “Listen to your instincts.”  These are all woo-woo terms we hear all the time.  They are telling us to listen to those other “brains” in our body.  They are there.  We can all feel them, feel through them.  Our bodies are truly mysterious vessels.

The real question, though, is how do we translate that interaction into action? 

We can do it by being honest with ourselves and following our heart and our gut as we think our way through our lives.  We tend to do lots of thinking but not as much feeling or intuiting.  What tends to happen is that we trick ourselves into believing that the only valid way to navigate a problem statement is with logic.  We try to shut out our emotions and our intuition, thinking that there is no place for either in the problem-solving process.  There’s evidence that such an approach misses the mark.

Colm Foster is a researcher, author, and executive coach.  He lectures part-time at theUniversity College Dublin.  The man has quite the pedigree.  One of the areas he has studied is this link logic-emotion-intuition link.  Early on in his studies, he looked for linkages between mood and cognition in the research and found next to nothing.  So, he pulled together research from various disciplines.  What he found was evidence that emotion plays a vital part in “good decision-making.” 

One of his areas of study has to do with stress vs. distress.  Activity and blood flow to the amygdale go nuts in stress situations.  This is a normal response.  Distress, on the other hand, is extreme stress and is characterized by the shutdown of certain cognitive processes.  Distress can lead to alexithymia, which is the phenomenon of not enough emotion to make a decision.  What he found was that by suppressing emotion, you lose the wisdom that is inherent in that emotion.  Like smells, emotions invoke whole memory processes which allow you to call upon past memories and experiences.  These memories and experiences are part of the wisdom we draw on to make the best decisions possible in the present moment.

PLUS you expend a lot of energy in suppression.  Since we all have finite supplies ofenergy that means you have to divert energy from one function to suppress another.  The more you suppress the less energy you have for…well…other things.

Mood and emotion are always present.  There are no fully “rational” decisions.  What matters most is whether or not we are allowing the full person we are, balanced between the present moment and past experience, to come through and act.  When we find that balance and expend as little energy as possible in suppression, we are able to bring the energy and passion into our lives that will draw others to us.  When they see that passion, that joy, they will respond, and, hopefully, they will be that much better for it.

You never know how the good thing you do for a few people might ripple out and effect everyone with whom they come into contact.