by Don Goewey

Most of us judge the content of mind wandering as useless if not downright stupid.  We tell ourselves to snap out of it.  Well, it’s time to reconsider that notion. The evidence is that our openness to this experience and its seemingly irrelevant content intensifies creativity by associating two ideas from different brain networks.  You’ll know when you’ve experience this; it’s comes on as that out of the blue moment and verbalizes in you as Ah Ha!

by Don Goewey

Most of us have been taught to push our brain hard in order to get the most out of it. Yet, research is finding that some of the ways the brain goes about making us brilliant is captured in that old Frank Sinatra song “Nice and Easy Does It.” 

by Don Goewey

The brain seems to make forgetting easier than we once thought.  That goes for bad stuff as well as stuff that are no longer relevant to the brain.  Scientists used to believe that long-term memories were immutable.  Researchers have found that ten to twenty attempts at blocking a bad memory reliably leads to forgetting it in most people.  In theory, you could bury an unwanted memory by practicing shutting it out every day for a month.

by Don Goewey

We all want to live a good life. And it is just as true that most of us want the life we live to open the way for an even better life for the next generation. It is an ideal that has been with us for more than 2,000 years. The ideal of the Good Life was originally formulated by Aristotle around 400 BC in the Nichomachean Ethics. It served as the vision and aspiration that sustained the Greeks for hundreds of years in advancing one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Ironically, Aristotle’s ideal does not define a life situation, such as material wealth. Rather, it defines an attitude toward life.

by Don Goewey

Mark Twain once said, “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” I call this “Thought Attacks.” Thoughts attacks are fearful thoughts that, when believed, escalate into negative emotions that produce perceptions of threats. It is the reactive mind that repeatedly mistakes a stick for a snake. Dr. Robert Sapolsky — the famous stress researcher at Stanford and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers — states: “We humans are smart enough to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads. We can experience wildly strong emotions, provoking our bodies into an accompanying uproar, all linked to mere thought.”

Fear is the trigger for a stress reaction. If you are stressed, biologically you are in some form of fear.

So, whenever you feel stressed on the inside:

The relevant question to ask yourself is:

What am I afraid of? 

Ask what am I afraid of five or six times and let the answers come straight from the brain’s primitive fear center, called the amygdala. The amygdala is in charge of fight or flight. It is a highly paranoid feature, designed to see potential calamities but often it mistakes sticks for snakes. Its language is raw, edgy and negative. During the exercise, don’t edit or sugar-coat what it tells you. Allow the amygdala to forecast all the fearful things it tends to predict. Exposing these illusions to the light of day nullifies its power to torment you.

For example, your credit card bill is larger than you expected and the fact scares you. The amygdala is likely to start predicting outcomes that gradually paint the mental picture of you being thrown into poverty. Of course, it’s not true. However, this thought, when operating unconsciously, can form an emotional cloud that darkens your mood and makes you vulnerable to misperceiving events and overreacting.

Once I conducted the What Am I Afraid Of? exercise, one on one, with a prominent corporate lawyer. The lawyer was in litigation, about to go to court, and he was immobilized by stress. So, I asked him, in this legal situation, what are you afraid of?

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” Pablo Picasso

Two Million Years of Lost Vacation Time

Why Do We Skip Vacation?