What role does emotion play in neuroplasticity? And how can we use it in ways that support our goals and dreams? Emotions are a powerful catalyst when you're creating new neural pathways and memories.
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What role does emotion play in neuroplasticity? And how can we use it in ways that support our goals and dreams? Emotions are a powerful catalyst when you're creating new neural pathways and memories.
Sign up for the Early Bird list here.
Fun links…
Follow Stefanie on Instagram
Get the Strength Discovered Newsletter & Freebies
Join the Strength Discovered Community
Download Your Neuroplasticity Roadmap
Follow Stefanie on Instagram and TikTok
0:00
Hey there, it's your girl, Stefanie here. And today's episode is all about neuroplasticity rule number six, emotions.
0:09
So when we're looking at emotions through the lens of neuroplasticity, what they're finding, and they're always finding more. So this is based on my most current understanding all of these episodes are and what they're finding out. And I might be missing things. But as of now, what we do know is that when we get our emotions involved, it helps build memories, and neural pathways in the brain, which those two things are connected. But getting emotions involved strengthens neural networks that are associated with those emotions already, which is really cool.
0:47
And they're also finding that emotions are a catalyst in a way for creating long term memory, and for neuroplasticity in and of itself. Something that Shad Helmstetter talks about in his book, "The Power of Neuroplasticity" is that when you're wiring your brain, having strong emotions, in the process of wiring in a new program, creates a stronger program. So when we couple a strong emotion, it actually helps build a stronger neural pathway. So for you this might look like when you're shifting from self doubt, into creating more self confidence, you're going to identify that your intention is to build more self confidence.
1:34
And intention is rule number three, if you miss that episode, you can go back and catch up on that. But once you have your intention identified as building more confidence, then your next step is going to be laying out what that actually looks like. What is your self talk like? What are the things you believe? What are the things you think what are the things you feel, what are the things you do, and once you have that laid out, that is now your new program.
2:01
But if you just do that, and you don't actually put any emotion into it, along with repetition as well, then it kind of falls flat. When we couple an elevated emotion with an intention that we are trying to create in our life, that emotion actually gives us more access to the autonomic nervous system. And the autonomic nervous system or the ANS is the seat of the subconscious mind. And that's really important to have that access to the subconscious mind when you're creating a new neural network or a new program that you want to be running in your brain.
2:40
It's like the, you know, you're you're making a recipe and you have this one secret thing that you put into it, that just makes it so much better, and makes it so much more enjoyable. And emotions are kind of like that when you are building something new. It's the secret ingredient, to access more of your brain to wire in a new pathway so that you can begin to have that confidence in yourself instead of the self doubt.
3:07
So there's a book called "You're the Placebo" and it's by Dr. Joe Dispenza. And I want to share with you a quote from that book that talks about the AND, and I quote, "But if you can't emotionally embrace the result, then you can't enter the autonomic nervous system, which is vital because that's the seat of the subconscious programming that's been calling all of the shots."
3:34
And that's the end of that, quote, when I think about how all this works, I am drawn back to long term memories of my own, that weren't created on purpose, but they were created nonetheless. And when I look back, there was an event coupled with an intense emotion. And sometimes those are good memories. And sometimes they're not good memories.
3:58
For example, when my older sister passed away in a horse accident when she was seven, and I was five years old. That was a highly charged emotional event. And it is ingrained in my brain as a long term memory, I can still look back and see myself in the backseat. My mom is driving, I'm in the backseat with my sister, and we're driving by the ambulance. It's over to the left, I look out my window and I see my sister getting loaded into the ambulance. And that was the last time I ever saw her. And that memory is ingrained in my brain because of that elevated emotional state I was in. And when I say elevated that might not be the right term. Just an intense emotion, in general can lend to long term memory being created.
4:52
And this also works in the opposite direction, which is what I'm going to be encouraging you to do when you're creating a new program in your mind that you'd rather be experiencing. So this idea that coupling an emotion in a purposeful way, with an intention can activate that same thing in our brains is very powerful. That means we actually have more control when we couple an emotion with an intention to begin creating that new neural pathway in the brain.
5:23
So how does this work? How can we actually apply this concept in a way that makes a difference? It's tricky. I'll be real with you because it's easy to produce a negative emotion because we almost programmed to be more negative as a safety feature to keep ourselves alive, than we are to be in more of a positive emotional state. So it takes practice to teach yourself how to visualize an outcome or visualize an intention, and then purposefully couple an emotion with that intention. And it does, it takes practice, it's it's not something that comes naturally to a lot of people. But it is so worth the practice.
6:08
If you're familiar with Dr. Joe Dispenza's work, this is what he bases a lot of his work on is this intention coupled with an elevated emotion, and you can look him up, he's got lots of stuff out on YouTube, that can help you understand that concept in a deeper way, if you want to take that rabbit hole dive. So what are some of the elevated emotions that we do want to purposefully produce? Well, a couple of them they're endless, right. But a couple of them could be gratitude, love, joy, passion, feeling inspired.
6:39
And when we're able to do this, and the key is to do it in such a way that it feels real. And this is going to require you to set aside your current reality in order to embrace an elevated emotion coupled with a visualization. So that means when you're in this place of really allowing your emotions to be in alignment with your intention as if they are either coming or are ready here, it means that you have to set aside what you think, you know, you have to set aside your limiting beliefs, you have to set aside the things that say it's not possible for you in order to get into the state. And it takes time to be able to train yourself to purposefully feel a certain emotion when you're in a state of visualization.
7:32
In and even if that sounds completely not realistic for you, right now, I don't want you to push this emotional rule to the side, I really want you to just play with it a little bit. If you find yourself not even wanting to feel any emotions, you're the one that stuffs that down and shoves it away, you might have to start out with holding space for whatever emotions are present. And as you do this, as you become curious about what they actually feel like in the body, it will actually begin to give you more control over time. And that's because you're in a state of observing it instead of being afraid of the emotion.
8:15
And you can also use this when a empowering emotion comes to the surface. Get familiar with it, get curious about what that actually feels like in your body. And then when you go to visualizing your intention, and you're practicing creating this emotion that's attached to it, you will know what it feels like in an everyday situation. So that you can feel if you that's actually replicating during your visualization or not. And the reason why visualization works so well is because the brain can't tell the difference between an imagined event and an actual event. And this gives us a doorway to purposefully direct our brain in the way that we are wanting to be going for our next step, a year from now, five years from now, whatever it is.
9:05
If the rule of emotion feels overwhelming for you, then that's okay. You don't have to do anything with it right now. But I do want you to keep it in the forefront of your mind that this is something that you want to play with in the future. And one of the first ways is going to be becoming familiar with what those emotions feel like in your body right now. So that when you do begin to purposefully use it, you know what it feels like and you know, if you have or haven't tapped into that emotion. And if the dominant state that you tend to live in in an emotional way is along the line of doubt and fear and worry and anxiety and guilt and shame. It's gonna take some time to learn how to then shift into something different on purpose, because we are trained to believe that our emotions just happen. And to a certain extent, yes, they do.
10:07
But I really want you to understand that our emotions are a result of our habitual thinking, or habitual beliefs, things that we have on repeat in our mind. Those things create the emotion, and then that emotion comes back, and supports the belief and the thoughts. So it ends up being this cycle that supports each other. But we can interrupt the cycle in a conscious way, with purposeful thinking, with purposefully shifting our beliefs so that we can influence our dominant emotional states to be more of gratitude and love and passion and inspiration. And I will be really fucking real with you right now. If you are used to feeling like shit, if your normal state is a depression, then this is going to be challenging, it will feel so uncomfortable to feel better emotions.
11:09
Why is that? Well, emotions are really chemical signatures that are in the brain in the body. And when we have a chemical, chemical signature in our body, it affects us at a cellular level. So every cell in our body, so every cell in our body is living in an environment that is produced by our thinking, and our feeling. And when we begin to shift our thinking and our feeling, the environment begins to shift as well. And it's uncomfortable, because every cell in our body is used to things being a certain way. And we begin to purposefully shift that it doesn't feel normal, it doesn't feel like we should be having those better emotions, because they're not familiar to us. We don't know how to exist there and live our lives there.
12:08
Something that I have found very helpful for me when it comes to coupling emotion, with an intention is to get my body involved. So if I'm working on something, and I need to get myself in a better emotional state, I will take a power pose. And what this does is it signals to the brain because of your body's stance, what that stance means to you. So my power pose might look different than yours. Some people, they have their, their standing, right, their feet are spread apart a little bit, it's a little bit wider than hip width, and then both of their arms are up in the air. And I'm doing doing it right now. I'm such a kinesthetic person, my arms up in the air as I'm doing it, some people love that. I however, prefer my hands down on my hips, my shoulders back down and relaxed and my chest forward as I'm fully grounded through my hips and my feet. And that feels very empowering to me. So you might experiment with that to get your body involved to teach yourself how to produce a different emotion.
13:18
Music can also be helpful in teaching yourself how to feel different states in a purposeful way. In a very real way, we need to teach our bodies, what it feels like to live in the emotional state that we think our goal or intention is going to bring to us. And what this does is it teaches our brain and our body, that this emotion is okay, this emotion is familiar. And when we are in that state, then all of a sudden, we start saying and doing and thinking things that are in alignment with things in the world that produce more of that emotion.
14:01
And this is my own personal opinion. But I really feel like the more we're understanding about neuroscience, the more I see how the law of attraction, really, it really isn't something to dismiss. I was one of those people that dismissed it. And I think when we can couple some of those concepts from the law of attraction, with neuroscience, we come to this interesting place where for me, my big realization is if I want to achieve a goal, if I want to have a certain outcome, I need to wire my brain to achieve that outcome. And that means my thoughts, my emotions, my actions. I need to get those things wired into my brain so that those things feel so natural that the outcome just starts to happen. Because it feels so natural and it feels so effortless.
14:58
And if you're looking at that from A law of attraction standpoint, you got yourself into vibrational alignment with the outcome that you were going after. And then it's a little bit more complicated, right, where you're actually, you're taking the proper actions, but you're also attracting that to you as well. And that's way more complicated than what I am willing to get into. Because I don't understand all of that.
15:23
But this rule of coupling our emotion, with the intention or with the goal is so powerful, it helps us get ourselves ready, in a very real way, we are becoming the person that achieves that outcome and that achieves that goal. So if you are a person that really struggling with self doubt right now, and you just want to shift into more self confidence, then that's where you focus. That's your intention, more self confidence, and then you identify what that actually means to you. And then you go through the rules of neuroplasticity, and you build it in your brain, you wire it in your brain, you practice it, you repeat it, you add emotion to it.
16:12
And then the next rule of neuroplasticity, we'll dive even deeper into the next level past emotion. And you build it in your brain, you wire it for that outcome of feeling more confident. So whether you are going after a specific goal in business, in your in your relationships, with your body, or food, whatever it is that you're working on, you can use the concepts of neuroplasticity to help you get there.
16:38
And if you're not already, go ahead and sign up for my early bird list that I have for the course that I'm launching in February. It is very, very, very near and dear to my heart. I am so excited about this. I'm coupling this what I'm teaching you right here on this podcast, the concepts of neuroscience with Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping in such a beautiful way that I am teaching you how to create a lasting change in a very systematic way in this course. So if that piques your interest, come on the ride with me, it's going to be in beta mode. So it's going to be the best time to jump on especially if you're thinking about price wise. In the future. It won't ever be at this price again. But if you want dibs, go to the show notes. Jump on the early bird list so that when it does come available, and you want it, it's yours.
17:29
Thank you for joining me today for this episode all about emotion. And let me know what your thoughts are, what your questions are. This is a big one. This is something that's a little bit more tricky to teach ourselves how to do that it's possible. And even if you don't believe it's possible for you right now, just know, coming from someone else who didn't think this was a possibility for herself. And now I'm actively practicing this and transforming myself in the process.
18:01
You you've got this. You don't have to have it all figured out right now. It's just one step at a time. One step at a time. Talk to you soon.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai