Both negative and positive thoughts travel through the same brain cycle when formed. Thoughts are like a tree with numerous branches, including electrical impulses, chemicals, and neurons. All five of your senses – sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste – are your contact between the outside world and your internal world, thereby activating your mind.
As the data from your five senses pours into your brain, your brain is gathering electrical impulses through your peripheral nerves. These senses become the entry way into your intellect, influencing your free will and your feelings.
The first step in the process, the forming of thought and the gathering of electrical impulses, makes sense of the information coming in from your five senses. This incoming data then goes through some outstanding cerebrum structures that flavor, enhance, and circulate the data along the way.
The data is taken to a place where you can decide on the permanence of that data and whether it becomes part of your identity. Here, the brain can react to positive and negative thoughts as well as accepting or rejecting them.
When the data enters your brain through any of your five senses, it passes through a major transmitter station (the Thalamus) that screens and processes this information. The Thalamus is the meeting point for all the nerves that interface with the distinctive parts of the brain. There isn’t a signal from your environment that does not go through the Thalamus. [Click here for extensive NYTimes article on the topic.]
The Thalamus connects the brain to the body and the body to the brain. It allows the entire brain to receive large amounts of important data from the external and internal worlds simultaneously. The Thalamus transmits the electrical information throughout your brain, activating existing thoughts (or nerve cells) in the outer part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, to help you understand the incoming information.
This wonderfully complex transmission of information through the cerebral cortex alerts and activates attitude. Attitude is a state of mind that influences our decisions as well as what we say and do as a result of these choices. If the attitude activated in the cerebral cortex is negative, then the emotional reaction will naturally be a negative or stressed feeling within the depths of your mind.
While the feeling will be peaceful if the attitude is positive, the fact is your attitude will be uncovered regardless of how long you try to hide it. Then the activated attitude – positive or negative – is transmitted from the Thalamus down to the Hypothalamus. The Thalamus signals the Hypothalamus to prepare a response to your thoughts chemically.
The Endocrine System is an accumulation of glands and organs that mostly produce and regulate your hormones. The Hypothalamus often controls things like thirst, hunger, body temperature, and the body’s reaction to your emotional life. This implies that if you are anxious or stressed about something, the Hypothalamus responds to this anxious and worrying attitude with a flurry of stress chemicals engaging the Pituitary Gland.
The Endocrine System secretes the hormones responsible for organizing the trillions of cells in your body to deal with any impending threats. Negative thoughts shift your body’s concentration to a mode of protection and decreases your capacity to process and think with wisdom or develop sound thoughts.
If you change your attitude positively, the Hypothalamus will cause the discharge of chemicals that encourage the feeling of peace, and the rest of the brain will respond by releasing the right formula of neurotransmitters for thought building and clear thinking. You can choose to reject the presently–activated thoughts and the incoming data, or you can let the information make its way into your mind, and spirit, eventually subsiding in your non-conscious, which dominates who you are.
You can’t always control your conditions, and especially outside influences, but you CAN make decisions that will help you control your response to your conditions and keep toxic input out of your brain.
Being prepared with tools such as responding over reacting, daily gratitude, and/or keep a steady practice of meditation, will help you filter out negative reactions to outward stimuli so you can maintain a positive attitude – in both mind and body.
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