Why struggle? Rewiring is easier!

I’m not a health professional. This is for entertainment and information.

Have you got big dreams? Something you work toward, but get stuck and frustrated by? Are you a self-saboteur? It’s a real inconvenience, right? Well, while trying to enhance my intuition, I discovered a great pairing of scientifically validated techniques (and one paradigm) that work well together to fix unwanted acculturation.

Instead of the instincts most animals have, we mimic and acculturate. Only sometimes we make bad imprints due to imbalanced role models and bad circumstances. Don’t feel bad! No one is perfect, after all. Now we can take steps to rewire those imprints!

If you don’t want to look under the hood because you’d rather Mess Around and Find Out then just skip down to the Subconscious Update Exercise below. If you want to ponder why making faces, hyperventilating, reimagining bad memories, and how we can drive for hours without remembering details, then push on!

Studies by Dr Paul Ekman concluded that facial expressions are universal across all human cultures. His research has further demonstrated that holding a facial expression will cause the subject to feel the emotion that has been facially expressed.

Studies on Wim Hof, the multiple (Guiness Book of World Records) world record holder for cold exposure and his controlled hyperventilation method have revealed that WHM breathing can alter blood pH levels into a more alkaline state. When this happens the alkalinity of the blood dissolves stress hormones. Also, the body stores extra hormones it cannot process in lymphatic tissue.

Memories aren’t accurate depictions of life. They are subjective experiences that can change for the better or worse with each recollection.

Ideas from Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson, Master and his Emissary by Ian McGilchrist, and I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hoffsteder inspired how I contextualize thought and consciousness for this activity. These works assert that the right hemisphere is our nonverbal, receptive, super consciousness. We’ll call it the Programmer. In order for humans to use technology like tools and reading often and overlaid on other activities, Programmer makes Autopilots do the busy work. Our society is so technologically advanced and abstracted from nature, that most of us let our Autopilots remain in control almost all the time! I wrote some thoughts on Autopilots already…

Negative emotions are an Autopilot alerting its Programmer that it is either exhausted, or in over its head. In other words, activation of the sympathetic nervous system. The positive emotions occur when we have shifted control of the body back to the Programmer, who sees novelty as a joy, not a burden. This shift is also known as activation of the parasympathetic nervous system.

By doing these exercises, we are training our nervous systems to react to novelty (stressful situations) by passing control over to the Programmer. This gives us our broadest tool set for problem solving and allows the true you to play the game of life for a while! What fun.  If you have a trigger emotion due to trauma, then this presents a cool opportunity. It will be painful to do, but it can fix you.

Neurons that wire together, fire together. This exercise lays the foundation for a healthy reaction to emotions, completely removed from the stressful event which made your poor Autopilot take on a cautious, aversive response to the emotion. If you repeat it enough times, it will become your natural response.

Let’s look at martial arts for an example. Before you’ve learned to fight, if someone punches you, you’ll likely flinch and curl in on yourself or jerk back. A trained fighter would feel their head slipping the punch by instinct while realizing they are in a situation and that the extended fist of their opponent has left their chin open. Their counter punch would connect before any Autopilot reacted.

We are going to lay new experience over the painful past. Then we are going to revisit the new experience intentionally as needed, until it just becomes our instinct to react that way.

Subconscious Update Exercise

• Get triggered! Either out in the world (if so, go right to the next step), or intentionally with the following technique. Imagine your trigger, the thing you want to change. How does it make you fee? Make and hold that expression for a few minutes. When you begin to feel the emotion, think about all the times you can recall having felt this way and what caused it. Really let yourself become immersed in the feeling. It’s very important that you stew in it for a bit and visualize what has caused these feelings.
• Do 2 rounds of Wim Hof Method breath cycles and hold in your last breath. Make sure you are laying down or comfortably seated. WHM breathing can make you light headed and some people faint.
• Close your eyes and imagine an ideal outcome to the original memory, or imagine yourself coaching a younger you on how things will turn out okay. If it would be more productive to take this event as a prompt for a certain behavior (ex; interruptions while I speak are an opportunity to redirect focus to something urgent. What is it?) Give your younger self in the memory a positive, satisfied emotion.
• Make and hold the facial expression until you feel that emotion. Connect with the times in your life you’ve felt that way. It’s the same routine as the negative expression…
• Journal your experience
• Now live the dream! Next time your trigger event happens, you may slip right into your new programmed behavior. If not, as soon as you become aware that you’ve been triggered, repeat the process. Some stuff is harder to change, but everything in our minds is malleable and impermanent.

Let me know how it went!

Please share your results at the blog’s Discord Server. I look forward to hearing about your experiences!