Too Many Tiger-Strewn Pathways

You’ve felt down at times; sometimes for very little reason. There have been times in your life when stomach-upsetting feelings of fear have surprised you. Maybe more commonly, you know the feelings of frustration or impatience. You’ve had these feelings because that is part of how your brain and body react to life. You are aware of having those emotions because they are electrical and chemical eruptions throughout your brain and body. They are the same reactions, though less intense, that happened to the caveman faced with a Sabertooth tiger.

Certainly, at times, you can feel emotional solely because of an imbalance within your body. A common example is the depressed feelings a woman might have around the time of menstruation and some people are vulnerable to chemical depression caused by chemical imbalance in the brain and body. In most cases, though you are aware of feeling emotional because of a mental trigger or stimulus. Modern life is filled with situations, people, memories, future projections and much more that trigger the body reactions we characterize as negative emotion.

These discomforting and sometimes life-disrupting feelings exist for survival. If the caveman hadn’t felt fear he wouldn’t have run from the saber tooth tiger and you wouldn’t be around. If you don’t feel fear, you might persist in some activity or situation that is not safe for you.

Today we are rarely wending our way down paths populated by actual tigers. Fear happens because you are imagining some uncomfortable future possibility. Your imagination is kicking up a soup of damaging body reactions. You are fighting mental tigers.

Our goal should be that we don’t spend the majority of our days embroiled in such feelings resulting from a runaway imagination. From a neurological standpoint, the effects on the brain and central nervous system sustaining negative emotions are stress producing and unhealthy.

There are ways to train your brain to better manage your emotional responses. In the case of emotions resulting from a runaway mind, a runaway imagination, the focus is on the feeling itself, the eruption in the brain and body. That is something you can do something about. What you are projecting is either just a possibility that doesn’t yet exist or it is a reality that you are going to have to eventually deal with in a coherent, rational manner. You are not going to be helped having it embroil your central nervous system in unhealthy reactions for long periods of time.

There is a great deal of science today illustrating the damaging physiological effects of negative emotions. They take a toll on the health of your brain and body. Don’t worry you will always feel necessary emotions, (no pun intended); they will be kicked up to warn you, to prepare you, to help you survive. But, in today’s world our minds are taken down too many mental tiger strewn paths. We are fighting mental battles continuously. Our bodies and the effective working of our brains are being compromised.

If you are considering ways of learning to manage your vulnerability to negative emotion better, start with learning to train your brain to respond in healthier ways rather than with dissecting the what is triggering the emotions you are feeling.

Find ways that slow your mind, concentrate your mind and relax your body. Today's tigers are mental. Work on changing how your are responding to the tiger-strewn pathways not on fighting each tiger.