The important Left v Right brain insight you haven't heard before 🤯

A new perspective on the Left 👈 v Right👉 Brain 🧠

1. Thinking (Something to think about):

The left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the processing of information, memories, future ideas and creating order in your world. It’s here that worry originates from thoughts related to potential future scenarios, that may or may not happen.

If the part of the Amygdala in the left hemisphere detects something that appears dangerous, it can trigger an emotional response to prepare you for the danger. The left hemisphere processes the information it gathers and analyses it against things that it’s learnt, or experienced in the past, and creates the expectation of what you feel a situation should look like.

For example, if you’ve asked a colleague to prepare a report, your left brain may generate an expectation that it should be presented in a certain way - with clear coloured graphs for example. So when you’re given the report with no graphs, the right side of your brain experiences what’s happening in the present moment and registers that the report has been written solely with text and contains no graphs. The right brain doesn’t judge whether this is good or bad, it just experiences the current situation.

The left brain, however, is all about judgement and will come crashing in when the information hits the thalamus which usually directs it to the cortex for rational processes, it realises the expectation doesn’t match the reality and sends the data straight to the Amygdala in the left hemisphere. As Daniel Golemen described in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, your Amygdala gets hijacked and rational thoughts are ignored.

So the amygdala kicks in and fires off stress hormones to help you deal with the threat that something isn’t right. So if you’ve got to present this report to your boss in an hour, you may get triggered with an angry response where you react instantly to the situation, or maybe fear of being humiliated. The left brain goes into overdrive, and can create more stress through unhelpful thoughts (eg. what if I get fired because of this? How will I keep a roof over my head and feed the family? etc etc)

2. Unthinking (something to stop thinking about)

Whether you like it or not, the situation with the report isn't what you expected. The report doesn’t have graphs, and your expectation was that it should have. This difference between the expectation of your left brain, and the reality of the situation that your right brain is experiencing, is what can cause the stress. It’s what fires off the stories in the left brain, that trigger emotions that result in physiological responses.

If you can sit with the situation, and stay in the right brain, where there is no conflict, you’ll be able to remain present and be well placed to move forward and find a solution.

So how do I do that?...

3 .Syncing

There are different ways you can shift out of the spiralling thoughts in the left brain, such as focusing on what’s happening in your current situation right now, and getting in sync with that.

For example, focus on your breathing. Just listening to each of your slow, calm breaths, can break the circle of unhelpful analytical thoughts in the left brain, and keep you in the right brain, of just experiencing what’s happening right now.

Try it in a low risk situation today, and see whether you can feel the shift away from over analysing thoughts, and into a less stressed state of mind. Practise it a few times, and you’ll be able to use it next time something more important comes up.