Day Two Hundred and Eighty Two!!!!

Survival 


The body has a survival system to any threatening circumstance. This system is usually triggered by external events, yet it can also be triggered to the perception of threat to ones well being. When there is a threat, your brain decides if there is danger, and this isn’t done consciously, this is to do with you limbic system and your body prepares to take appropriate action and that action is either fight, flight or freeze to the point of shut down.


If fight or flight is engaged, then your brain will mobilize your bodies energy to activate what is possible, to take action required for survival, meaning that your brain will become alert to anything that is a cue for survival. Seeing food means that adrenaline will be released in the blood stream by the adrenal glands, your heart will pump faster shooting oxygen rich blood out to your arms and legs to prepare the muscles to take action, your breathing capacity will increase and the digestive process will slow down. You may tremble and shake, the mouth become drier, and you may experience butterflies in your stomach, and/or feel nauseous in order to better meet the physical or psychological challenge in order to survive. 


Thoughts have emotional components, and most of our conscious awareness tends to be on the thoughts with little awareness on their underlying emotions. The more rational and problem solving part of the brain becomes inhibited, and as such during these threatening situations our ability to think our way out of the problem is compromised. Your body is repeatedly preparing you for action to survive the experience, so that, when you are confronted by a fast food restaurant or a trigger of cookies on the plate, these are psychological challenges rather than physical challenges, for which our anxiety prepares us. Stress and anxiety is usually associated with increased muscular tension and stress.


Excessive levels of stress can cause a depletion in the levels of neurotransmitters, resulting in mood and sleep problems and a reduction of serotonin absorption when GABA levels become low. Poor sleep equals a weakened immune system, which equals a greater inflammation and subsequent increased emotional and physical pain. Lower levels of dopamine also result in a poor mood. Negative emotions are to do with survival, whereas positive emotions are to do with the expansion of capacities and growth as new experiences and meanings become integrated into how you view yourself. They are motivations to organize new directions as well as setting new goals. 


The goal of new experiences in regards to diet, weight loss, and a new lifestyle, is to surrender to the experience of flow and of being in the zone, and to make it make sense to you as personal authorship. When transformed activities are satisfying and pleasurable, and marked by recognition processes, then it makes us become who we feel ourselves to be, making it coherent and inevitable, natural and fundamental with positive emotions, providing motivations that refuel the rewiring, broadening and building and creating a new you.