Mike Gosling Ph.D. Executive Leadership Coaching

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Dr. Mike Gosling

The Divided Brain

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A sustainable emotional health solution is vital to human wellness, workplace productivity, and a healthier lifestyle. Never have the prospects been better. People are enthusiastic about the shift to emotional wealth and its potential to eliminate exposure to surges in negative emotion, reduce the impact of stress felt in the body, foster new personal development opportunities and improve one’s quality of life. Corporations are increasingly supportive as they look to strengthen emotional skills and revitalize individual and organizational performance.

In his recent video – The Divided Brain – Psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, challenges the notion that the left hemisphere of the brain is all knowing. He asks that we question the left hemisphere talk, which is convincing, and reduce the need to control everything. The right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice and can’t construct all the arguments of the brain’s left hemisphere. He draws us back to what the right hemisphere, the seat of emotion and empathy, knows to a broader context and reminds us that the intuitive mind (the right hemisphere) is a sacred gift.

Working so much with the brain, as I do in my ELPro coaching model, this video offers a refreshing perspective on how the ‘right’ side of the brain – or the emotion side – is so often subsumed as the “poor cousin” of the left. In reality, emotion is the force of real life! What do you think? Please add your comments below.

Deepak Chopra On Releasing Emotion Toxins

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Cleansing your body of emotion toxins (what I call emotional constipation) caused by negative thoughts, wrong or outdated beliefs, values, memories and unmet expectations, will help heal your body and bring back vitality, energy and well-being. Emotional health is your responsibility. No one else can make you angry or anxious!

Deepak Chopra, a world-renowned authority in the field of mind-body healing and a best-selling author, gives us seven steps to releasing emotion toxicity…

Deepak details the seven steps to releasing emotional toxicity, which include:

  • Take responsibility for your emotions.
  • Witness the emotions in your body.>
  • Define it: is it anger, fear?
  • Express it: write down what is happening.
  • Share it with a loved one.
  • Do a ritual to release it: write it down and burn it.
  • Bring it to a closure: go out and celebrate.

Diversification of Emotion

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By Baiju Solanki – Performance Coach

Recently I attended a seminar where they talked about the importance of diversifying your financial portfolio. Any good IFA worth their salt will tell you that you should never have your investments in one place, or even in one type of investment, i.e. stocks & shares, property, ISA’s, the list goes on. Financial wealth is determined by the number of sources of income you have. The more sources the more financial wealth you can acquire.

This got me thinking about Emotional Wealth. Do we allow ourselves to have a diverse portfolio of emotional wealth?

Baiju Solanki’s definition of Emotional Wealth:

“Emotional Wealth is having a balance in your life, ensuring that you have more good days than bad days, and that you don’t allow the stresses that we have in our life to have a detrimental effect on us.”

What is your definition of emotional wealth. Click on “LEAVE A COMMENT” in the top right hand corner of this post. We’d love to hear from you.

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Baiju Solanki is a Performance Coach. His contact details are:

baiju@pctconsultancy.com
www.performancecoachingandtraining.co.uk
www.developingcoachingcultures.com
07968 533918

Understand Your Emotional Brain

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To perceive emotion is to receive and interpret information from both external (world) and internal (body) environments. Your senses – sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing – connect you to the world around you, through your physical brain. Perception is the process by which information (events) about the outside world impinges on the sensory organs and is then decoded and interpreted by the brain – resulting in a conscious experience (behaviour or response). Perception is one aspect of cognition – all the mental activities which enable us to know and make decisions (appraisals) about the world (our environment).

The physical brain
Four major brain regions are: the brain stem, cerebellum, neocortex (cerebrum) and limbic system. The limbic system – comprising the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and connecting pathways – mediates and expresses emotional, motivational, sexual and social behaviors, and memory.

The brain controls all involuntary functions at the same time. These include breathing and heartbeat, as well as the higher mental processes such as thought, and the physical activities of breathing, movement, and coordination, plus non-physical functions such as emotions. It regulates bodily functions and is the seat of your personality. The brain absorbs information from the outside world, interprets it, and makes the body act accordingly. It does this through a fascinating process of communication between specialised brain or neural cells – called neurons – that fire electrical impulses, or thoughts. The largest web of neocortical functioning in the brain is between the prefrontal area and the limbic structures. This perhaps explains the great variety of emotions that humans experience. The amygdala plays a large role in emotion processing.

The key to creating emotional health is putting a gap between event and response. When impulse happens, usually from the amygdala (the fear centre of the brain), meaning is formed through appraisal. It is in the gap that the trigger – the conditioned response – occurs and you experience the response in your body. For example, your first experience on a roller coaster may be exhilarating or terrifying. The memory will be stored as such, and will be recalled at any time the words roller coaster is mentioned. In this way you form emotional habits. The good news is that cognitive reframing allows you to change your emotional habits to enjoy a life of ease!

Appraisal, through the operation of the thalamus, hypothalamus, and limbic system, is the trigger for emotional response. Appraisal is a source of autonomic (involuntary) arousal, as the emotional response is mediated by the autonomic nervous system. The physiological effects of accumulated arousal felt in the body can be severe (See – Physiological effects of stress).

Autonomic Nervous System – ANS
Our central nervous system is a regulatory structure that helps people adapt to changes in their environment. The ANS is comprised of two parts – voluntary and involuntary. We use our voluntary nerves to direct our muscles within our body to move, more or less, at will. The involuntary nervous system helps our glands control the functioning of our organs, such as; heart, lungs, bowels, and digestion. The involuntary nerves consist of two types – sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system provides adrenalin. The parasympathetic nervous system has a moderating influence. It helps restore balance, once the threat has passed.

When our bodies are in a peaceful state, the two branches of the ANS are in check. However, when there is a stressful response or threat – anger, fear, sadness, disgust, or surprise – the sympathetic (fight, flight) branch dominates the parasympathetic (calming, restorative) branch, and we are aware of our organs functioning. We may feel a racing heart, clammy hands, a tightening in our abdomen, and an urge to use our bowels. Sympathetic nerves react this way by means of the chemical, adrenalin, which is released at the nerve-endings of the organs concerned. For any task, there is an optimum level of arousal at which performance will be most efficient. On the whole, moderate levels of arousal seem to act as positive reinforcers and extreme as negative.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Mike Gosling helps people grow and brings clarity, purpose, happiness and abundance to their lives. He is an expert in teaching people how to apply their emotional intelligence in emotional leadership and everyday living. An author, business owner, ELPro coach and mentor to successful leaders worldwide, Mike is also co-founder of the world’s premier membership site to reduce stress, EmotionMatters.com. To reach a new level of self-understanding and greater effectiveness in your personal and professional life, sign up for the e-Changes! Newsletter

© Copyright 2002-2012 Gosling International

What You Should Know About Adrenal Fatigue

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Recently, a colleague of mine, Eric Holmlund, who assists me with internet marketing, wrote on his blog why he has not been writing much lately. He says,

“The reason I haven’t written much lately, and haven’t created any new lessons in the past few months is because I haven’t had the energy to do it.

I’ve been experiencing what is probably best described as Adrenal Fatigue. In case you’re curious about it, there is a very good article explaining it here”: http://www.lammd.com/articles/adrenal_fatigue.asp

Here’s another post from Positive Health Wellness on Everything You Need To Know About Adrenal Fatigue (Plus Management Guide).

Eric has gotten to a point in his life where he has physiological symptoms of severe stress. He writes:

“Various medical tests showed that my adrenals simply aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do… resulting in various chemical imbalances in my body. For example, I’m not producing much cortisol, which has several physical ramifications. To aggravate the situation, my adrenals are compensating by producing too much epinephrine (adrenaline), which results in a lot of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms.”

This advice from Eric has enormous implications for many people. I applaud what he has done in bringing his condition out into the open. What ever we can do to help people understand that stuff to do with emotions is vital to our well-being and NOT something to hide away. Everything we do in life is about our emotions. It is imperative we learn to recognize, use, understand and manage our emotions if we are ever going to enjoy perfect health. Positive emotion is a non-problem status. Negative emotion (stress) is unhealthy and leads to emotional constipation. Eric has boldly, and at some risk to his business, let us know his current medical condition. He says that he believes “this condition is most likely the result of many years of poor sleep habits, constant blood sugar spikes, and internalizing my stress and anxiety.” From my own experience, I believe this to be true.

On May 29, 2011 I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. This came as an enormous shock to me as I, like Eric, have enjoyed good health and an active lifestyle. In my case, I believe that my current condition is mostly due to severe stress I have experienced since February 2009 when Karen and I were forced to close our counseling and coaching practice in Singapore and return to Australia as bankrupts due to the severe adverse impact and failure of our business, brought on by the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. I have experienced severe anxiety over my family’s situation and financial stress over two years and unbeknown to me, my body has reacted in an adverse way, triggering Type 2 diabetes. I am now aware of what my body is doing and have put steps in place to manage it so that I can get on with living and a life of ease!

So what’s all this got to do with Adrenal Fatique. I had not heard of this condition until Eric mentioned it, and according to Dr. Lam’s website, many medical doctors are not fully knowledgeable about it . It seems to me that Adrenal Fatigue could be a progression of severe stressors playing havoc with our body if we don’t actively work on emotional stress. In Lesson 2 (Module 1) we have a detailed account of the effects of stress felt in the body:

Physiological effects felt in the body from accumulated stress include:

  1. A breakdown in the immune system. Making a person more susceptible to colds and flu, skin conditions, and other ailments.
  2. An interruption to the autonomic nervous system that copes with digestion, bowel irritation and evacuation, reproduction, and recovery from stress.
  3. A decrease in the level of serotonin – the chemical in the brain that is responsible for mood and thinking. Lowered serotonin leaves one feeling flat, despondent, depressed – a loss of “joie-de-vivre”. This depressed mood state often manifests as lethargy and “I can’t be bothered”. Thinking also becomes impaired and irrational.
  4. Lowered personal esteem – caused by a loud inner voice – which can lead to depression and/or nervous suffering.

What we do not cover in Emotional Wealth Academy, as we are not medical doctors, is what happens to our body after prolonged and chronic stress has done its work on us. I’m not saying that everyone who experiences physiological effects from stressors felt in the body will progress to adrenal fatigue. I am saying that given Eric’s experience and my own, we owe it to ourselves and our families to take emotional stress seriously and Emotional Wealth Academy is a starting point for understanding how stress is caused and what we can do about its symptoms.

If you are experiencing behavioral change, emotional distress and personal problems or are simply troubled by your feelings, please see your doctor or mental health professional and get early advice as to how you deal with adrenalin arousals felt in your body. Read our fact sheet on the physical, cognitive and emotional effects of stress. Do not let your adrenalin floods continue without seeking professional help.

Learn how to effectively manage emotional stress.

On his website, Dr. Michael Lam lists a number of the signs and symptoms of Adrenal Fatigue. He says:

“None of the signs or symptoms by themselves can definitively pinpoint Adrenal Fatigue. When taken as a group, these signs and symptoms do form a specific Adrenal Fatigue syndrome or picture of a person under stress. These signs and symptoms are often the end result of acute, severe, chronic, or excessive stress and the inability of the body to reduce such stress. Stress, once a “basket” term used by physicians to explain non-specific symptoms, undetectable by conventional blood tests, is not a mystery to the body at all.

The ability to handle stress, physical or emotional, is a cornerstone to human survival. Our body has a complete set of stress modulation systems in place, and the control center is the adrenal glands. When these glands become dysfunctional, our body’s ability to handle stress is reduced.

The adrenal glands are two small glands, each about the size of a large grape. They are situated on top of the kidneys. Their purpose is to help the body cope with stress and help it to survive. Each adrenal gland has two compartments. The inner or medulla compartment, modulates the sympathetic nervous system through secretion and regulation of two hormones, called epinephrine and norepinephrine, which are responsible for the fight or flight response. The outer adrenal cortex comprises 80 percent of the adrenal gland and is responsible for producing over 50 different types of hormones in three major classes – glucocorticoids, mineralcorticoids and androgens.

The most important glucocorticoid is cortisol. When this is lowered, the body will be unable to deal with stress. This happens in Adrenal Fatigue.”

What You Should Know About Adrenal Fatigue – Dr. Lam