You don’t know me yet, but maybe you should! Hi, there! I’m Felipe and I’m a medical doctor who fell in love with breathing (you know, that thing you do around 22,000 times a day?) and the multiple ways breathing techniques can influence our physiology, our psychology, and the intricate neurophysiology aspects of the whole process — that is how breathing changes the way our body works, our mind functions and what exactly is happening inside our brains that makes us feel so different when we breathe one way or another. In fact, I’ve been so interested in this topic that I’ve become a breath coach so I can teach you how to breathe functionally and reap the benefits yourself. Also, I started writing about some of the things I’ve learned so you can understand it too.
This one is going to be more about psychology than breathing itself.
Yesterday I came across Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work about EMOTIONS and how our brains actually create them. As a Doctor and Coach, I was instantly hooked by its implications in a clinical sense. Although I believe I could write a whole book on this, I’ll summarize it for you:
Let’s start from the very beginning — the etymology of the word “emotion”.
The word emotion is a contraction of two words: exit and motion. The ancient Greeks believed that the smiles and the frowns associated with such states as happiness or sadness indicated that the soul was coming out of the body and revealing itself. It was making an “exit motion.” This became “e-motion” or simply “emotion.”
Your body is constantly transmitting information to the brain about all the processes, reactions, and metabolic systems in function (how much glucose, salt, oxygen, CO2, you have racing through your tissues and blood vessels at any given time); your brain is constantly receiving all that information and fine-tuning the systems to keep them running properly.
Your Brain is not WIRED in a way that lets you feel all of those sensory changes (if it wasn’t like this, we couldn’t process anything else in our lives just by the sheer amount of data to be processed) so what it gets is a SUMMARY of all that is happening in ALL THOSE SYSTEMS. Picture the brain as the CEO of a multinational corporation. Not every piece of information about the daily operations of every office around the world comes to the CEO’s attention, just a summary of the results that is handed to him via an office admin or secretary. That SUMMARY is projected as a FEELING and it can be of comfort, unease, pleasantness, unpleasantness, and so on.
Now I want you to remember something crucial. Your beautiful, powerful, and unique CEO of a brain, just like an important pharaoh after death, is forever trapped inside a sarcophagus we call a skull. Plus, it can only understand your outside world by scraps of information — the SENSES — or the reports — FEELINGS — that come to its attention.
That FEELING is then used to create a STORY the brain tells itself about what’s going on inside your body in relation to what’s happening in the outside world — the FEELING becomes a feature of the EMOTION. That STORY, in turn, is created using your past experiences and is “written” in a way that your brain gets to “PREDICT” how you’re going to see, hear and feel next!
Let’s quickly recap: The CEO-in-a-box gets a report of how its company is doing and, being creative as it is, tells itself a story of how the company is interacting with the markets and customers, and then makes a prediction, based on all of the past reports, how it believes the company is going to act next. Freaky right?
So basically, when you get really NERVOUS about a situation, cortisol and adrenaline (stress hormones) flood your body and you FEEL uneasy or unsafe, your Brain processes that feeling, does a quick check on all your past experiences related to that feeling, attempts to PREDICT what’s going to happen next, and BOOM — An EMOTION is born!
Your brain is trying to be a fortune teller, but it actually has the power to control all of your complex organic systems (it is the CEO, remember?) so your body BELIEVES it and acts accordingly. Now imagine you go to the town’s fair and pay a visit to the fortune teller. You get inside her tent, see that crystal ball on the table, sit down and, instead of talking to you or reading your hand, she would gaze at her crystal ball as it showed your internet browser history, only to then, with that particular information as the WHOLE story of your life, make a prediction of how your year is going to go… (Too cringy? Calm down, fellas, it’s just an analogy!)
This is part of why neuroscientists say that “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”. Your brain LOVES predictability! The hidden truth here and the most important implication of this phenomenon (for me) is: although you can’t change your past experiences, you can feed your brain new information to make a different prediction.
I’ll say it again: you can seed or feed your brain different or new information to make its future predictions UNPREDICTABLE, therefore making it less empowered to take over control of your body. (it gets confusing, I know… psychology, right? Stay with me!).
In a nutshell: when you do different things, your brain gets used to different outcomes and is less likely to predict your next step and is less likely to hijack your body’s system and you’re less likely to get stuck on an emotional spiral (gives a whole new meaning to “never let them know your next move”).
As a kid you are constantly being told what to do or not to do by your parents, grandparents, social workers, teachers, doctors, you name it. Because you’re not — by any means — autonomous, you’re WIRED by the decisions and actions of others. Once you grow up and become an INDEPENDENT ADULT, you finally get to be the one responsible to WIRE YOURSELF! You can (and MUST) make decisions about what you experience RIGHT NOW, because you can’t change the past, and the future hasn’t happened yet so it’s out of your control. You’re finally free to make choices about how you act, and those actions, choices, and decisions either REINFORCE your brain’s predictions or CHANGES THEM! (So, GO WIRE YOURSELF!).
In conclusion, the next time you’re feeling physically uncomfortable, emotionally sad, and picturing yourself spiraling into the hole of self-pity, remember the following:
Sometimes in life, you’re responsible for changing things, NOT BECAUSE YOU’RE CULPABLE or TO BLAME for those things, but BECAUSE YOU’RE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN CHANGE THEM!
While that can feel and maybe even is UNFAIR it’s also HELPFUL because it means that you ALWAYS HAVE TOOLS AVAILABLE AT YOUR DISPOSAL TO HEAL YOURSELF. Just ACT differently so you can FEEL differently.
So, tell me: What different thing are you gonna do today, so you can feel different tomorrow?
Kindly reminder: Breathwork is always a great idea ^^
