How strong is your mind?

No matter how strong you think your mind is, it’s always stronger than you think.

It’s a common statistic to say we only use a small percentage of our brains. Whether or not the stat is accurate, the main message remains the same…there is way more potential power in our brains that remains untapped.

Doing something physically exhausting like CrossFit or ChalkFit classes, taps into a part of your brain that some may never access. Your brain says, “I can’t go on, I can’t go on.” And then you go on.

You’ve now successfully rewritten a limiting belief by physically proving it wrong.

Proving your own mind wrong is powerful.

I like to think we have two brains. One that wants to keep us alive, and another that wants to see us thrive. You can think of these brains as lower-level and higher-level thinking. I refer to the two brains as primal and analytical.

There’s actually a third brain that is known as our emotional center. This is our limbic system aka our mammalian brain. This is our center of feelings. With so much of our feelings being influenced by our analytical neocortex “human brain” and our primal “reptilian brain”, the mammalian brain is more primed to taking cues rather than making rules.

Let’s focus on the rule-makers, the influencers of our brains, and actions.

Our primal brains are there to protect us from threats. Stay alive and reproduce, stay alive and reproduce, stay alive and reproduce…this is the daily work of your primal brain. If you feel like you’re always hungry and horny, it’s likely your primal brain dominates the conversation.

The primal brain is also wired to see the negative and identify threats in order to keep us alive.

If you feel like you’re seeing a lot of negativity lately, it’s because you are, you’re wired for it. It’s a survival mechanism.

For some, the thought of catching the virus alone is enough to fill them up with crippling fear and anxiety. Nevermind the stresses of their job or not having one, kids not going to school, and limited abilities to visit loved ones who may be in the last seasons of their healthy lives as it is.

It’s easy to see how the emotional center of our brain gets overwhelmed by messages from our primal brain, without even consulting our higher-level thinking. Our survive-or-die tunnel vision doesn’t leave much room for logic or creativity. Forget reimagining your career or starting that new business.

Let’s unpack these two brains a little more so you can use them to get you through this time, but also thrive, rather than just survive your future.

The primal brain works very simply. It just wants to know “the how.” You just ate a bowl of ice cream and your body gets hit with a sugar high. Your primal brain recognizes it got 500 calories of energy in 5 minutes. Like hitting the survival lottery! It got to feel incredible sensations of intense cold and smoothness that it’s not conditioned to feel. What is this euphoric taste and feeling?

All that primal brain cares about, is HOW can I repeat that feeling again?!?!

This is why you’re unexplainably attracted to repeat behaviors you know in your mind that are bad for you, but you feel like you can’t resist. Alcoholics and addicts fall victim to their reptilian brain and become enslaved to it running the show. Hopelessly turning on the news every day to get your daily dose of fear and negativity becomes an addictive primal behavior as well.

It’s up to your higher-level brain to make sense of events in your life. We have to rely on our higher-level brain to figure out the WHY. WHY am I feeling anxious? WHY do I crave sugar so badly right now? WHY do I eat ice cream when I clearly have sensitivities to dairy and always feel awful after I eat it? (This was a question I asked myself for years.)

Right now we need our analytical brain more than ever.

We need it to understand our own WHY behind our actions and feelings so that we can understand our past better. Understanding our prior actions and feelings is the key to rewriting a better future. This is the same for coronavirus survival as it is for weight loss.

We need our higher level brains to remind us of how strong we really are. We, athletes who have pushed ourselves to great extents, have a unique set of skills that would make even Liam Neeson jealous. Stop discounting that and start using it.

Our brains are incredibly powerful machines when we use the right parts of them. Now it’s time to tap into your own mind, to make your mind more effective. (Did I just blow your mind?)

Have confidence that you’ve done this before. You’ve exercised this part of your brain to thrive in the past and it’s time to do it again.