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  1. Brain Tip #5. Memories: All About the Past?

    May 13, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    Here’s some food for thought: there is no memory bank in your head. Your most favorite memories don’t all live happily ever after.

    In fact, every time you recall a memory, you change it by updating some small or large detail. You never notice the difference.

     

    That’s because memories are more about the future than they are the past. They’re in your brain so you can use what happened in the past to help you deal with what’s happening in the present. Your brain is continually updating old memories as you make new ones—to ensure that you’ll have all the information you need when you need it.

    As if that wasn’t weird enough, you also have emotional memories, and they operate under separate rules. They’re tricky; you can’t “re-call” them the way you can the facts of your life.

    We’ll talk more about these in the coming weeks. Here’s a clue: If you want to know what your emotional memories might be, take a look at your emotional behaviors. You know, all those behaviors you might wish you could change? Yeah; those.

    In my book, “Why Do I Feel This Way?” What Your Feelings Are Trying To Tell You, I invented an unscientific experiment to get myself some clarity about my own emotional memories. You could—if you had a mind to—recreate this experiment for yourself.

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  2. Brain Tip #4. Fear: Yours, mine and ours (Part 2)

    May 3, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    We can’t control our emotions of fear, but we have everything to say about our feelings of fear: yours, mine and ours.

     

    We often identify “our” feelings of fear by personalizing them. That’s correct because our feelings of fear—like all our feelings—are ours alone. No one can ever feel exactly the way you do about anything.

    For a long time, “my worst fear” was that I didn’t deserve to be happy. My husband died, and I felt responsible. Surely, if I had loved him enough, I would have been good enough to keep him alive. I had failed. Even though my intellectual, thinking brain knew that wasn’t so, that he had been sick and had to die, my hurt and sad feelings of loss had a different story.

    I learned a valuable lesson about “my worst fear.” A thing called Survivor’s Guilt assured me that what I was feeling was normal for people who lose love.  That helped. Being normal was something to hold onto until I felt strong enough to look “my worst fear” straight in the eye. You’ll never guess what happened next.

    My fear couldn’t look back at me. It fell apart, dissolved right before my eyes.  It couldn’t exist without me holding it up with my thoughts—I thought it to death!  I took a stand for myself against my fear, said I would not allow it to run my life.  it was my loss but it was not my fault. I don’t have that kind of power to will another person to live. Every one of us is entitled to our own destiny.

    I do, however, have the power to be honest with myself. To be responsible for what is mine—my own life. “My worst fear” got the message, and my little mother, my brain, was only too happy to have me happy and thriving again. That’s all she ever wants for me.

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  3. Brain Tip #4. Fear: yours, mine and ours (Part 1)

    May 1, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    Fears come in two varieties.

    Some fears are emotions. By definition, they happen upon you, automatically.

     

    If you jump out into traffic and a very large truck honks its horn at you, your brain will respond by sending chemicals throughout your body, to force you to stop long before you can even think about it. That’s your little mother, your brain, working to keep you safe.

    You can’t do anything about the emotion of fear. It forces you to “fight,” “flee” or “freeze” until danger is past.

    Other fears are feelings. They grow up in your thinking brain. You think them into existence with thoughts like “my worst fear is getting caught in the rain” or “what I’m most afraid of is that no one will ever love me.”

    The feeling of fear is not like the emotion. The feeling of fear is yours to do with what you will. Your brain will await your instructions. If you really want to, you can think your fear to death.

    You get to decide. Think about it. More tomorrow….

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  4. Brain Tip #3: What, where, how and why are feelings?

    April 29, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    Lots of us feel bad about our feelings. We try to ignore them, pretend they don’t exist. We’re ashamed of them: what would people think if they knew how we feel? We complicate them.

     

    Feelings are much simpler than all that drama.

    Feelings happen automatically—remember Brain Tip #1? Your brain automatically does the important things that nature tells it to do. Feelings are one of the most important parts of your survival. They tell you you’re having a reaction, a response to things you see, hear and experience. They’re the simple truth, according to you.

    Immediately after you get a feeling, you start to think about it—automatically. That’s how feelings work. All you have to do is acknowledge the feeling. You don’t have to like it, want it or act on it. You just think about it and then decide what you want to do about it—or not. Then you act, or not, and then you move on to the next thing.

    NOBODY GETS TO DECIDE WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR FEELINGS EXCEPT YOU, BECAUSE ONLY YOU CAN HAVE YOUR FEELINGS.

    Oh, yes. You may also want to keep in mind that your brain wants you to do whatever is in your best interests, and it will not second-guess you. Your brain is YOU. It will do whatever you decide.

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  5. Brain Tip #2: Your brain is always changing its structure…

    April 27, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    …which makes you a very powerful person.

     

    Your brain is charged by nature with keeping you alive, and you can help it. You can override thoughts in your head that bring you down. If you do that often enough, and replace those old thoughts with ones that lift your spirits, your brain will get the message that being happy is really, really important to you. In time, things will always go the way you say they will.

    Of course, the opposite is also true. It’s only logical.

    If you tell yourself you want to be unhappy, your brain will stop building its new scaffolding for happy and turn to building a structure that supports unhappy—isn’t that what you told it to do?

    Do you really mean to tell your brain you intend to be unhappy? Then stop talking about how unhappy everything makes you, and get busy telling yourself that happiness is what you’re really all about. Your brain will not second-guess you when you are thinking. It is more than happy to take your wish as its command.

    Think about that!

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  6. Brain Tip #1: What Your Brain Would Say

    April 24, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    From your brain’s perspective, you are the body it is in charge of keeping alive.

     

    Your brain appreciates being able to do most of its work automatically, without you having to think about it. Nature makes you get hungry and tired (and finalbookcovera bunch of other things) and so your body is gently forced to eat and sleep (and do other things). This is good news for your brain.

    As humans got more sophisticated over the eons, brains had to get more complex to keep up with YOU. You started thinking and wanting, longing. You love to have adventures, and everything that challenges you is an even bigger challenge to your brain.

    Try to remember that your brain doesn’t like too much change. It really only wants what’s best for you. It wants you to be happy, healthy, and safe. It doesn’t know how to think when you send it mixed signals, so it tries to scare you, cajole you, into changing nothing. Sometimes, it can seem like a permanently implanted, worried little mother, moving you, always, to do the best thing.

    Remember that only you can decide what’s best. In the end, it’s your brain, and it will do whatever you tell it to.

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  7. We are all connected: Happy Earth Day, Part 2

    April 17, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    As I mentioned yesterday, scientists believe our brains have evolved to enable us to thrive. They say that evolution has shown a “preference” for those aspects that connect—rather than separate—humans from one another.

     

    So what are some of these things about being human that connect us to each other?

     

    Dance causes people to trust one another. Joy leads to love. Even embarrassment—that most awful moment when you wish you could just disappear from the room—gives you a great opportunity to teach empathy to those who are watching you. Laughter—which is so contagious—makes us feel good, and it can help us reach consensus where we might otherwise be digging in our heels to win a point. Beautiful, genuine smiles warm our hearts—who can resist smiling when they see and hear a happy baby laugh?

    Compassion is something we feel automatically, without even trying; even those among us, who think they are uncomfortable with such a powerful emotion, will feel compassion in spite of their discomfort. Charles Darwin thought sympathy was the strongest of our instincts, and that societies that were sympathetic would have the most children to carry on the human race after they were gone.* There’s more, so much more about what our brains are up to.

    Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sending out some brain tips, easy and fun things to know, and note, about what’s really going on right there in your head. Check back and read what your brain—the central control room of YOU—might tell you about yourself if it could talk. And while you’re waiting, wish the Earth a happy day, and do one thing differently with IT in mind.

     

    * For more on these, see Born to be Good, by Dacher Keltner (2009).

     

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  8. Happy Earth Day!

    April 16, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    I know that here, in the United States, it is said that we pride ourselves on our personal independence, even at the expense of one another.

    But, are we really so separated from each other?

     

    Could we—would we all choose to live entirely separate and apart from other humans? Do not the vast majority of us choose—indeed long—to create families, of all kinds, and isn’t that what we think of as only natural?

    Have you ever considered that it’s not a coincidence that people gather together when disaster strikes, that even strangers become as family, reaching out to help each other, to ensure that no one is left behind in a storm? What is it that causes people from all over this country to send money, and blankets, and clothing—even toys for children—when we hear and see the suffering of others who we may never meet?

    What if I told you that our very brains have evolved to include all sorts of ways for us to connect with each other? How would you think of that in relation to your own independence? Would it offend you to know that dancing, and laughter, even embarrassment, have appeared on the scene to enable us to experience trust, joy and empathy with one another? Would you stop laughing, if you could? Would you forbid yourself to be embarrassed ever again—if you could? You couldn’t; don’t even try. These are aspects of being human that occur in us automatically, and neuroscientists link them to our feelings and emotions about others. And that’s just the beginning.

    Maybe it’s time for us to take a second look at the ways we hold fast to our fierce separateness. Maybe we should try to see it in the light of our kinder, gentler aspects, our human nature.

    What have you got to lose? Your anger? Your resentments? Your fear and suspicion that someone else, or everyone else, is out there trying to undo you, outdo you, and otherwise render you ineffectual? For Earth Day, this year, April 22nd, why not let it all go and celebrate the earth itself? Talk to a stranger. You never know what might develop from there.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  9. Now I’m Doing Radio Shows!

    April 2, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    I’m having so much fun since I started working with Dana Humphrey of Whitegate P.R.!

     

    Dana is a terrific public relations woman who really delivers for her clients.

    Here’s the latest link to an interview I did last Wednesday, March 27th with Kory French for his great show, “Book Talk,” on Break Thru Radio: http://www.breakthruradio.com/post/?dj=kory&post=1404&blog=89&autoplay=1

    The interview runs in two parts, so you can hear the whole or either half. As always, I’d love to hear from you after you’ve listened. Thanks!

    And, while I’m at it, I would so much appreciate your going to my Facebook page for “Why Do I Feel This Way?” to “Like” it. Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Why-Do-I-Feel-This-Way-by-Dina-Wilcox/281223048655193

     

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  10. Installment 3: L Got Robbed

    March 29, 2013 by Dina Wilcox

    In our final installment of L’s story of restoring her identification papers after her bag was stolen last Friday, L discovers that rural life has way more than “charm.”

     

    By the time I met her at the Department of Motor Vehicles down on Greenwich Street—is it a coincidence that so many of Government offices are still located downtown, where Peter Stuyvesant might have placed them originally?—she had already been in and out. Ever the stoic, she pronounced, “They can’t help me either, because I need to have five different kinds of identification to get a driver’s license.”

    Five? How did any of us ever get driver’s licenses in New York State? L passed me the form they had given her. There it was, under “General Requirement for Proof of Identity”:

    (1) “Proof of your date of birth” and

    (2) “4 points of proof of name along with your Social Security Card.” In a way we had come to understand our Government chooses to address us, its creators, the document warned that, if you don’t have a Social Security Card, you will need 6 points of proof of your name.  At least one “point of proof” would have to have a signature, and “3 major credit cards count as only one credit card.”

    Apparently, you can’t get a driver’s license unless you already have one.  Had the world gone mad while I was busy not watching?

    L, being from Vermont and ever resourceful in the face of madness, was ready with a remedy.  She was going back to her home state to inquire whether it might not be too late to renew her slightly expired license. To our great relief, she reported the next day that Vermont, indeed, would renew and mail her a new identification. I suggested to her parents that they treat L to a freshly minted copy of her birth certificate, with a raised seal, and they agreed. L was on her way back.

    Slowly, ever so slowly, the victim of identity theft will fill in the blanks torn open by the thoughtless thief. L says that what hurts the most is thinking of her beautiful backpack lying in a trash can somewhere with so many of the little things that made her familiar to herself. Slowly, ever so slowly, and largely without the help and consideration of her Government, she will restore herself, and that’s great news.

    Who will restore the Government for all it has lost in its civility toward its own people?

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