How Your Brain Works & Changes — Episode #1

Feelings and emotions arise from the nervous system and neuromodulators. They are contextual and culturally dependent. While they feel uncontrollable, we can influence them by changing our nervous system through neuroplasticity.

Thoughts incorporate sensations, perceptions, and memories. They can be reflexive (automatic) or deliberate (requiring effort). Deliberate thought involves analyzing duration, path, and outcomes. Reflexive thinking dominates when resting or distracted, while deliberate thinking is required for learning, focus and change.

Actions are the “final common pathway” of the nervous system. Though short-lived, our experiences, thoughts, and feelings drive our actions and shape our impact on the world. The nervous system converts them into movement, speech, etc. Actions are also either reflexive or deliberate, requiring top-down control and feeling strained.

The autonomic nervous system regulates transitions between wakefulness, sleep, and other states. It includes sympathetic (alertness) and parasympathetic (calmness) divisions. Over 24 hours, it fluctuates between more alert and focused and more calm and unfocused. Understanding and controlling this seesaw is key to neuroplasticity and optimizing one's nervous system.

In addition to circadian (daily) rhythms, 90-minute ultradian rhythms govern our focus, perception, and sleep cycles. We can enhance learning and productivity by timing tasks around these rhythms and our personal energy levels across the day. The early parts of an ultradian cycle may feel strained but become easier.

Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the nervous system to change in response to experience. It is most dramatic in childhood but continues to a degree lifelong. In adulthood, it requires effort and focus as well as adequate rest. Acetylcholine and epinephrine are neuromodulators that “open up” neuroplasticity, marking active neurons during focused states for later change. Though learning occurs during focused, effortful practice, the actual rewiring of synapses happens during sleep and rest.

Sleep is essential for health, longevity, emotional regulation, memory, and neuroplasticity. However, sleep quality and properly timing sleep are equally important as duration. Nonsleep deep rest, a state between wake and sleep, also facilitates neuroplasticity and renewal. By understanding one's energy and focus levels across the day and night, one can optimally schedule sleep, learning, and rest for productivity and well-being.

• Sensation is divorced from perception. We constantly sense far more than we perceive or are aware of. Perception requires attention and is selective.
• Top-down control and deliberate thinking require effort and feel unnatural or strained because they activate epinephrine and norepinephrine, creating mental friction. With practice, new behaviors become easier and more reflexive.
• There are many techniques for influencing emotions by changing one's nervous system over time. Emotions arise from temporary states of the nervous system and are context-dependent.

Traumatic experiences induce neuroplasticity unconsciously through heightened arousal and the release of epinephrine and acetylcholine. This “highlights” whatever neurons are active during the event, reinforcing those connections. Deliberate neuroplasticity requires choosing a focus or skill to improve, attending fully while practicing it, and then resting. It allows us to rewire our nervous system in a targeted manner.

How do they relate to one another? Sensation refers to the initial detection of stimuli in the external or internal world by our sensory receptors. Perception is how we interpret, focus on and make sense of sensations through higher brain processes like attention, experience, biases, etc. Awareness is our conscious experience arising from what we perceive. Sensation leads to perception, which produces awareness. We can only become aware of and understand what we actively perceive.

• The nervous system translates external and internal signals into all our experiences. Understand its parts and functions.
• Perception depends on where we direct our attention. We can choose to perceive and influence our experiences.
• Feelings originate in temporary states of the nervous system. Though they feel uncontrollable, we can rewire emotional reactions over time through practice.
• Top-down control and deliberate thought require effort but become easier with consistent practice as new behaviors become reflexive. Agitation and strain lead to neuroplasticity.

• 90-minute ultradian rhythms govern our focus, energy and sleep-wake cycles. Schedule demanding tasks and rest periods around your rhythms.
• Neuroplasticity requires focus and rest. Learning and practice activate the process, but rewiring happens during sleep and rest.
• Master your autonomic nervous system by understanding your ideal sleep-wake schedule and energy levels during the day. Optimize sleep quality. Timing of learning and rest is key.
• Explore the state of non-sleep deep rest to facilitate renewal, insight, and neuroplasticity.