What we experience as reality is a combination of the world inside our bodies and what is going on in the world outside. For example, a person can see a gun where there is no gun. If a soldier's heart is racing and has trouble inspecting the visual input, his brain might predict that a person is holding a gun even if it really is a stick.  Our brain's predictions come not only from past experiences but also from the news and social media. They come from what the world is curating for you.

How reality is created in our brains

Instead of passively observing reality, your brain is predicting your reality. What will I do in the next moment? How did I act the last time I was in this situation? Predicting and correcting is far more efficient than only reacting. So, your brain is making informed guesses about what is going to happen next to reduce uncertainty. It is continually drawing on past experiences to create your present.

The brain is a prediction machine

The brain's most important job is not thinking or feeling. It is to keep you alive and healthy. Every thought you have, or emotion you feel, or action you take is to support your body. Your brain's job is then to anticipate the needs of your body en meet it before it arrives.

The brain is not for thinking

The brains' most important job is to control the systems of your body in an efficient way. Your energy efficiency is like a budget that consists of resources like water, salt, and glucose. Every time your brain has to learn something new, it has to withdraw from the budget. Stress is when your brain withdraws from your body budget. In a good stress situation, you will make a deposit again. In chronic stress, your brain keeps spending your budget, but you don't have sufficient deposits.

Understanding anxious, stressed feelings

We assume outside events cause our anger or anxiety. But emotions are made by your brain as you need them.  This means the more you know and understand emotions, the more you can influence how your brain will construct them.

How emotions are made

If you are running a body budget deficit, you may feel lousy. But if you're not a very granular person, feelings of anger, sadness, fear all mean the same thing to you. In this case, your brain might struggle to know how to deal with the situation. Do you have a drink of water? Do you go for a run? Do you tell someone? However, if your brain has learned that sadness means you have lost something you care for, whereas disappointment means your expectations turned up empty, it will lead to very specific actions.

Understanding your mood

When the body is running a deficit from chronic stress, the body stops spending. It means you stop moving your body, and you stop learning. You're not sleeping enough because of all the worries.  If you don't make deposits, such as enough sleep, healthy eating, giving and getting support etc., you will eventually get to a place where you are bodily bankrupt.

The importance of making sufficient deposits

Emotional granularity is the ability to put emotion into words. Emotion is an event where your brain uses your current knowledge about your feelings to make sense of the changes in your body (increased heart rate, heavy breathing, etc.). It connects the sense data and the feelings you have with what is going on around you. For example, tightness in the chest is experienced as anxiety or determination. The more concepts you kn﻿ow, the better you are able to construct your emotions more precisely to fit the situation you are in.

Emotional granularity

Your daily experiences is a carefully controlled illusion constructed by your brain. The hallucination creates all your experiences and guides your actions.
This is the way your brain gives meaning to the sensory inputs of your body and the world. You are not reacting to experience, but your brain is constantly making predictions about what will happen and acting on it.

Your brain predicts your experiences

You are more responsible for your actions than you think. This is because you're the only person who can change the way things are. The actions your brain takes today will become your brains' predictions tomorrow. So making an effort to cultivate new experiences today and learning new things is an investment in who you will be tomorrow.

We are more responsible than we think

A conversation with neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett on the counterintuitive ways your mind processes reality—and why understanding that might help you feel a little less anxious.

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