Why Is The Synergy Between Your Two Brains That Important?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

You don’t get to control your feelings, Thinking Brain. Self-control is an illusion. It’s an illusion that occurs when both brains are aligned and pursuing the same course of action. It’s an illusion designed to give people hope. And when the Thinking brain isn’t aligned with the Feeling Brain, people feel powerless, and the world around them begins to feel hopeless.

The only way you consistently nail that illusion is by consistently communicating and aligning the brains around the same values. It’s a skill, much the same as playing water polo or juggling knives is a skill. It takes work. And there will be failures along the way. You might slice your arm open and bleed everywhere. But that’s just the cost of admission. ~ Mark Manson

Can you give a guess about the wonderful skill to which the brilliant Mark Manson is referring? Let me help you a little: it is probably the most overrated “soft” skill everybody is talking about in the business context — even the bossy manipulators who have found themselves rushed to adapt their talk during the pandemic. Pathetic, I know!

This skill is the hero of so many articles, books, and speeches. It has drastically helped the creation of many new positions in the self-development and coaching industry. The labels might be different, but they all revolve around the same magic skill.

Please give warm applause to our winner: “Emotional Intelligence”! 

How is an emotion managed?

An external stimulus triggers an emotion. Let’s say a stranger acts cruelly towards you, which results in a legitimate anger emotion. This emotion is sent to your subconscious program — the fastest part of your brain in processing data (40 million bytes/sec). One of two case scenarios might occur at this point:

If your program is anything but your friend; if it is full of emotional scars, unprocessed feelings, trauma flashbacks, mental patterns — you name it, the anger emotion translates into the same feeling. Thus, you react in a violent way whose only purpose is to hurt the other party. There is no space between the stimulus and your response. The misalignment may be described this way:

The Left logical brain says, “It doesn’t make any sense!”. The Right emotional brain sarcastically answers, “You must be kidding me! You’re worthless! It’s no secret, and you’ll only confirm it if you don’t defend yourself, loser!”

If you worked on re-writing your invasive program, you would be successful in enlarging the gap between the stimulus and your response so that you could understand their meanness is anything but personal, and that it is saying much more about their suffering. The anger emotion would be, consequently, transformed into a pity feeling. There will be no misalignment:

The Left logical brain says, “It doesn’t make any sense!”. The Right emotional brain, knowing your self-worth replies, “Oh yes it doesn’t make any sense. You don’t deserve that s/he mistreats you. You can stand for yourself firmly and gently. But s/he is a stranger, and you will probably never meet again. It’s simply not worth it. Let’s move on!”

In the words of David J. Pollay: “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they look for a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally. Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Believe me. You’ll be happier.”

I wrote this article detailing the different types of anger a few months ago, should you be interested!

What if the person responsible for the “negative” emotion is not a stranger?

Note that I am putting the negative attribute between quotation marks since I don’t believe that any emotion should be labeled as “bad” and something to be ashamed of and hide.

The emotion might be legitimate when you are a secure person and that someone either violated your boundaries — resulting in frustration, anger, sometimes even disgust — or did not reciprocate your healthy investment in the relationship, which may generate disappointment and sadness.

If you are not familiar with psychology, that you still have no clue about what a subconscious program from which you are operating on auto-pilot 95 to 97% of your day — while you were not even responsible for writing it in the first place — is, or that you have just started your homework, you might experience another variety of “negative” emotions, namely resentment, anxiety, jealousy, envy, etc.

Whether you are in the first or second category, the emotion is always a good thing as it is a sign something is off and that you either need to stand for yourself or start working on your program!

Let’s go back to the anger emotion, shall we? There are two options whenever you unbecome the filter, reconnect with who your true self is and grow to an emotionally mature person:

• The person you are dealing with is an abuser suffering from a personality disorder from the Cluster B DSM-5 classification (Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Antisocial Personality Disorder): know they are looking for your reaction to nurture their sick ego. What you can do is to educate yourself about their different strategies, thereby you can easily spot them and answer accordingly. What you need to keep in mind is that you should NEVER share your anger or any other emotion with this kind of person. They lack empathy and will only take advantage of your sacred emotions.
  
  
• The person you are interacting with is an imbalanced kind soul who is more likely unable to understand the basics of a healthy relationship. You can decently express your anger, bearing in mind that they can walk away with all their dignity!
  
  

If you can afford to go no contact with a toxic or emotionally unhealthy person who is draining you daily, then don’t think twice. You owe it to yourself and have all the right to choose nurturing relationships in which the keyword is healthy expectations.

An emotionally healthy person needs to be seen, recognized, encouraged, challenged, celebrated. They need free acts of kindness and generosity. They need the roles in a relationship to be clarified. They need people to keep their promises. They need them to apologize quickly and sincerely whenever screwing things up — as we all do anyway!

While love is a pure emotion you can give to anyone and anything, a relationship is deserved!

Takeaways

Your EQ level — most particularly your emotions’ regulation part — is correlated to the level of the synergy between your Left and Right brains.

The more you destroy your limiting beliefs, the closer you are to the original “Principles” Center — numbed under the layers that were created by your life-time of conditioning, and the higher this synergy is!

That’s how you become able to manage your “negative” emotions healthily! You feel them but developed the gap between the stimulus and the answer enough to respond effectively!

Thank you so much for deciding to stop by and invest some of your precious time reading this story! It means a lot to me!

If you feel interested in discovering the different stages of re-writing your program, then this article might be for you.

If you found some value in this piece, then this one might also resonate.