Movement & Neuroscience nuggets: INPUTS, OUTPUTS & Interpretation
Two destinations on two consecutive weekends. Late nights, a delayed train, a break of routine and two presentations to give on my return. Phew! I’m feeling a wee bit fatigued to say the least. This Thursday just gone, I gave my first ever ‘The power of transformative neuro drills’ presentation at Rutland Nursery’s ‘Thrive & Bloom’ monthly wellbeing event. I confess, I’m not yet comfortable doing public speaking so for me putting myself out there is doing a hard thing and getting me out of my comfort zone. Despite some tech issues (I couldn’t access all of my presenter notes) the show had to go on and it was a hit!
So many people chatted to me afterwards, thanked me and told me how much they learnt from it. One lady said she couldn’t understand why she had had these episodes of extreme unexplained dizziness during stressful and uncertain times in her life. During my talk she had a ‘lightbulb’ moment, suddenly the dizzy spells all made sense, it was because her brain didn’t feel safe so it wanted her to stop doing everything so she could feel safe! Just understanding why the brain does this gives people immense relief, and it also gives them HOPE that they CAN improve their undesirable OUTPUTS by learning how to improve their INPUTS.
This is precisely why I wanted to get this neuroscience info out there. When we start to understand our brains a bit better, we can also understand why our brain can interpret inputs (incoming info to the brain) as perceived threats even if there is none and how this may affect our physiology and what we can do to improve that.
I’m slightly geeking out with what I discovered today on instagram. It’s a part of the brain that I wasn’t aware of. It’s called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, and it can grow if we do hard things that we don’t like (things like public speaking). What’s more, is that once we do this, it means that our ability to adapt and do other hard things gets EASIER and that this may even increase our longevity. So do the hard things, trust me, it was incredibly rewarding and I’m still buzzing from it.