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Neuroscience Nuggets #3: Know Your Body Budget
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but your brain couldn't care less if you have a meaningful job, make a positive impact, or feel inspired daily.
It's got one main subject on its mind: to keep you alive and well. Basta!
The brain's #1 job is to regulate your body’s energy so that you can grow, survive and sow your seeds. This is called allostasis, or the body budget.
Think of your brain as a brilliant (albeit not-so-fun) bank account manager. She knows (even when you try to convince her otherwise) the amount of money coming in and out of your accounts at all times. She has exclusive analytics and back-end prediction algorithms that can anticipate and satisfy your spending needs based on your past experiences in order to keep you on track and out of trouble.
The way she works her magic is by:
Perceiving the sensations within your body (which she reads without your conscious awareness).
Perceiving the information from the outside world via your skin, your eyes, your ears, etc.
Interpreting your internal and external worlds to decide the best way to allocate your body’s energy to keep you alive based on your past experiences.
While she's fussing over all of this data, you, my friend, are doing normal life things that may strain your body’s budget in small and big ways: filling your to-do lists will impossible tasks, meeting up with friends four nights in a row for drinks, bing-watching Netflix series and going to bed each night after midnight, eating take-out because you have no time to cook, feeding yourself a steady stream of anxiety-producing news. Sound familiar?
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but your brain couldn't care less if you have a meaningful job, make a positive impact, or feel inspired daily.
It's got one main subject on its mind: to keep you alive and well. Basta!
The brain's #1 job is to regulate your body’s energy so that you can grow, survive and sow your seeds. This is called allostasis, or the body budget.
Think of your brain as a brilliant (albeit not-so-fun) bank account manager. She knows (even when you try to convince her otherwise) the amount of money coming in and out of your accounts at all times. She has exclusive analytics and back-end prediction algorithms that can anticipate and satisfy your spending needs based on your past experiences in order to keep you on track and out of trouble.
The way she works her magic is by:
Perceiving the sensations within your body (which she reads without your conscious awareness).
Perceiving the information from the outside world via your skin, your eyes, your ears, etc.
Interpreting your internal and external worlds to decide the best way to allocate your body’s energy to keep you alive based on your past experiences.
While she's fussing over all of this data, you, my friend, are doing normal life things that may strain your body’s budget in small and big ways: filling your to-do lists will impossible tasks, meeting up with friends four nights in a row for drinks, bing-watching Netflix series and going to bed each night after midnight, eating take-out because you have no time to cook, feeding yourself a steady stream of anxiety-producing news. Sound familiar?
Your day-to-day habits can take a toll on your body budget, resulting in a distressed bank manager who can resort to extreme behaviour to get your attention (like burning out, having a panic attack, lashing out at your kids at the end of an exhausting week).
But, more often than not, she’ll just send out a more subtle vibe or outlook on life.
In scientific terms, this is called “affect.” In common language, it’s called mood and it’s the energetic budget our brain is working with.
Affect is the general sense of feeling you experience throughout your day. It’s much simpler than an emotion and is based on the intersecting levels of two general feelings: pleasantness (aka valence) and intensity (aka arousal).
The combinations of high to low valence and high to low arousal look like this:
When your body budget is unbalanced, it colors your mood. But a general bad feeling doesn’t always mean that something major is wrong (e.g. Like you need to leave your life and move to Brazil). It could mean that, or it may simply mean that you are taxing your body budget.
What's the best way to maintain your body budget and positively influence your mood and energy? Healthy diet, exercise and optimal sleep are the three main ingredients to a balanced body budget.
So, what's the moral of the story then? Before you jump to conclusions about what's wrong with humanity, or make big life decisions, you might want to first stop and look at your body budget. Are you hungry? Exhausted? When did you last get some exercise?
These very basic factors have HUGE implications on our moods, and therefore on everything.
Override the panic button
I was in bed with an elephant on my chest. It wasn't the first time I felt that kind of pain. It had been going on for a few days. Should I tell my husband about it? Or was it all in my head?
My father-in-law had passed away a year prior from a sudden heart attack. He had had pain in his stomach for a few days that were the early signs that something was wrong. He didn't catch them fast enough.
Was I doing the same? Was I having a silent heart attack?
I caved in and told my husband who calmly said it was probably nothing but that I should get it checked out.
It was cold in my doctor's office. I kept my winter coat on in the waiting room as I scrolled mindlessly on my phone.
It was early January 2018, and I had just tipped into the second and final year of my unemployment benefits. In one year I'd be 100% on my own.
The date loomed in my mind. "Was I making the right decision to become a coach?" "Could I survive financially?" "Would I be any good at it?" 'Should I just go back to marketing?" "Should I answer some ads on LinkedIn?" "What if this is all a big waste of time and I lose these precious months of benefits to get a full time job?"
My doctor asked what was going on. I told him about the pain in my chest and that I was a bit stressed out because I had a tipped into the final year of unemployment while I transitioned to a new career and was spending my days in cafés drinking a million coffees while I built my coaching website.
I was in bed with an elephant on my chest. It wasn't the first time I felt that kind of pain. It had been going on for a few days. Should I tell my husband about it? Or was it all in my head?
My father-in-law had passed away a year prior from a sudden heart attack. He had had pain in his stomach for a few days that were the early signs that something was wrong. He didn't catch them fast enough.
Was I doing the same? Was I having a silent heart attack?
I caved in and told my husband who calmly said it was probably nothing but that I should get it checked out.
It was cold in my doctor's office. I kept my winter coat on in the waiting room as I scrolled mindlessly on my phone.
It was early January 2018, and I had just tipped into the second and final year of my unemployment benefits. In one year I'd be 100% on my own.
The date loomed in my mind. "Was I making the right decision to become a coach?" "Could I survive financially?" "Would I be any good at it?" 'Should I just go back to marketing?" "Should I answer some ads on LinkedIn?" "What if this is all a big waste of time and I lose these precious months of benefits to get a full time job?"
My doctor asked what was going on. I told him about the pain in my chest and that I was a bit stressed out because I had a tipped into the final year of unemployment while I transitioned to a new career and was spending my days in cafés drinking a million coffees while I built my coaching website.
He examined me and then said, "You're not having a heart attack. Just stop drinking so much coffee and go back to your full-time job if you don't want the stress of owning your own business. It's hard."
And that was that!
I listened to just half of his advice. Can you guess which half, Zeva?
I was reminded of this story this week when a client had that deep, heavy feeling in her chest the day after she announced her new business to her contacts, and was debating whether to throw in the towel and go back to her old line of work.
I think she and I both experienced the "point of no return" panic button that our brains hit when they feel us tilting into a truly new territory. As you sink deeper and deeper in love with your new path, your brain starts freaking out like an old boyfriend trying to woo you back.
"But wait, it wasn't all that bad, right?"
"You've had some time to relax and take a break, isn't it time just go back to what you know?"
"Play it safe."
"The unknown is scary and hard. Beware!"
All it takes is a sharp-witted doctor, a worried parent or a friend with a fab new promotion, to cue your brain to strum up its favorite fear-mongering phrases.
I'm here to say: don't let your fears lead you off your path! Listen to them, welcome them, but explore what's really going on under the surface.
What do you really need right now?
Very often you're just looking for a concrete sign that you are moving in the right direction, and need a friendly reminder to ease off the caffeine!