Neuroscientists are now finding an explanation for the influence our emotions have on our health and well-being. There are many laboratory tests and mounting evidence that we do in fact control our health.
In our everyday living, we are exposed to 400 billion bits of information per second, but we're only aware of 2000 of those. Our awareness is all about our environment, our body, about time. We are constantly bombarded with information, but our brain considers most of it irrelevant.
Reality is happening in the brain all the time and yet we haven't integrated it.
We only see what we believe is possible. We match patterns that exist within ourselves through our conditioning and memory. We react to what we perceive as reality through the filter of our emotions.
Emotions are not good or bad. Emotions are designed to reinforce chemically something into long-term memory. That's why we have them.
Those chemicals are called peptides. There's a chemical for sadness, and there's a chemical for anger, and for lust. There's a chemical that matches every emotional state that we experience. And the moment that we experience that emotional state in our brain or in our body, the hypothalamus organize the neuro-peptides to release them into the bloodstream.
From there, it finds its way to the different centers and the different parts of the body. Every single cell in the body is ready to receive these chemicals via receptors on its surface. One cell can have THOUSANDS of receptors. A receptor site that has a peptide sitting in it changes the cell in many ways. It sets off a whole cascade of bio-chemical events, some of which wind up making changes to the actual nucleus of the cell. Each cell is alive and has a consciousness, particularly if we define consciousness as the point of view of the observer.
In adulthood, most of us who have had our emotional glitches along the way, are emotionally detached in places, and we're operating as if we're living in today or yesterday. We spend our adult life recreating situations that are familiar to us, that keep us in a reality that is comfortable, that we know.
We create situations outside of the body that meet our chemical needs. We are emotions and emotions are us.
Emotions are not bad. They're life. They color the richness of our experience. We become addicted to a certain set of emotions, because they are made up of chemicals that bring up the same high that the drug addict gets. Once we understand that we are addicted to emotions, it's not just psychological, it's biochemical. Heroin uses the same receptors on the cell that emotional chemicals us. So if we can be addicted to heroin, then it's easy to see that we can be addicted to any neuro-peptide. The relevant search command is related to finding a related emotional state. We can't even direct our eyes without having an emotional aspect to it. When we look around us at our reality, we perceive only what our emotions let us perceive. A man will perceive the same scene differently than a woman, or a child, or an older person. We filter our world through our perceptions and our memories.
This becomes important when you apply it to health. The thoughts that you have and the emotions have a chemical impact on your body. Can you change the way you perceive the world? Absolutely. You no longer see the world the way you used to see it before you were married. Or when you were a child. Our perceptions change over time. Once you understand that, you can choose to change your perception of any particular situation in an instant, because you have that sort of control.
In the Science of Being Well Home Study Course, I take this sort of material discussed here and apply it specifically to creating health. We have that power.
