Change Your Words, Change Your World by Andrea Gardner

Author:Andrea Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self-help and personal development
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2012-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Positive words foster growth

I like a good moan like anyone else – it’s great for letting off steam and, let’s face it, some of our best humour can be drawn from the days when the world seems to be plotting against us – but when I want to create beauty and harmony around and within myself I choose my words and thoughts with care. Mantras and affirmations are two of the most effective ways to change our thoughts and experiences.

The latest neurological research reveals that by choosing our words and thoughts with care and concentrating on them specifically for ten to 20 minutes every day, we can actually change the functioning in key areas of our brain by as much as 25 per cent. For example, simply by focusing on a word such as ‘peace’ you will begin to feel peaceful and the emotional centres in your brain will start to calm down.

In their groundbreaking book, Words Can Change Your Brain, neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman explain that once your parietal and frontal lobes have been stimulated by the positive word or thought you’re holding in your mind, the message will be relayed by the thalamus to other parts of your brain, effectively slowing down the limbic system’s ability to generate neurochemical messages of anxiety, irritability or depression. This sets up a self-reinforcing pattern in our brains. The frontal lobe includes specific language centres, which are directly connected to the motor cortex responsible for moving us into action and therefore influencing behaviour. As these language centres are stimulated by our peaceful feelings, we are more likely to act in a calmer way, which generates more serene thoughts and strengthens the new neural circuits being created and so the cycle continues. Words can even alter the expression of genes throughout the brain and body, turning them on and off and thereby changing the way we biologically grow.

After just a few weeks of repetitive practice you’ll begin to change your brain positively. In fact – as one new study found – even looking at a list of positive words for just a few seconds will improve the mood of an anxious or depressed person. Try this every day for a month. Write out a list of words that have a very positive connotation for you, meditate on them for ten minutes every morning and ten minutes before you go to bed and note how your mood changes.

Our brains, however, are even more sensitively attuned to negative communication, particularly the word ‘no’, and if you stare at a list of negative words, you’ll immediately feel worse. As soon as your amygdala – an almond-shaped fight or flight button that rests in the centre of your primitive emotional brain – interacts with a negative word or phrase, stress-producing hormones and neurotransmitters are released, interfering with the functioning of your whole body and mental processes. Memory and emotions are particularly affected and research suggests that the more we focus on negative feelings and

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