Soar Above by Steven Stosny

Author:Steven Stosny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: how;use;most;profound;part brain;kind;stress;steven;stosny;soar;above;Steven Stosny
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
Published: 2016-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

In contrast, core values are:

Far less reactive to the environment and more attuned to what is most important;

Far less influenced by physiological states. You’re not likely to stop loving or become less humane when tired, hungry, thirsty, or sick;

More available to choice (less conditioned);

Consistent over time—more or less permanent.

Feelings follow value investment, but not the other way around. If you allow your deeper values to motivate behavior, your feelings will follow. You’ll feel more authentic, with a stronger identity and more coherent sense of self. If you act on your feelings, you won’t know who you are, as who you are gets lost in the vicissitudes of transitory feeling states. Identity is reduced to whatever you feel at the moment.

How Toddler Brain Feelings Become Adult Brain Values

Like feelings, values have a motivational function. They tell us to do something. The behaviors that values motivate fall into four broad categories: improve, appreciate, protect, and connect. These are so important that each requires further explanation.

Improve

We function at our best when seeking to improve something. Just thinking about how to improve your situation or your experience engages large numbers of neurons in the prefrontal cortex and activates the positive—and usually productive—emotion of interest. The more interest we can summon, the more likely we are to improve, which is why we do so much better when interested in tasks than when we’re bored with them.

Probably the greatest barrier to improving is the inability to fix something or make it 100 percent better. It’s more productive to think of improving as an incremental process—making things a little better in each of several steps. In emotionally charged conditions, it’s nearly impossible to go directly from feeling bad to 100 percent improvement. (It takes about twenty minutes for the most potent effects of cortisol to wear off.) But once you make something 10 percent better, it becomes easier to make it 20 percent better. Then it’s easier to make it 40 percent better, and so on. Strive to make a bad situation a little better if you can, but if you can’t, then make your experience of it better. For example, a common problem after divorce is the hard feelings of valued former in-laws. In this case, you would start out thinking of what might make the situation with, say, your ex-mother-in-law 10 percent better—perhaps sending her a sincerely written card or a flower would serve as an olive branch. If that—or anything else you try—doesn’t improve the situation, change the way you experience it. In place of the self-denigrating interpretation that she’s rejecting you, see her as a hurt woman trying unsuccessfully to deal with her own pain. That doesn’t excuse her behavior, but it improves your experience of it. When we choose to control the meaning of our experience, we can soar above. When we don’t choose to improve, we’re likely to get stuck in the Toddler brain and repeat the same mistakes—and feel the same pain—again and again.

Below are the major types of improve motivations:

Situational.

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