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Changing Your Mind, Part 2: Rewiring Your Brain

Updated: 13 hours ago

This is my second article in the series ‘Changing Your Mind’. The present article focusses on the neuroscience of transformation, how you can use your mind to literally rewire your brain, and the power of decision and how this relates to your beliefs. We will look at how a 'Decision Matrix' can assist us with this. We will also explore the cause of human suffering and how to become a phenomenon.


Rewiring your brain, or neuroplasticity, refers to the brain's ability to reorganise itself by forming new connections throughout life, allowing for learning, a change in your beliefs (and subsequent thoughts, emotions, and action responses), adaptation, healing, and recovery from injury or all forms of emotional trauma. It can also powerfully affect your dysregulated nervous system to one that is at peace: I speak from from personal experience.


Rewiring your brain will change your life. It is not clear whether the old wiring is eliminated or 'wired over', but in any case the result is a total transformation of who you are BEing in any life situation, whether it be at work, in all your relationships, emotionally, psychologically, in overcoming negative beliefs and thinking, and in terms of your spiritual development and Real Personal Power. Isn't it time to daily deflate your ego and rewire your brain into your Higher Power?


Repeatedly redirecting negative thoughts to positive or neutral ones can physically rewire the brain, weakening connections associated with negativity. This is a daily decision or choice.


To be afraid (in other words, reacting from ego - for fear is the language that the ego speaks) means to fail. Ego states are far from bliss: They are a blight on the mind.Fearlessness (responding from the state of your Higher Power) leads to transformation, which leads to more fearlessness: And the cycle continues, as success continues to unfold for you. The decision to react from ego or to respond from your Higher Self is a choice. Choosing the higher path is a deep belief in your higher energy, which is your divine spiritual blueprint, in your birthright, and in your fearlessness. You were born to respond and not to react: In fact you have an innate response–ability to do so. The reason you don’t is that fear was conditioned into you by your parents and by society.


If you live in fear you will not be able to solve your problems: You will see non-problems as problems and you will experience confusion, illusion, and chaos.


FEAR stands for forgetting everything about reality. This is where most people are operating from when dealing with the ‘challenges’ of their lives.


Jesus said in Matthew 6:27 that "Who adds one cubit to their stature by worrying?"


Any problem can be solved, but only if you bring enough Higher Power to the problem. You can’t see your way through as you are not bringing enough energy, power, and clarity to the problem.


All change occurs from a powerful state of BEing. How do you know when you are in this state? Because you are creating, realising that none of your limiting beliefs are true, quite the opposite, and you feel good: You feel joy, peace, love, and you are totally energised. You have chosen to be your Higher Power. You are communing with God. You have chosen your highest possibility. This is no less than the journey from ego to Self. And it is a choice.


In the present article we will explore two books, which have identical philosophies, which are both in my 'Suggested Reading' list: ‘A Changed Mind: Go Beyond Self Awareness – Rewire Your Brain and Reengineer Your Reality’ by David Bayer, and 'Your Inner Awakening' by Byron Katie


You can view the first article in this series, 'Changing Your Mind, Part 1: Becoming Aware', here:


This first article can be summed up as the spiritual equation “Man minus limiting beliefs equals infinite possibility."


Rewiring your brain
Rewiring your brain

The neuroscience of transformation

You were born with approximately 100 billion neurons in your brain. Neurons are a specific type of cell that use electrical impulses in chemical signals to transmit information between different areas of the brain and between the brain and the rest of the nervous system. You're also born with approximately 25 billion synaptic connections. Synapses are like little bridges that connect neurons to each other. You can think of this network of neurons and synaptic connections as a neurophysiological matrix that underpins many aspects of your psychological and emotional experience of life including your memories, inner talk, perceptions, and belief systems. If you do the maths, you'll notice that you're born with more neurons than connections: Meaning not all neurons are connected yet into the mainframe of your brain or body. So, which ones are? Well, Nature has a highly intelligent way of operating. At birth, your consciousness has already been transmitted into a hardware that came fully equipped with the necessary features and functions to give you life and keep you alive. Contained within your newborn body ‘suit’ and wired up in the circuitry are the primary survival functions of eating, crying, seeing, breathing, sensing, and moving - everything you need to sustain life is already wired into the system. So, what about those other 75 billion neurons that aren't yet connected and programmed? In Nature's infinite wisdom what was also included in the default operating system was a blank canvas - a space to create uniqueness and our own individual identity and personhood: An infinite potential of perceptions, beliefs, experiences, and biases that would shape each and every one of our personalities and destinies differently. 


By the age of seven, the average human brain has gone from 100 billion neurons and 25 billion synaptic connections to the same number of neurons with over a quadrillion, 1000 trillion, connections. So, what happened? Well, life happened. From the day you came into the world you've been recording your experiences into the hard drive and wiring of your brain.


Every single moment of your existence has been captured. Your five senses – sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell - have been ingesting the data of your daily experiences, sending it through the nervous system where it is digested and organised in the brain, and compiled into a variety of outputs including memories. New connections are formed between neurons as new memories are created.


This is why some people fear dogs – they were bitten by a dog as a child, and now, even as an adult they are terrified of dogs. If the reaction is hysterical, then it’s usually historical. This affects every aspect of our lives. This is how childhood trauma, and fears for your survival become imprinted on your brain, long after the threat has gone. This is captured in the brilliant book by Benjamin Fry, ‘The Invisible Lion’, which is in my ‘Suggested Reading’ list, which says that we believe in an invisible lion that has long since disappeared.


You can’t outwit your beliefs, but you can change them. Your beliefs are stored in the neural networks of your brain. Every experience you've ever had is locked away in a vast storage vault of quadrillions of data points that hold the key to your unique perception of life and everything in it. Each memory has embedded with it the meaning you gave the experience, and these memories combine to create a highly complex and unique lens through which you're perceiving and experiencing the world. The moment you have an experience, your brain searches the vast constellation of information inside of you, and presents a meaning from a similar prior experience and you live the new moment through the lens of the original meaning or belief. You bring the knowledge of the past into your present moment to ensure your survival of it. In many ways this is a highly useful feature of the operating system. You can imagine how difficult it would have been for early humans to survive without memory: Once attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger one would want to retain the memory of that experience to give a head-start on avoiding the next one.


Imagine as a child learning the importance of looking both ways before crossing the road only to forget that critical instruction the next time. We wouldn't last very long without the ability to interpret the new moment with some information gained from the prior experience; without the capacity to remember. In each new experience your brain is data matching with a past memory and applying the same meaning that you invented the first time around. But that’s where things get a little sticky: The new moment isn’t the old moment. In fact, no two experiences are the same. Each new moment affords a new experience and a new opportunity - to survive. This new dog isn't the same as that old dog. This new relationship isn't the same as that old relationship. This new business opportunity isn't the same as that last one. But that's how we experience them. To make matters more complex, in each new moment we experience an inner dialogue that is aligned with the original experience. We literally hear a voice in our head that says “Watch out that dog is dangerous!” or “This is never going to work out for me!” or “Why do people show such lack of consideration?” or “What am I doing wrong?” The complicated part of all of this is the inner dialogue, what I like to call ‘the story that you tell yourself’, and sounds and feels as though it’s actually you. It’s told as what seems to be your inner voice: If we were to determine the location for it we would say it comes from inside you. Most likely from your head space. It’s seems like you are talking to yourself. Except you’re not. The story you hear is an unconsciously generated dialogue, or tape, that automatically runs based on the story you told yourself the first time an experience like this happened. You then react instinctively to the story without questioning the validity of it and go from zero to panic in an instant.


The story is just a story. None of what you are telling yourself is true. Nothing is truly personal. It isn't a matter of getting respect off others: That is simply external validation. It’s not any of the things that you are telling yourself. In fact, you may see the story and realise that none of it is true. You can relax. Realise that this has really nothing to do with you and everything to do with someone else. Say a little prayer for both of you and that you are both safely protected by a Higher Power that is greater than you, but ultimately is you. The moment that you can see the story for what it is, a habitual, untrue narrative based on your habitual beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and actions, it opens up a space for a new way of interpreting the experience. While viewing the present moment through the lens of the past is a critical neurocognitive feature supporting survival, it isn't conducive to having a joyful or powerful living experience, achieving your full potential or catalysing change. In fact, it’s conducive to what I call a ‘Groundhog Day’ type of existence, named after the classic Bill Murray comedy. In that film, Murray’s character wakes up and experiences the same day repeatedly. He’s trapped in a single day filled with the same experiences. Over time it drives him mad. In order to escape the crazy making cycle of living the same day over and over again, he begins to invent creative ways to kill himself including the classic scene where he's kidnapped the local town celebrity and drives his car headfirst into an oncoming train. The movie is quite funny, but the reality that most people are living a ‘Groundhog Day’ type of existence is anything but. Left to our own operating system we too will experience each new experience the same way.


Through the limiting beliefs and the story we've told ourselves over and over again despite the fact that each new experience is, well, new: A new dog, a new relationship, or a new business opportunity, a new job, a new possibility. Each moment is unique. But until we learn how to consciously manage our reactions, interpretations, and belief systems, we are destined to live the same quality of life over and over again. Different relationship, but the same relationship. Different conflict, but the same reaction. Different job, but the same dissatisfaction. Different health problem, but still health problems. Different car ride, but the same road rage. In a very real and profound way until we are able to see their beliefs are shaping our perception of the present moment in ways that don't actually reflect the reality of the new present moment and until we see the story for the story, we aren't actually living in the present moment: But, a distorted version of the present moment, shaped by our experiences and beliefs and memories from the past. We are living the same experience over and over again. Despite the fact that life is presenting a new opportunity: A possibility for change.


The brain is a storyteller. It's important to realise that most of the time we aren't consciously thinking. The vast majority of each and every day we are habitually reacting to new experiences as if they were old experiences. The brain is serving one of its primary functions which is to ensure our survival and on a moment by moment basis it's manufacturing a sophisticated narrative or story that matches up with the beliefs we have about ourselves in every aspect of our lives. The brain is a storyteller and your thoughts, for the most part, are not your thoughts but simply unconscious psychological habits. Just as your heart beats and your lungs breathe, so too does your brain produce thoughts.


Whether you're actively engaged with the thinking process or not, if you want to free yourself from your psychological and emotional habits so you can create an opportunity for something new in your life, it's important to understand the machinery at work so you can elevate your Self to be a master of the machinery rather than continue to participate as a help as passenger continuing down the same unfulfilling road when there are so many possible routes on the rich road map of your life.


I invite you to put this article down for a moment, to sit comfortably in your chair or upright in your bed, or wherever you are, to take a few deep breaths to relax your body, and to spend just one minute with your eyes closed. While you do that, try not to think. Go ahead:  Well, you'll notice, and why so many people who begin to meditate or engage in a mindfulness practice have such a challenge, which is that you can't not think. Your brain has become so habituated to thinking as a mechanism for survival that even when you are sitting with your eyes closed in an environment with no external stimulation it will bring up thoughts, memories, or ideas for it to think about. “What do we think about this?” “What do we think about that?” Before you know if you're off following some ‘train of thought’ that has nothing to do with anything relative to your day.


The brain is addicted to the process of thinking. And that, in and of itself isn't necessarily a problem: The problem arises when you do not realise that your thoughts are not your thoughts. And you fail to distinguish between what you actually think about the present moment and the brain's unconscious opinion or story about it. Napoleon Hill said that “The brain does not think but serves as the interpretation of stimuli which cause thought.” Similar to how the ‘five primary drivers’ work (see my first article in this series) where your beliefs inform your thoughts, your thoughts inform your emotions, your emotions inform your actions, your actions inform your results, and your results reinforce the originating belief: So too does the story you tell yourself inform how you feel and from there what you do and the results you produce. From a psychological perspective your beliefs dictate your destiny. And from a neuroscientific perspective the quality of your life is equal to the quality of the story you tell yourself. Until you have the tools to consciously insert your Self into the process by questioning the story you become trapped in what's called a ‘psychocybernetic loop’. You bring past beliefs into your present moment as you relive the past again in the here and now. You reinforce those beliefs at an even deeper level and become even more likely to tell yourself the same story the next time around. You accumulate so much evidence for the story that it becomes hard wired into your reality.


Use your mind to change your brain. Up until the late 1800s scientists believed that the brain was fixed or hardwired. In other words, the way you thought and perceived was something that was fixed within your personality and there was no way to actually change who you were. It was as if some sort of karmic die was cast just before your birth and the brain you got was the brain you were stuck with. In early studies most people's brains did seem to stay the same, in part because what you think determines your results, and the results simply reinforce what you think. But in 1890, William James, considered by many as the father of modern psychology, proposed a theory that the brain could change and that it was malleable and capable of reorganising. Decades later, his theory proved to be true, when neuroscientists discovered that stroke victims who damaged parts of their brain were able to use cognitive therapy and other techniques to relearn behaviour that was lost due to the brain damage and observed that those corresponding parts of the brain regrew. The discovery was groundbreaking: You can use your mind to actually change your brain. This idea is at the core of personal development version 2.0. It is part of the fundamental definition of what mindset is: To use your mind to change your brain and it is the single most important skill you must learn if you want to achieve your full potential and living extraordinary life. The doorway to this transformation begins the moment you see the story as a story. When you see the story is a story you are now seeing the story rather than being the story. You moment you see the story, you are now aware of the machinery rather than being an unwilling participant in it. It is in the seeing of the story that you open up a small but critical space to begin to question your interpretation of the present moment, which is also a questioning of your beliefs and, in a great sense, a question of the entire way you've been living life for your entire life. It is in this magical transformative moment that you now have a choice: And that choice is the key to creating a dramatic shift in your current reality in life. Mindset truly is the developed capacity to use your mind to change your brain.


The story versus what happened: Think about a recent situation or experience similar to when a driver who cuts you up where you reacted in a way that was emotionally charged. Write out the story with all of the charged emotional limiting beliefs driven language that you can remember to capture the anger or frustration and document as best you can to describe the story that your brain was telling you. Then rewrite the experience simply through the lens of what I call ‘what happened’: Your experience expressing only the facts about what happened without the belief-driven narrative: Without the story. Now, separated from the actual experience see if there was a reinterpretation of the event that might be possible that could be more in alignment with what you wanted and I encourage you to look for the gift, blessing, or the opportunity in the actual experience. You will see that everything else was just a story. You might find that this is a repeated pattern in your life and that none of it has ever been true. Where do you think you came up with this story? It’s likely that if it was a hysterical reaction that it was historical. Why is this so upsetting to you? Because you were about to change your entire life over a story that was never true in the first place. Our limiting beliefs and stories cause us to perpetuate lives that aren't ours to live. They cause harm to others, they create blame, resentment, jealousy, anger, insecurity, and suffering. They are the cause of arguments, breakups, and divorces. They are what keep us stuck in poverty, depression, a job we don't love, a relationship without passion: They are the singular cause of stress, disease, disagreement, and even war. The quality of our stories dictates the quality of our lives. When we see the story as just that, a story, we create an opportunity to change the beliefs we've been carrying with us for years, often decades, and in an instant create a profoundly changed future. At the core of all transformation is a new belief. A new belief creates a changed mind. The question then is how do you permanently change your beliefs? The answer relates to the power of decision.


The power of decision in changing your beliefs

Most people get stuck in personal development at a very specific point. The actual changing of their beliefs. In the progression of your personal growth, you go through a variety of stages. The first stage is a total lack of awareness. You believe the external world is chaotic and unpredictable and that joy, change, accomplishment, and success depends upon a lining up of circumstances that produce those desired results. Luck, in effect, seems to be the determining factor between the happy and unhappy. The second stage occurs when one is first exposed to spiritual concepts. You realise that your external reality isn't random but an actualised reflection of your inner architecture and belief systems. You may not be particularly aware of your limiting beliefs, but you know that they are there. And they're unconsciously informing the decisions you make and the coincidences and synchronicities that are occurring in your life. The goal from the second stage of personal growth is to move into the third stage which is hallmarked by increased self-awareness. You gain greater insights into what you actually believe and think. You begin to tune in to the inner dialogue and are able to realise that the little voice in your head isn't actually you but a pre-programmed automatic response to the experiences of your life. You still have the same brain - you're just acutely aware that it isn't programmed in alignment with the life, business, or relationships you want. This awareness is accompanied by an intensification of dissatisfaction, frustrations, stress, overwhelm, and generalised suffering. This is where most people stop and that so many are frustrated and feeling unfulfilled and incomplete in their personal growth journey. This gap, between personal development one 1.0 and personal development 2.0, is hallmarked by an intellectual understanding of personal growth concepts and philosophies, yet void of the actual transformation itself. It is in this gap that the vast majority of seekers get stuck. No one needed to convince me that my beliefs were holding me back, but I didn't have a strategy or practice for actually changing them: For rewiring my own brain. I refer to this phase of development as ‘self-awareness purgatory’: Where you become acutely aware of your limiting beliefs but don't know how to replace them. It's a painful and uncomfortable phase of the process it is often where people get so frustrated with personal growth that they either become entrenched in a lifelong addiction of trying to discover how to fix themselves or they just flat out give up.


Beginning in her early thirties, Byron Katie was so depressed and stuck in self-loathing that she was often unable to get out of bed for days or weeks at a time. One morning, in a sudden moment of life-changing insight, she saw that her suffering came from her beliefs and thoughts about her situation—such as “My life is horrible,” and “I don’t deserve happiness”—and not from the situation itself. She realised a simple truth: When she believed her thoughts, she suffered, and when she didn’t, she was happy.



The commonest limiting beliefs (fears), which I believe are shared by everyone, are the mortal fears of: Not being loveable or loved, feeling unworthy, and scared of being abandoned and that we will die because of these fears. The turnaround sentences, according to ‘The Work’, expressing the opposite of what one believes, would be that one is loveable and loved, that one is worthy, that one won’t be abandoned, and that one won’t die because of those limiting fears.


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly


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Hello,

I am delighted and enchanted to meet you. I coach men with 'Deep Coaching', 'Supercoaching', and Transformative Life Coaching (TLC). Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching on Zoom or in person. 


“Transformative life coaching uniquely creates and holds the space for you to see your self afresh, with clarity, and step into new ways of BEing, which will transform how you perceive and intuitively create your world. My work is to guide you to raise your own conscious awareness to the level that you want to achieve.”







Click here for the books that I know will help you along your journey of recovering your Self:









I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have a number of other higher qualifications in science and surgery. I have published over 50 peer reviewed PubMed cited scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for over five years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.




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