We process about 35,000 choices per day. We make a choice approximately every two seconds. Needless to say we have been making a shit-ton of choices all throughout our waking hours for pretty much our entire lives. Most of the choices we make are automatic and fast.
Why?
So that we’re efficient and able to keep pace with the world around us. This is just one of the wonderful things about our mind and brain. We develop patterns and habits to do things easily and automatically.
There are three main parts of our three pound brain. Let’s talk about some of those parts.
Thank the lord we have an autonomic nervous system that controls the functions of the body to happen without thinking about and choosing to breathe or do much processing in order to perform. Judging by the track record of how most of us make choices without it many of us would be dead in no time flat. This type of stuff happens in the brain stem. (the reptile part of the brain) When we do make choices, in this part of the brain it’s based off of basic and primal needs of survival.
We unconsciously train ourselves to think certain things, feel certain things, and make choices that are based on some of the very simple systems of mortal and social survival.
In a very similar way, we have another part of our brain that handles certain levels of functioning to happen but this part called the limbic system. It requires a lot more effort and consciousness to manage and make choices in this part because it’s dramatically effected by emotions. It too is automatic and fast. What needs to be relayed about survival and also how we feel gets us all locked up and we can’t access the prefrontal cortex(this is the part of the brain where we see long term plans, manage our behavior, and other complex functions).
I’m telling you about this because our inner map or imprinting is the link between different levels of functioning and part of our brain should be fast and automatic and other parts absolutely, definitely shouldn’t be all the time. This is why you need to slow down and think about how you feel and why you feel the way you do so you can maybe, just maybe, make different choices.
The framework of how these parts of the brain interact becomes a major problem when we get locked in just simply surviving. The problem is that complex problem solving, reasoning, creativity, and the rest of the human part of us happens in another part of our brain that we easily lose access to when we simply worry about surviving.
Right now, maybe more than ever, I hope you can see that the way we make choices, and the patterns of how we come to those results, helps us to adhere to what’s healthy and productive for us, which is vital and important.
Engineer your choices, engineer your mind, engineer your emotions.
The opportunity:
What’s one thing you need to consciously choose to do less of?
What’s one thing you need to consciously choose to do more of?
How much time are you spending identifying that you have more choices than you think?
Are you slowing down to assess the choices you’re making so that you can make different ones?