Love does make us warm inside. I have written at length on this website about the physiology of emotions - how your body changes according to what you are feeling. We call all negative emotion, stress. Accumulated stress can lead to severe physical effects felt in your body and ultimately depression. In my anger and anxiety scales, which my clients complete, we get you to learn to recognize where in your body you feel the various intensities of your emotions as a first step in identifying the causes of your emotions.A study has found that different emotions affect the body in different ways yet these effects are the same across cultures. Love does make us warm inside - it is felt right down … [Read more...]

Is your understanding of your emotional brain affecting your relationship? Do you feel a racing heart, clammy hands, a tightening in our abdomen, and an urge to use our bowels when things are going wrong? To perceive emotion is to receive and interpret information from both external (world) and internal (body) environments and is the starting point to understand your emotional brain. Your senses – sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing – connect you to the world around you, through your physical brain. Perception is the process by which information (events) about the outside world impinges on the sensory organs and is then decoded and interpreted by the brain – resulting in a … [Read more...]

Can you recognize your pain points on the pain timeline? Are you feeling lots of pleasure points or is your life filled with anger, anxiety, guilt, remorse, shame, and regret — what I call stress? We recognize the pain timeline to show visually how pain is present in the past, present and future. Pain perception is about how appraisal triggers arousal (emotional response) in your body. Deepak Chopra explains that cognitive appraisal in the brain arouses only two impulses—pain or pleasure. We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure.  Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives. … [Read more...]

Do you see the glass half-empty or half-full? Which one of these choices will help you be positive and live longer? Ask yourself: what’s the benefit... to yourself, your partner, your children, your family... to be someone who, even under difficult circumstances, sees the proverbial glass as half full rather than half empty? Be positive live longer. Be optimistic.  Are these words we connect with bottom line results?  In most cultures, not really.  It’s surprising, (and positive) how much research and experience is showing us that these attitudes and behaviors really do produce real, bottom line results. How much more bottom line can we get than our own … [Read more...]