Peace Guidebook Part 2: Conquering the Dinosaur
If you have not read Part 1 yet then go read that first because Part 2 builds on the knowledge of Part 1.
Part 2: Conquering the Dinosaur
How much do you actually know about the brain?
What some people might know is that the brain is divided into two parts. There is the left side which is more scientific and analytical, and there is the right side which is more creative and intuitive.
Not as many people know about the up side and the down side of the brain.
I first learned about this from the book, The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. It's only one chapter in the book, but Carl Sagan talks about the evolution of the brain and the model of our brain known as the Triune Brain.
The Triune Brain is divided into three parts. The top is the neocortex which is your rational thinking. The middle is the mammal brain, aka the limbic system, which is your emotions and your hormones. And then there's the reptile brain at the bottom which is your basic functions and survival.
Like with the mental states and the Hierarchy of Needs, we can see similarities in current psychology coming from earlier sources. This time we can see a comparison between the Triune Brain and the mental model developed by Sigmund Freud almost a hundred years ago in which he separated the mind into three parts: the Super Ego, the Ego and the Id.
If you really want to break it all down very simply and speaking like Freud, there is your conscious and there is your unconscious. If you're trying to make it super simple to understand, the top part of the brain is where all your thoughts come from and the lower area is your emotions and basic functioning.
The science of our brains has been continually updated. Even now our understanding of the brain is changing. The book The Dragons of Eden was written in the 1970’s and the whole idea of the reptile brain and the mammal brain comes from the idea that our brains started with just the reptile brain and then evolution slowly developed the rest of the brain. Brains started with reptiles, then grew with mammals, and then finally we got human neocortex brains. Or so we thought.
The current scientific understanding now questions that and it says that our brains developed more so all at once. So the reptile/mammal brain is not a truly correct scientific way to explain the brain, but I think still using it as mental model to understand how our brains work is a good way of thinking about your brain even if the metaphor of the reptile/mammal isn't exactly correct from an evolutionary standpoint.
Now looking at the Triune and Freud Brain models we can see how they correlate with with the more updated neurology of the three mental states with the calm state, threat state, and danger state.
With this understanding, we can see that when you're in a threat state, your brain will shut down the Neo-Cortex.
Your consciousness and rational thinking is gone and your unconscious takes over. I want to stress though that the unconscious is not an evil thing. It's just essentially trying to protect you. It is trying to make sure that you survive. That is its job.
The reptile brain is in charge of all the basic functionings of your body that you need to live (as seen below). It's controlling your immune system, your digestive system, your respiratory breathing system, and more. This is all important to keep you alive and you can thank your reptile brain for managing all of this.
It's doing all these things without you having to think consciously about it as you go about your day. Then when you get into a bad threatening situation, the reptile brain says “hey, we don't want to think right now. We just need to focus on staying alive in this situation.” Unfortunately though that can often lead to worse situations. The reptile brain is doing good things, but sometimes the dinosaur takes over and we make bad choices.
So in these situations how do we conquer the dinosaur in our brain? How can we retain our rational thinking and make good choices in bad situations? There's one really good way to do it. The number one way is:
Breathing.
Why? Because, as shown in the diagram of body systems, the respiratory system is one of the basic functions that your reptile brain is controlling, and breathing is also the one aspect of your reptile brain that is the easiest for you to access. Usually you're doing shallow short breaths, but with your conscious brain can think “alright, I'm gonna take a nice big deep breath and breathe it all out." You can override the reptile brain and take control of your breathing.
Breath control is stress control.
There are really many different ways of breathing.
There's basic deep breathing. Breathe it all in, breathe it all out.
Wim Hof methods of breathing are becoming popular. Then there are ancient forms of breathing such as the Chinese healing sounds, and there’s Indian chanting (which is my favourite). These are some examples, but if we really counted the different way we can breath it would be pretty long list.
There are other ways that you can train yourself to override the reptile brain and the first one is exercise.
When you're exercising, you're going to get to a point where the body is going to tell you, “Stop. That's enough. No more.” It's just trying to protect you by essentially saying, “Hey, maybe we don't want to overexert and hurt ourselves.”
There's the saying though with marathon runners that once you get to that point where your body wants to stop, you're actually only 80-90% of the way there. So you still have 10 to 20 percent of your body’s ability to go further. But the only way for you to do that is for your conscious brain to override the reptile brain and tell it, “No, we can do this!”
Another method of training your brain is cold exercise. Some people might actually find this one controversial but I think just from the standpoint of overriding your reptile brain it’s a good way to strengthen your mind. When you go into cold water, you can have an immediate jolting reaction. The reptile brain is like, “This is freezing cold. Get out!” But you can train yourself to say, “No, calm down. We’re fine.”
Wim Hof starts with breathing first and then he puts you into the cold. Through breathing he trains you up to access control of your reptile brain. Then once you enter the cold, you breathe in and you can handle the cold much longer because you are capable of overriding the reptile brain with your conscious thinking.
If you are interested in learning more about Wim Hof’s cold training then I really recommend reading his book The Wim Hof Method.
Then there's fasting. The body says, “I'm hungry, feed me.” But it's actually amazing how just with the conscious brain, you can tell it, “No, we're good.”
You can go days without eating. I have done my own personal experiments with this. I started with one day of no eating. Then two days, three days, and I've gone to one week with no food.
This just goes to show that we are far more capable when we put our minds to it.
This is where I say again, this is an introduction. If any of this about exercise, cold, and fasting sounds interesting to you then I encourage you to look further into it. But, I think all this stuff helps with overriding the reptile brain, and each one also has the health benefits of improving your physical strength and endurance, improving blood flow with your ability to handle the cold, and improving the digestive system with fasting, but look into it more yourself if you find that compelling.
Like I said though, the number one way to conquer the dinosaur is breathing.
You might want to do some breathing if you feel like you need it, because you're going to want to be calm for the next part.
