Five ways to gain control over your subconscious mind

When thoughts go in several directions at once or when you feel disconnected from what you are doing in the moment, do yourself a favor. Pause for a moment to center your emotional energies.
When you are not centered, fear has overwhelmed the balance of the body, and thoughts feel scattered because the emotional part of the brain is flooded. Your subconscious mind has stopped cooperating with your conscious mind, in fact, it has hijacked all the systems of your body, as happens, whenever the stress response of the body gets activated.

Whether you are worrying about the future or a problem that needs to be fixed or just entertaining anxious thoughts, in effect, you are unwittingly throwing off your body’s balance by entertaining worrisome thoughts that focus your mind on anxious images “out there” somewhere in the future. Since the power to make choices resides in the present moment, this can leave you feeling powerless, or even overwhelmed.

What happens to throw you off balance or make you feel disconnected? Conflict. Tense moments. Triggers.

What do they have in common? They activate painful or unpleasant emotions inside, and the body’s “fight of flee” response.

Emotions are signals, important messages that the mind of your body sends to your thinking brain. “It is through ‘molecules of emotion’ that our brain, glands, organs, and immune system are in constant communication,” says Dr. Candace Pert in her book, Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Unfortunately, if you’re like many, you’ve been conditioned throughout life to deny or numb, ignore or dismiss painful emotions.

Avoiding or denying your feelings, however, is a temporary solution that backfires somewhere down the line. Taking a few moments to center yourself is a great option, as well as a kind loving gift to yourself.

What does centering yourself mean? It is a process that involves tuning into what is going on inside, your feelings, thoughts, needs, wants, etc., so that you may be fully present to your experience of self in the moment. This allows your conscious mind and subconscious to work together.

Since your conscious process, it involves making conscious choices. More specifically, you can choose to gain the cooperation of your subconscious mind, the part of the mind that runs all the systems of the body. Here are five fast and easy ways:

Set an intention to do so. One of the first steps to take, when you notice you are off balance, is to simply set an intention to restore calm to the energies of your mind and body.

Practice slow, deep breathing. Prompt yourself to, “Breathe,” and take long, slow, deep breaths, from deep within your belly. Focus on your breathing, with every inhale, breathe in a sense of calmness and confidence. With every exhale, let go of tension or stress. If you follow the ebb and flow of your breath, you will find this easily restores your balance.

Notice what’s going on inside. Observe what you are thinking, feeling or needing inside. Consciously let go of any judgments, give yourself empathy, and validate your emotions with an affirmation, such as, “It makes sense that I’m feeling anxious. I’m scaring myself out of sharing my feelings with worrisome thoughts, such as ‘I will hurt people’s feelings if I tell them how I feel.”
Affirm words to yourself that are calming. Confidently remind yourself that you can handle unpleasant emotions, and think of situations in the past when you have. Make calming affirmations, such as “I feel anxious. I can handle this. I have in the past. I feel confident in my ability to remain centered and calm.”

Visualize the outcome you want. If possible, sit down for a few moments, close your eyes, see your entire body relaxed, put a smile on your face, and picture yourself as calm, confident and centered. Now imagine the most positive outcome to some problem. See the picture vividly, hear the sounds, feel the feelings. Enjoy the sensations this image brings to you.
Use these five tools daily, as needed, to center yourself in the present moment. When you are fully present to your experience of life in the moment, you have access to vital resources inside, core powers of awareness, intention, and breath, etc. This optimizes your ability to make informed decisions.

Contribution by Athena Stiak

Let there be light: It's good for our brains

EPFL scientists have proven that light intensity influences our cognitive performance and how alert we feel, and that these positive effects last until early evening.

Tests conducted in EPFL’s Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) have confirmed the hypothesis that light influences our subjective feeling of sleepiness. The research team, led by Mirjam Münch, also showed that the effects of light exposure last until the early evening, and that light intensity has an impact on cognitive mechanisms. The results of this research were recently published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

Light synchronizes our biological clocks. It is collected in the eye by photoreceptors that use photopigments (pigments that change when exposed to light), known as melanopsin. These cells, which differ from rods and cones, are considered a third class of photoreceptors in the retina and were discovered just ten years ago. They’re not there to form an image, but to perceive and absorb photons in the visible light spectrum. In addition, they are stimulated by blue light.
Research shows that light can influence memory and the subjective feeling of sleepiness. Image credit to EPFL.

Exploring office lighting

Münch and her team wanted to know how our circadian rhythm could be influenced by our perception of light during the daytime. They created realistic office lighting conditions and recruited 29 young participants. “For this study, we took into account the intensity of natural and artificial light without specifically evaluating their spectra.”
From daytime to dusk

To synchronize their internal biological clocks, the volunteers had to maintain a regular sleep schedule during the seven days leading up to the test. They wore bracelets equipped with light sensors and accelerometers, so that the scientists could monitor their movements.
The study itself took place over two eight-hour sessions. The participants spent the first six hours in an experiment room, first in well-lighted conditions (1000-2000 lux, more or less equivalent to natural light in a room). In the second session, the light intensity was about 170 lux, which is what the eye perceives in a room without a window, lit with artificial light. For this experiment, light intensity was measured at eye-level. Every 30 minutes, the subjects were asked to assess how alert or sleepy they felt.

Finally, at the end of each session, the participants underwent two hours of supplemental memory tests in a darkened room – less than 6 lux. During these last two hours, the researchers took saliva samples in order to measure cortisol and melatonin concentrations. These two hormones are produced in a in a 24-hour cycle by the human body.

Boosted by the light

The volunteers who were subjected to higher light intensity during the afternoon were more alert all the way into the early evening. When they were subjected to light intensity ten times weaker, however, they showed signs of sleepiness and obtained lower scores on the memory tests.
These results were observed even in the absence of changes in cortisol and melatonin concentrations in their saliva. “With this study, we have discovered that light intensity has a direct effect on the subjective feeling of sleepiness as well as on objective cognitive performance, and that the benefits of more intense light during the daytime last long past the time of exposure,” concludes Münch.

Contribution by Sandy Evangelista