Antonio Damásio, world-renowned neuroscientist. Professor of neuroscience, neurology, and psychology at the University of Southern California. Prince of Asturias Award. His studies on emotions and the mechanisms of consciousness make him an indisputable reference figure.
Damásio believes that we achieve discernment when we learn to consider that emotions and feelings are two different things, and that emotions precede feelings.
For example, let us think about stress, about those negative emotions that overwhelm us, about the physical discomfort they cause us, that makes us ill, and about what these mental states do to us: we start to think more pessimistic thoughts and we stop seeing ways out of even the everyday problems of everyday life.
He says that one of our resolutions should be to cultivate positive emotions.
As the classic saying goes: “be well enough to think better”. To achieve something like this requires that our body feels calm, in harmony, a calm body also translates into a relaxed mind, a calm and focused mind, which thinks and decides better.
How, one of the resources available to everyone is to practice meditation and relaxation exercises. There are hundreds of guided meditations on the internet to be done at home and at any time we have 20 minutes to give ourselves.
I must tell you, from my own experience, that to achieve results we have to make meditation one of the good habits of our life, start with half an hour a day, and savour the results and multiple positive impacts on your daily life.
A calm and focused mind thinks and decides better.
Damásio has opened up new perspectives and makes us understand the importance of concepts such as consciousness and the world of emotions. He tells us that consciousness is a process and an entity that is present in all species, even in single-celled organisms, which have a minimal sense of awareness. They work to preserve their integrity, so every organism, every living being has a more or less sophisticated level of consciousness with which to adapt to its environment and to develop.
We, for our part, have made a great evolutionary leap by including in our consciousness dimensions such as memory, imagination, creativity, and logical reasoning.
Damásio and his wife Hanna, who is also a neurologist, have been able to gather data from their experiences with various patients. One of them is that emotions are actually a set of chemical and neural responses that form a distinctive pattern, which they defined as a “somatic marker”.
By this name, Damásio meant that we all have an emotional imprint that makes us react, that influences us to display certain behaviours, or to make certain types of decisions and not others.
Let’s take an example: we are walking down the street and suddenly we hear a scream. What we experience at the moment is a physical reaction, our heart races, we are paralysed, our pupils dilate …. and we instantly feel a sense of alarm and fear.
After emotions come feelings, which have a deeper relationship to thoughts.
NLP can help you to modify this “somatic marker” in your neural network, which makes you react automatically and is evident in your behaviour, depending on the circumstances.
NLP uses your memories to transform this pattern and stop the automatisms that emotions provoke when reacting. You can also recognise triggers and be aware of the impulses as they arise, and how the physiology drives the emotion.
Know yourself, train your emotions to work for your well-being.
Contact me, I will be happy to be your guide, take the helm of your life.
Thank you very much,
Leticia Morales
