Anxiety, Stress and Rewiring the Brain

We dug deep in our interview with Dr. Don Wood, from Inspired Performance Institute. He has worked to create innovative strategies to help people heal from the limiting effects of trauma, so they can feel and perform at their best.

The result has been the development of a revolutionary approach to performance improvement referred to as TIPP (The Inspired Performance Program). TIPP is based on the idea that our minds have developed some glitches and error messages in the ways they store information about events from our past. And we all have these glitches!

Did you know that the number one fear for human beings is uncertainty.

If you're living in an environment where your job, career, business or personal life is uncertain that is going to create stress. And if you’ve lived with that uncertainty and trauma all or most of your life, even if you’re now in an environment that shouldn’t be activating that part of your nervous system, your brain is still constantly gauging your current situation.

Your subconscious mind accesses memory to basically do a Google search. Have we experienced this kind of a situation before? And here's where the glitch comes in. When it accesses that old information from years ago, it still thinks it’s happening right now and it creates a physiological response in you. So it's just like an old computer glitch that you continue to loop through, and you can't figure out why it's affecting the program you're running right now, which is your current job or current relationships.

There is also a major connection between unresolved trauma and health issues.

So we have these unresolved traumas and they continue to loop. And our mind is continually trying to fix them because your subconscious survival brain is operating in the present. When it accesses memory from years ago, it thinks something's still active and it creates a physiological response in you to protect you.

If you think about something that happened to you five years ago and you feel fear, that's a glitch. Your mind is actually calling for an action. That's the purpose of fear. So if you have that constantly going on, then your nervous system is being activated repetitively and your producing cortisol on a constant basis, that's going to affect your health. When we resolve this trauma, health improves, and so does performance.

When we have a traumatic or disturbing event, all our senses are heightened. Sight, smell hearing, etc. So how is your brain going to record that? High definition. Lots of data coming in. And that's where the glitch comes in. Only humans store explicit details about events and experiences. No other animal on the planet does that. So you have to update and reprocess that high definition data into the same format as something simple and non reactionary as what you ate for dinner last night.

It's almost like we're defragging the computer. So when you go to sleep at night, you go into a theta, brainwave state. And then theta is where your mind is processing what you experienced during the day. So if it experiences restoration, it's going to also then process anything else that needs to be restored. And it's amazing how much it cleans up and how well the mind will respond when it's in a restorative mindset.