Techniques To Strengthen The Thinking Brain – Part 1

• The emotional brain can cause you to lack self discipline.
• Delay pleasure to strengthen your thinking brain.
• Use pleasure and pain consciously to shape your behaviour.

Liberating Your Mind

One of the roles of the neocortex, your thinking brain, is logical reasoning. This involves deciding whether something is a good idea, and if necessary, coming up with alternative courses of action/explanations.

The neocortex is what you consciously think with, and therefore what should be driving your behaviour after making an evaluation of any incoming information.

The trouble is, as we have already discussed in previous articles, most people allow themselves to be controlled by their feelings, even though they think they are being controlled by their thoughts.

When this occurs and we continuously do things we said we would no longer do, or did not want to do, we strengthen the influence of our emotional unconscious brain, and weaken the influence our conscious thinking brain.

As a result, we begin to feel that we lack self discipline, lack the ability to live consciously and lack the ability to do the things we want to do in life.

In this, and the next few articles, you are going to learn some extremely simple (in principle) techniques that you can use to help strengthen your thinking brain.

By learning and applying the following techniques you will become less driven by your emotions, thereby allowing you to make better decisions and choices in life.

However before reading these techniques, it is important to understand why you are doing them. So if you haven’t read all the articles in this series, please go back and read them first.

Avoiding Or Delaying Pleasure

The first technique to strengthen your conscious mind, is to purposefully avoid or postpone activities you find pleasurable.

For example, at dinner time rather than eating your favourite food first, eat it last. Instead of eating the junk food you promised yourself you wouldn’t eat, have something healthier instead.

The key is to purposefully avoid giving into the things you find pleasurable, because even though you may think your behaviour was a result of your conscious thought processes, in reality, most of the time it is as a result of emotional responses driven by your emotional brain.

By avoiding the temptation to give into emotional responses, you weaken the affect of the emotional brain, and strengthen your thinking brain.

This does not mean you should avoid experiencing anything pleasurable, but rather to not become a “pleasure junkie” where you always seek pleasure and always avoid pain.

Otherwise you will always be driven by how you feel, rather than by what you think.

To sum it up, delay or avoid routine pleasure tasks or activities, and do things you least enjoy first to strengthen your thinking brain.

Consciously Using Pleasure And Pain

The second technique is something I have discussed before when talking about self discipline. This technique involves the use of pleasure and pain to influence your behaviour. 

Since the emotional brain causes us to seek pleasure and avoid pain, this is something that you can consciously use to your advantage, rather than having it subconsciously work against you.

I will briefly describe the technique here, but for more detailed information please see the articles on pleasure and pain in the self discipline section.

Click Here For Articles On Self Discipline

Pleasure Technique

When you want to motivate your behaviour towards something, you can use the prospect of some future pleasure to help you get through a period of pain or discomfort.

For example, you are at school and you would prefer to go out and party every night, but you know you have a lot of work to do.

Thinking about the benefits of studying (i.e. the good grades you will get) can be used to motivate you to stay in and work.

However it is important to remember that in order for this technique to work, it must be a pleasure that you strongly desire and can vividly imagine, so that it creates some kind of emotion within you.

Pain Technique

Some people respond better to the prospect of pain, so if using pleasure doesn’t work for you, then try using pain.

This can be used in exactly the same way as pleasure to influence your behaviour, only in this case, you are moving away from pain as opposed to towards pleasure.

So using the same example as above, if you don’t stay in and do your school work you will do badly at school, disappoint your parents and end up in a job you hate.

As with pleasure, this pain should be something you really want to avoid. The stronger you can make this pain, the more emotion you will attach to it and the more motivated you will be to avoid it.

To sum it up, use pleasure and pain to consciously to drive your behaviour, rather than allowing them to subconsciously drive you.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 7