Look at this Great Quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller

Brain Gardening

Exactly!!! Only I like to think about it as a garden. Let’s plant a gorgeous new garden and let the weeds in the old one just wither. Same thing as the story about the good wolf and the bad wolf. When the boy asks his grandfather which one wins, the grandfather says the one you feed.

It all works, but I prefer the garden because the brain is like a garden, and a good life is so much about caring for the brain. Look at this from Susan Warren at The Breakthrough Depot:

“Imagine your brain is a garden, except instead of growing flowers, fruits, and vegetables, you grow synaptic connections between neurons. These are the connections that neurotransmitters like dopamine, seratonin, and others travel across. ‘Glial cells’ are the gardeners of your brain—they act to speed up signals between certain neurons. But other glial cells are the waste removers, pulling up weeds, killing pests, raking up dead leaves. Your brain’s pruning gardeners are called ‘microglial cells.’ They prune your synaptic connections. The question is, how do they know which ones to prune?”

So the brain is a garden that practically gardens itself. The neural connections you work, the ones associated with the things you think and do, grow strong. What you neglect gets deleted. That’s why we have to be so careful what we plant in our minds. If the normal human brain wanders about 70% of the time, we have to take some control of what we put the mind on. Too many regrets about the past, and worries about the future, do not a good garden grow. So careful there.

Sleep Fertilizer

And then, all we have to do is sleep because that’s when the dead weeds get cleaned up. Having trouble sleeping in troubled times, or not your strong suit anyway, here is a recent post I wrote to help you sleep. And please know that if you are struggling with sleep it is more than okay to nap. Keep it short, though. I’ve heard 18 minutes, because too much of this particular good thing can make you think, feel, and perform worse.

Teamwork

A wise mentor once taught that we have to take care of who we want to take care of us, in this case our brain. We feed the brain useful thoughts, and then we sleep and let the brain do its thing. How easy is that. Practice, practice, practice…and let us know what happens.

Warm wishes,

Madelaine