We’ve all had those moments where our minds wander. Perhaps it was as you sat in a maths lesson staring out of the window, daydreaming about surfing. Maybe it was reading the same line in your notes a hundred times as you study for your final exam because you can’t stop thinking about how beautiful she looked in class today. For some it’s trying to get on top of all the emails but struggling to fire off even one because you’re running through the argument you had with your spouse that morning about how to handle your child’s lack of focus at school.
In this article I want to talk about two areas of our brain:
- The Amygdala is an ancient primitive part of our brain. It is the seat of our passions.
- The Forebrain is a more recently evolved part of our brain. It’s what separates us from other animals because it is where our higher thought processes live. It is the home of objective reasoning.
Before I go any further into these two sides of our neurology I want to touch briefly on the fact that each individual has a fingerprint specific hierarchy of values or priorities, things they deem to be important. This list of priorities is the framework through which we make just about every decision and it’s the paradigm which determines our emotions around the events and relationships in our lives. It is developed through our own unique life experiences. This is a whole article, or perhaps a whole book even, all on its own. Dr Donne discusses it in her article Shine: Setting Goals to our Highest Values.
We have all heard it before. The rise of the life coach has propagated the term exponentially and every social media influencer has dropped it into their caption at one point or another – “Find your passion.”
The root of the word ‘passion’ actually means to suffer. The Buddha defined suffering as the attempt to obtain the unobtainable (pleasure without pain) and avoid the unavoidable (pain without pleasure), The Bible talks in the book of James about being dragged away by our passions as if they were some wild beast. We talk about the Passion of Christ when referring to the crucifixion. Passion is a temporal thing and it arises in the most primitive, animal part of our brain.
The amygdala is a part of our brain which is crucial for our survival.
The amygdala is where we seek pleasure and avoid pain. It evolved early on in order to help us seek prey and find a mate to help us successfully propagate our genes all while avoiding predators. It is this part of our brain that gets ‘triggered’. It is this part of our brain that revs its engine when we see a magnificent specimen of the species walk into the room. This is where jealousy, gluttony, lust, sloth, anger, greed, pride and wrath live. This part of our brain has no capacity for delayed gratification. It is incapable of rational thought. It lives between two extremes: infatuation with that which we seek and resentfulness for that which we hope to avoid.
The amygdala is largely driven by fear because fear is a powerful motivator. When we are infatuated with something: the new guy at work, our neighbour’s new car, that pair of shoes; we become conscious of all the upsides and unconscious of all the downsides. We find ourselves lost in fantasy about it. We daydream and we magnify it relative to our current reality, which leads to states of depression and self-loathing.
When we resent something or someone: Our mother in law, our boss, losing our job, our child struggling at school, we become conscious of all the downsides and unconscious of all the upsides. We become caught up in a waking nightmare, playing and replaying real or hypothetical scenarios in our head, over and over again ad infinitum. We magnify ourselves relative to this person or event and we become proud, judgmental, manic and before long anxiety kicks in. Needless to say, neither of these scenarios is desirable for a constructive day’s work. We become pleasure seekers and pain avoiders.
Extended periods, living in this primitive part of our brain are how addictions develop.
We resort to things like social media, gambling, pornography, drugs and alcohol to get the kick of dopamine our brain needs to feels good as quickly and easily as possible. Once we have achieved that instant gratification we become lazy, like an overfed, oversexed antelope, ripe for the picking.
The amygdala served us very well for millennia but in order to become the most prolific species on the planet, we skinny, bald weaklings had to develop a huge, fancy brain that allowed us to outsmart our bigger, stronger, faster, warmer predators. A brain capable of forethought and planning that helped us problem solve, create and use tools, develop long-term relationships by setting aside our primitive instinct and becoming objective and reasoning. This meant setting aside our passion for a mission.
Enter the Forebrain, also known as the Telencephalon. This is where we unlocked our genius.
We all have a mission and this mission is derived from our own unique hierarchy of values. A person on a mission is objective, their blood glucose and oxygen move away from the amygdala and go to the forebrain and they become conscious of the upsides as well as the downsides, the support as well as the challenge because they love what they do.
Love has been defined as the synergy and synchronicity of complementary opposites. The boundary between pleasure and pain is where we maximise our potential. An antelope that eats too much becomes fat and lazy, it becomes easy prey. An antelope that doesn’t get enough food and is constantly hunted by predators becomes depleted and sick and will also be an easy target. An antelope that has good balance between food and predator stays fit and strong and is going to be difficult to catch.
The forebrain is the master of delayed gratification and addiction is not a problem here.
Think of that girl in your life who was a complete burnout, the party animal who you would’ve voted most likely to either end up on social welfare or marry rich, but then she became a mother and is now taking the good with the bad. She’s a successful businesswoman all while running a household, raising two amazing children. She mostly stays away from alcohol except for the occasional glass of Rose wine with the girls.
We unlock our leadership and our unique genius when we are on a mission because we become creative and are intrinsically motivated, we become focused. We are capable of forethought and solve problems before they happen through strategic planning. We talk the talk and walk the walk because nobody has to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. Our energy levels go through the roof and burnout and adrenal fatigue are not a problem because we are engaged in activity that fulfils and nourishes us from within.
Dr Dre is a record producer who went from gangbanger to billionaire, well known for producing some of the best rap albums ever made. He is single minded in his pursuit of excellence in music and has been known to stay awake for days on end in the studio, engrossed in his latest project because he is inspired from within. Focus is not a problem for him.
People like Elon Musk are unperturbed by outside voices and distractions and they are capable of overcoming endless obstacles in the pursuit of what they view to be valuable and the best part is, where those values align with the values of other people, there is a lot of money to be made.
What can you do to regain focus?
Warren Buffet suggests wring a list of the 25 most important things in your life and ranking them 1-25. He then suggests spending the rest of your life focused on the top five and forgetting the other twenty because they are merely distractions from what is most important to you.
Lacking focus by getting caught up in our amygdala is not some flaw in the system or a disease process. It is a message from our brain, telling us we are not living congruent with our highest values. We have subordinated ourselves to someone else’s mission or we have become one sided in our thinking about people or events in our lives. We have sacrificed our potential, leaving us unsatisfied as a distracted slave to passion rather than a focused master on a mission.
A great tool to help you to define your hierarchy of values is the Demartini values determination process. It is a short online questionnaire that should only take you about 10-15 minutes.
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