After we have experienced a trauma, a loss, or an unwanted change in our life… we may spend a great deal of time in a fight-flight-or-freeze state of survival emotions.

We may remain resentful, cynical, judgmental, nervous, guilty, anxious - all of the survival emotions that are part of the fight-flight-or-freeze reflex.

How can we overcome the stress reflex? How can we overcome trauma?

The answer lies deep within our minds, in the intricate labyrinth of our brain. To unlock the secret of true personal change, we must first understand the complex dance of neurons that unfolds when we experience a traumatic or stressful event.

How Trauma Creates Toxic Emotional Habits

Every time we have a thought, it creates an emotion. That emotion is communicated to the body through electrical impulses from the brain that signal the nervous plexus of the body to also produce their matching set of chemicals and hormones in their areas of influence throughout your body.

Just like everything you repeat over and over again, it becomes a habit. Science tells us that neurons that fire together, wire together - but it is deeper than that.

How Thoughts and Emotions Become Habitual

When you study scans of the brain as we learn a new skill or we recall an old skill, the power of habit becomes even more profound - and unlocks the secret we must understand in order to manifest true personal change.

Consider this example of how the brain learns:

When people are just learning how to juggle, they use the prefrontal cortex of their brain to coordinate this new skill.

However, after they have learned to juggle skillfully, they no longer use the prefrontal cortex, but instead this skill is dedicated to a lower, older part of the brain - the basal ganglia and the cerebellum are specialized for the execution of habits.

In fact, our juggler can now learn other tasks while they are juggling because the juggling is written into the subconscious part of our brain.

Why Our Personality Is Hard To Change

Just like juggling, our emotional habits, or our traumatic events, are also written into a subconscious part of our brain, and it is easy, it is ‘habit’ to fire that sequence of emotion.

With the intensity of our trauma, or with chronic stress, the emotional patterns become automatic and less consciously controlled because the prefrontal cortex's involvement has actually decreased! We ARE actually thinking less!

This is why we continue to feel that pattern of guilt, to get angry in traffic, feel that heartbreak, resentment, frustration or anger.

It’s not simply ‘because you have done it so many times’, but because this emotional habit has been delegated to an automatic part of your brain. 

With intent, or by traumatic circumstance - your subconscious has been ‘trained’.

Stress Is A Reflex, Recovery Is A Choice

When confronted with a stress or trauma, our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus regions come alive, painting a vibrant tapestry of neural activity.

The prefrontal cortex tries to respond to the crisis, while the hippocampus creates new memories.

However, strong emotions can reinforce these experiences and they can quickly transition from conscious thinking to automatic habits.

Once this happens, the neural activity then shifts from the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to the basal ganglia and cerebellum. The basal ganglia, nestled deep within the brain, are essential for the formation and execution of habits, while we may use the cerebellum to ruminate on reflections of the stressor.

Understanding these mechanics of our brain can shed light on why old habits die hard - they're deeply wired within the pathways of our basal ganglia.

The Science Of Releasing Stress, Intentionally

The mechanics of our brain also illuminate the path we must follow in order to unwire unwanted emotional habits caused by our trauma.

To recover, we must intentionally practice to activate our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, followed by repetition to engrain the new patterns into our basal ganglia and cerebellum. In other words, we practice emotional rehearsals and imagine mental movies of our future successes in order to reprogram our subconscious mind.

Harnessing these insights and combining them with yoga and meditation, I created a ten yoga class series as my personal path to deliberately overcome trauma and find a greater peacefulness than I had ever known.

Once Difficult, Now Easy

Initially, these tasks will require significant attention to let go of looping thoughts. I recommend that you practice with a guided meditation to begin building the skills to overcome trauma and chronic stress.

Over time, as you reach for relief again and again, the feeling of gratitude and satisfaction from the guided positive affirmations will gradually become second nature.

Understanding our brain's functioning is the secret key to recovery.

In essence, true personal change isn't about a dramatic transformation based on a flash of enlightenment. Instead, enlightenment is a gradual process of understanding and aligning with our brain's natural rhythms.

When in Shavasana pose at the end of yoga class, we intentionally engage in emotional rehearsals and mental movies of our future self. Our prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum are the tools we use as we apply meditation to create true personal change.

Engaging the prefrontal cortex through a mindful yoga practice can help manage stress. Mindful Yoga exercises can help increase our attention span, regulate emotions, and even promote neuroplasticity - the brain's ability to rewire itself.

The solution lies within us - in the very folds and crevices of our incredible brain.