By Don Goeway
Mark Twain once said, “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” I call this “Thought Attacks.” Thoughts attacks are fearful thoughts that, when believed, escalate into negative emotions that produce perceptions of threats, often when no real threat is present. It is the reactive mind that repeatedly mistakes a stick for a snake.
Most of us generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads. These “stress events” produce wildly strong emotions that provoke our bodies into an accompanying uproar. And it’s all linked to mere thought. Thought attacks are the origin of stress provoking behaviors called Type-A, and the Type-A profile is directly correlated with heart attacks. This intense and often unconscious pattern of thinking also causes stress hormones to flood the brain, debilitating higher order neural circuits. These networks generate key executive functions such as problem solving, creativity, error detection, memory and learning. They also produce the empathy, intuition and interpersonal resonance for effective leadership and teamwork. The fact is, a brain under stress is incapable of sustaining peak performance or securing the emotional and social resilience to persevere toward success. We simply can’t afford the price of stressful thoughts.
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