Lesson 8: Spirals and
Vicious Cycles
Looking at the ELFs (Excellences of Limited Function) gives a glimpse into the inner workings of the machine that has done such a brilliant job of creating trouble in your life. Now we are going to look at how these ELFs interact with your body and health.
Once again, as this is not the main focus of this book, this will be a relatively brief exploration of the subject. For a much more in-depth analysis of the link between the mind, brain and body you might find it helpful to refer to Introduction to the Lightning Process.
You may have noticed one of the key features of ELFs is their ability to self-perpetuate and generate problems, no matter how good or bad a situation. So, for example, if you ‘run’ the Stress ELF pattern, then in times of stress you’ll be stressed and in times of calmness you could also stress yourself in a number of ways. For example, you could worry about forthcoming stress you’re anticipating or, possibly, you may be nervous about the strangeness of feeling calm.
Linked to this is the idea of spirals and vicious circles, and an example of this would be anyone who is unfortunate enough to have (dû) panic attacks, which usually happen something like this:
One day, relatively out of the blue, they suddenly experience some very profound and concerning symptoms. The symptoms are, more often than not, purely a result of a large amount of the stress hormones (adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol and others) being pumped into the bloodstream as the natural response to what appears to be a ‘threat’. Classic examples of these types of symptoms include:
Unfortunately, as soon as they’re hit with these symptoms, which are often very strong and overpowering, they quite naturally become more stressed.
Now we have the problematic situation where the stress of the original event causes the release of hormones and the production of the symptoms above, which in turn create more stress, more stress hormones, more symptoms, and round it goes.
You can recognize those kinds of self-perpetuating spirals in the thinking styles in each of the ELFs; and they, in turn, produce powerful physiological changes, many of which are driven by the ‘flight or fight’ or the ‘physical emergency response’.
This response to threats and stress is well documented and designed to help us get out of emergency situations. The hormones produced actually make muscles temporarily stronger, faster and more powerful. It is thought that this physical response was set in place way back in human history when our primitive ancestors faced daily threats and challenges that were predominantly physical, such as dealing with wild beasts.
The problem is that activating these powerful hormones doesn’t just affect the muscles; it also affects most of the body’s systems.
In fact, most, if not all, of the cells within the body, including the brain cells, are affected by this ‘stress’ response. Activating the muscles consumes large amounts of body sugar, and as the brain itself is the other great user of the body’s sugar stores, when we switch on the ‘stress’ response our sugar supplies now have to be shared between two voracious appetites.
Changes in delivery of sugar, hormones and other essential supplies to the brain cells affect their ability to function – so stimulating this ‘costly’ system has a downside to it.
The body has limited resources and in order to ‘fund’ the switching on of these very powerful hormone systems other body systems have to switch off to some extent to balance the books. This is okay, temporarily, as normally our ‘ancestor versus the wild beast’ contest would be fairly short-lived, with one beating the other fairly quickly, and when you see the list of what’s sacrificed to fuel the ‘stress’ response, you can see why it’s not a system that was designed to be, or should be, constantly stimulated.
The body chooses to deactivate the systems least useful in ‘threat’ situations, which include the digestive, the sleep management, the healing immune and, rather importantly, our ‘complex thinking’ systems.
When these ‘complex thinking’ systems are switched off, due to being faced with a threat, we launch into a much more primitive way of problem-solving. The brain doesn’t want to overload itself by having to process too many options, which may slow down its response time to the threat, and so limits itself to some very simple choices, such as run, freeze or fight.
Unfortunately, when you’re stuck emotionally this more primitive system starts to work against you. Trying to work out how to be happy and fulfilled when using this primitive way of problem-solving just isn’t going to work very well. We obviously need some rather more creative and thoughtful ways of approaching the complexity of life, rather than just limiting ourselves to:
So running these ELF patterns not only makes us view the world and ourselves differently, it also messes with our brain and body chemistry. The hormone soup that the ELFs produce will directly make us feel ‘out of sorts’ by its influence on the body and the brain’s functioning, and it will also prevent us from being able to think clearly and find our way out of ‘bad’ states and moods.
This combination of ‘feeling bad’ and our physiological inability to think about our problems creatively makes finding good solutions very tricky. And so we gather further experience and evidence of how bad the world is or we are, and the ELF’s destructive cycle sweeps us deeper into a sense of reality where change is not only hard, it can seem impossible.
But remember, there’s good news. In the ELF chapters, we noticed how fragile the ELF’s grip is on convincing us that the world is really that way. We also discovered that making only a small change to the recipe would release us from its power, and once again the brain works both ways for us; as soon as we start to break that destructive spiral it can’t run any more. Instead we start to run a constructive spiral, where a change occurs that makes our brain work better, and the improved state makes us feel better, switching off those ‘stress’ chemical and upwards we go!
We’re going to look at how we put that change into action, by combining all the lessons in this book so far in a dynamic and practical way. And, because we’re already geniuses – great at consistently reproducing results, on demand, then it’s bound to be easy to put these ideas into practice and get the life you love, NOW.
