Some Parts of the Brain Improve with Age

Some Parts of the Brain Improve with Age
One of my recent articles gave a statistic from the sports
psychology world stating that it requires about 5 positive
comments to overcome 1 negative comment when coaching young
players. This means that negative comments carry a lot more
weight in the mind of a child than do positive comments.

Most people lack real confidence.

But this extends far beyond young athletes to most of the
population. Most people dwell on criticism or a bad
experience far more than they think about praise or
positive experiences. This all comes back to the beliefs
that you have implanted in your brain throughout your life.

If you continually tell yourself that you are no good at
something then your brain will pay a lot more attention to
the evidence to support that viewpoint than it will to
evidence that contradicts it. Your brain is always trying
to uphold your beliefs.

Since most people have limiting beliefs, they are more
focused on negative feedback than positive feedback and
that's how the whole 5 to 1 (positive to negative) ratio
gets established ? 1 negative piece of feedback is as
powerful as 5 positive pieces.

Seeing the sunny side of life

I ran across a couple of papers this week in Psychological
Science and The Journal of Neuroscience showing how brain
activity that controls this, changes as we get older. Our
brain circuits that filter your positive and negative
experiences actually rewire as you age.

When we are younger, our brains allow negative information
and bad experiences to go straight to our automatic
responses. We don't think about them too much or evaluate
them before we allow them to affect us. On the other hand,
positive feedback and good experiences get some extra
processing by the ?higher functioning' part of our brains
before we allow them to effect us. The positive stuff has
to pass through a filter before we believe it but the
negative stuff doesn't.

As we age this begins to reverse. Our filters of the
negative stuff get stronger and our filters of the positive
stuff get weaker. We allow positive stuff to affect us more
easily (in a good way) and screen out some of the negative
stuff. We don't spend so much time dwelling on criticism
and accept more praise.

This is just an average description of the whole
population. Of course, there are people that are good at
filtering out the negative stuff early in their life and
others that never get good at it. There are people that
take complements and praise very well at a young age and
others that never learn how to accept it.

Speeding up the process

So the question becomes, can we do anything to accelerate
the process? Can we ?train our brains' to become better at
accepting positive stuff and better at filtering out
negative stuff without having to wait until we get to our
elder years?

I believe that you can. There are certainly things that you
can do directly to pay more attention to feedback that will
boost your confidence and dismiss other experiences that
tend to bring you down. There are also many indirect things
that you can do to support the health and maintenance of
your brain.

This comes back to performance concepts that I've discussed
before. Your brain is in a constant state of remodeling
itself. It is up to you whether the new updates you make on
a daily, weekly and yearly basis will be the same as the
old ones, or improved.

You can ensure that your new updates are physically
stronger with the basic nutrition, sleep and physical and
mental exercise needs ? or not. You can also ensure that
your new updates perform better by working on your ability
to think for yourself and replacing some of your limiting
beliefs with empowering ones.

Over time, this will strengthen your filters to deal with
all your negative experiences and allow more of the
positive experiences to get through. Science shows us (as
discussed above) that our brain circuits have a natural
tendency to improve on this front as we get older, but the
speed at which you do it and the final levels that you
reach are up to you.

Focus on the good feedback and your health, and the brain
circuits that control your positive beliefs will literally
get stronger and faster. This will increase your confidence
and your ability to control your own life.

----------------------------------------------------
Master Brain Fitness techniques for you and your family.
Your Brain Fitness holds is the key to unlock your maximum
potential. Dr. Simon Evans puts together the right
ingredients in right amount to create the recipe for
success. Visit http://www.BrainFitForLife.com for FREE
Brain Fitness resources.