at first I was afraid, I was petrifieD.

This week’s tiny spark: our survival brain. We’re learning all about our brain, how it’s wired for survival above all else, and how it’s always trying to protect us, even when it doesn’t feel that way.

Have you ever had a situation where you were stressed/nervous/excited/scared and it seemed like your brain just wasn’t quite working right? Maybe you had to give a big presentation at work and you were so nervous that when you got up to talk, it felt like the speech you had memorized and practiced 10,000 times flew right out of your head? That, my friends, is the work of our survival brain.

If you’ve known me for a while, you probably know how much I love the brain. In fact, you may remember this post on how we change our brains (spoiler alert: it’s hard!). Understanding how our brain works is so critical in understanding ourselves so that we can be more compassionate and move more toward what we want for ourselves in our lives, be that changing habits, setting boundaries, forming new relationships, or whatever we feel drawn towards.

Of course, the brain is incredibly complicated but in my daily work I get to teach these topics to kids as young as 4 years old all the way up to older adults, so rest assured that anyone can understand and apply this material to their daily lives.

The first thing to know about the brain is that it’s made up of three main parts. One of the easiest ways to explain these three parts is to use our hand, a model created by Dan Siegal, a leading researcher in the field of interpersonal neurobiology. Imagine you held your hand up in a fist, thumb wrapped inside your fingers.

Read the rest of this post: https://trishawolfe.substack.com/p/at-first-i-was-afraid-i-was-petrified