The Power of Analytical Mind and Suggestibility.
The Power of Analytical Mind and Suggestibility.
The analytical mind (or the critical mind) is that part of the mind you consciously use and are aware of.
It’s a function of the thinking neocortex the part of the brain that’s the seat of your conscious awareness; that thinks, observes, and remembers things; and that resolves problems.
It analyses, compares, judges, rethinks, examines, questions, polarizes, scrutinizes, reasons, rationalizes, and reflects.
It takes what it has learned from experience and applies it to a future outcome or something it hasn’t yet experienced.
The analytical mind always brings you “back to your senses.”
At that moment you begin to analyze;
- Is this right?
- Should I do this?
- What will I look like?
- Who is watching?
- What will my boyfriend think?
The suggestion would no longer be as powerful, and you returned to your old, familiar state.
Since the neocortex is divided into two halves called hemispheres, it makes sense that we analyze and spend a lot of time thinking in duality.
You know, good versus bad, right versus wrong, positive versus negative, male versus female, straight versus gay, Democrat versus Republican, past versus future, logic versus emotion, old versus new, head versus heart you get the idea.
And if we’re living in stress, the chemicals we’re pumping into our systems tend to drive the whole analytical process faster.
We analyze even more to predict future outcomes so that we can protect ourselves from potential worst-case scenarios based on experience.
- Also Read: Essential steps to reclaiming or improving your memory and restoring the health of your brain.
There’s nothing wrong with the analytical mind, of course.
It has served us well for our entire waking, conscious lives.
It’s what makes us human.
Its job is to create meaning and coherence between our outer worlds (the combined experiences of people and things at different times and places) and our inner worlds (our thoughts and feelings).
The analytical mind works best when we’re calm, relaxed, and focused.
This is when it’s working for us.
It simultaneously reviews many aspects of our lives and provides us with meaningful answers.
- It helps us choose from myriad options to make decisions,
- learn new things,
- scrutinize whether to believe in something,
- judge social situations based on our ethics,
- get clear on our purpose in life,
- discern morality with conviction,
- and evaluate important sensory data.
As an extension of our egos, the analytical mind also protects us so that we can cope and survive best in our external environments.
One of the ego’s main jobs is protection.
It’s always evaluating situations in the external environment and assessing the landscape for the most advantageous outcomes.
It takes care of the self, and it also tries to preserve the body.
Your ego will let you know when there’s potential danger, and it will urge you to respond to the condition.
For example, if you were walking down the street and saw the oncoming cars driving too close to the side of the road where you were walking, you might cross the street to protect yourself that’s your ego giving you that guidance.
But when our egos are out of balance due to a barrage of stress hormones, our analytical minds go into high gear and become overstimulated.
That’s when the analytical mind is no longer working for us but against us.
We get overanalytical.
And the ego becomes highly selfish by making sure that we come first because that’s its job.
- It thinks and feels as though it needs to be in control to protect its identity.
- It tries to have power over outcomes;
- It predicts what it needs to do to create a certainly safe situation;
- It clings to the familiar and won’t let go so it holds grudges, feels pain and suffers, or can’t get beyond its victimhood.
- It will always avoid the unknown condition and view it as potentially dangerous because, to the ego, the unknown is not to be trusted.
And the ego will do anything to empower itself for the rush of addictive emotions.
It wants what it wants, and it will do whatever it takes to get there first, by pushing its way to the front of the line.
It can be cunning, manipulative, competitive, and deceptive in its protection.
So, the more stressful your situation, the more your analytical mind is driven to analyze your life within the emotion you’re experiencing at that particular time.
When this happens, you’re moving your consciousness further away from the operating system of the subconscious mind, where true change can occur.
You’re then analyzing your life from your emotional past, although the answers to your problems aren’t within those emotions, which are causing you to think harder within a limited, familiar chemical state.
You’re thinking in the box.
Then because of the thinking and feeling loop discussed earlier in the book, those thoughts re-create the same emotions and so drive your brain and body further out of order.
You’ll be able to see the answers more easily when you get beyond that stressful emotion and see your life from a different state of mind.
As your analytical mind is heightened, your suggestibility to new outcomes decreases. Why?
Because an impending emergency isn’t the time to be open-minded: entertain new possibilities and accept new potentials.
It’s not the time to believe in new ideas and openly let go and surrender to them.
It’s not the time to trust; instead, it’s the time to protect the self by measuring what you know against what you don’t know to determine the greatest chances of survival.
It’s the time to flee from the unknown.
So, it makes sense that as the analytical mind is endorsed by the stress hormones, you’ll narrow your thinking, be unlikely to trust and believe in anything new, and be less suggestible to believing in thought alone or in making any unknown thought known.
Thus, you can use the analytical mind or ego to work for you or against you.
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