Physiology

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#7 Our Core Beliefs Are Seeds That Grow Happiness

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Core beliefs are what we think and feel about ourselves. Our core beliefs are seeds that grow our happiness. We form them from the verbal, physical, and emotional information other people gave us. These deep seated beliefs develop before we have conscious recall. They lodge in our subconscious mind where they grow our attitude, behaviors, and additional beliefs – where they grow our happiness.

We Store Information Before We Are Born

The first information we get that creates our beliefs comes from parents before we are born. Mothers and fathers, who esteem each other and their unborn children, care for each other with respect, honor, kindness, generosity, and love, create a safe and secure environment in which their children develop. This sends messages of love and security to their children. Mothers and fathers, who don’t esteem their unborn children or themselves, by abusing drugs, alcohol, and each other during pregnancy send very negative messages to their children, such as the world is a dangerous place.

While this information to the unborn child is visceral, mothers also have direct influence on their babies’ physical wellbeing. Mothers who keep themselves healthy are more likely to have healthier babies. Highly anxious or stressed mothers overwork their safety features and are in a chronic state of fight or flight. Not only do their babies sense their fear, but they get infected with the stress hormones produced by their mothers. Stress hormones are released when we are alerted to danger. They affect our vital organs to prepare our bodies to fight or run. Higher than normal levels of stress hormones in babies can lead to anxiety and future health issues.

Sensory Memory and Our Emotions

Unborn and newborn babies have active subconscious minds that take in information and store it for future use. Since our subconscious mind is our alert system, it takes in information through all of our senses. For example, we can smell smoke, taste something rotten, feel an earth tremor, hear an explosion, and see something dangerous. Therefore, we store sensory information before we store intellectual information.

Our senses are tied in with our emotions. So, our sensory memory is closely linked to our emotions. Think of the feelings you get when you recall the smells of turkey roasting on Thanksgiving and fresh baked cookies or songs you hear from your past.

We also associate how we feel with the way people affect our physical and visceral senses. We can remember people’s scents and we remember how people made us feel by their actions towards us. The memory of Grandma’s sweet perfume can trigger feelings of comfort and joy. Trauma victims often have vivid memories of the sounds and smells they experienced during the traumatic event.

Our Inherent Emotions and Basic Knowledge Form Our First Beliefs

Because we have more emotions than knowledge in the beginning of our life, our feelings define what we are rather than who we are. Then, we translate what we feel like we are into who we believe we are. For example, if our parents make us feel bad, we will think we are bad and ultimately believe we are bad. Our parents are the first source of information we use to create our beliefs, then it comes from other people in our lives.

Beliefs We Need For Happiness

If our parents treat us in ways that make us feel good and happy, we will think we are good and safe. We will believe we are loveable, valuable, and acceptable, which give us joy, peace, and love. If our parents treat us in ways that make us feel bad and sad, we will think we are bad and unsafe, and believe we are unlovable, not valuable, and unacceptable (not good enough). This will keep us on alert and we will overuse our survival emotions.

Our survival emotions are our first emotions and are rooted in our subconscious mind. They include fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt. Our basic knowledge, associated with our subconscious mind is good, bad, happy, and sad. When we combine our deeply rooted survival emotions with our basic knowledge, you can see how easy it is to form negative beliefs.

Our negative emotions preserve our existence. We need them to stay alive, but they cannot be used to create the beliefs we need to live happy and well.

The beliefs we need to live happy and well are that we are valued, accepted, and loved. These give us a sense of belonging and make a healthy society. When the people who are responsible for making these true for us make us think they aren’t, our subconscious mind takes over and uses what it has (our survival emotions). We then practice those feelings and repeat those thoughts until they become true beliefs for us.

Formation of Subconscious Beliefs

Once we develop intellect we can put information into our subconscious minds through repetition. Just like we learn to do something by practicing until we can do it without thinking, we can repeat information to ourselves until it turns into a subconscious belief. We do this by saying certain things over and over, i.e. “I’m so stupid,” “I am good enough,” by replaying events over in our minds, and by repeating things other people told us about ourselves. These beliefs can be good or bad.

Subconscious Beliefs Come From Confusing or Scary Information

Children also develop core beliefs from the indirect messages they get when they hear bits of information that is scary or they don’t understand, such as news reports or when they overhear parents talking.

Case in point: Clementine is a sweet six year old girl who all of a sudden refused to go to school. For the past several months, she’s refused to sleep in her bedroom because “The bad people will come and get her,” but her fear has escalated. Clementine’s parents thought it was just the childhood “monster in the closet” phase and tried to reassure her each night, only to find her on the floor of their bedroom or in bed with them each morning.

Further investigation revealed that Clementine’s refusal to sleep in her own bedroom started soon after she woke up one night as her parents were watching the late night news. She came out of her bedroom into the living room just as a story about a girl being abducted came on. The girl’s family was on television crying and pleading for the girl’s safe return.

Clementine’s parents didn’t realize she heard and saw the report. They gave her a drink of water and sent the sleepy little girl back to bed. She appeared undisturbed until the following night. Clementine knew something bad happened to the girl on the news, but didn’t know what abducted meant. So, she filled in the gaps with her five year old imagination. This led her to think something bad might happen to her and even her family. She became very afraid.

Clementine kept rehearsing the story in her mind, trying to make sense out of it and to create an ending she could handle. But, she couldn’t. She repeated her thoughts and feelings until her subconscious mind took the information in and accepted it as truth and reality. This became a core belief for Clementine and she behaved accordingly.

Clementine believed she was in danger. To be safe, she needed to be with her parents.

Subconscious Beliefs Result From Traumatic Stress

Post traumatic stress leaves us with traumatic subconscious beliefs. When traumatic event(s) happen, our subconscious mind goes into overdrive sending out alerts as we sense danger. Our primary emotions take over. If we aren’t able to process the event(s) in a way that allows our alert system to go back to standby, we get stuck feeling fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt. These feelings override our rational thoughts and we develop traumatic beliefs about ourselves, such as “I’m going to die.” or “It’s my fault…” We continue to live in terror.

Our Brain and Core Beliefs Develop Beyond Teenage Years

We continue to develop core beliefs while our brain continues to mature (into our mid 20’s) from information people who are “bigger” or important give us. Abusive relationships, middle and high school bullying, an alcoholic partner, sexual abuse from a person in authority, and untreated traumatic events can leave us feeling afraid, guilty, ashamed, insecure, and unacceptable.

If we experience these kinds of situations, we often replay them over and over in our minds because we are too afraid or ashamed to talk to anyone about it. Sometimes, when we do try to talk about it with someone, we’re told to keep it quiet or made to feel it really wasn’t “like that.” This compounds the situation so that along with fear and shame from the trauma, we doubt ourselves and the truth.

When we replay negative events in our minds, we continue to relive the negative emotions we had during the events. Eventually, these negative emotions become our norm and we become comfortable with them. This can lead us to be happy being miserable.

Core Beliefs That Come From Survival Emotions

We all know what our core beliefs are when we pay attention to ourselves. It’s the feeling and thought that pop in our head when good and bad things happen to us and others. If you feel bad when something good happens and feel good when something bad happens (especially to others), your core beliefs are coming from your survival emotions.

Our survival emotions put us in our natural state and the core beliefs we have in the natural are based on the law of nature, survival of the fittest and might makes right. They include greed, suspicion, and superiority.

If we translate these beliefs into civilized behaviors here’s what it would look like:

  • If you feel like you aren’t valuable, you try to compensate by gathering a lot of material goods. You are greedy.
  • When you don’t feel like you are loveable, you are suspicious of people who show you kindness.
  • If you feel like you’re not good enough, you might continuously try to impress others through superiority (dominance).

What Are Your Seeds Growing?

Our core beliefs are seeds that grow our happiness. So, the first step to being consistently happy is to recognize your core beliefs and how they affect your behavior. To do this:

  1. Pay attention to yourself — your feelings and thoughts when good and bad things happen. (Do you feel more fear, shame, and guilt than gratitude and joy when something good happens to you? Do you feel more satisfaction than compassion when something unfortunate happens to people, especially those you’re not too fond of?)
  2. Pay attention to the words you use when you talk and how you feel when you use them. (Do you use a lot of “n’t” words, i.e. can’t, don’t won’t, aren’t in your daily vocabulary?)
  3. What do you repeatedly say to yourself or what thoughts do you constantly repeat to yourself?

Recognize what you believe about yourself and how it makes you behave. You can choose if and what you want to change.

Read Post #8 for traits of happy people you can set as goals. Use the Essentials to help change your core beliefs and behaviors so you can grow your happiness.

Our Core Beliefs Are Seeds That Grow Our Happiness:  

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#5 Getting to the Core of Happiness

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Apples and people develop from their cores. But, unlike apples, our cores are invisible. While the cores of apples have seeds that grow more apples, our core has seeds, known as our internal beliefs, from which we grow in body, mind, and spirit, and from which we help others grow. “Getting to the Core of Happiness” explains how to find your core, its components, and how your core relates to your happiness.

Where We Find Our Core

Our core is also our innermost part. It is our primary brain, our spark of life, our soul. It originated when we originated, so is the core from which we develop and grow. Our core is spiritual. We cannot see it, but we see the world through it and other people see us through the way our core affects our attitudes, behaviors, and decisions. The basis of who we are lies in our core.

Our primary brain, the home of our core, develops less than a month after we are conceived. It develops at the top of the neural tube (spinal process) and continues to form during fetal development as brain tissue folds over itself, making an intricate pattern of layers. 

The layers that form create the conscious part of our brain which develops over and around our primary brain. This places our primary brain deep within and below the conscious part. Therefore, we refer to this area of our brain as the subconscious. Our subconscious mind is the core of our existence.

Functions of the Subconscious Mind

Our subconscious mind controls our vital functions and much of what we do and believe. It is our memory warehouse and our alert system. When we sense danger, our alert system engages. Our natural instincts which include emotions of fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt arouse our mind and prime us for survival. We have more acute hearing and awareness as we position ourselves to fight, flight, or freeze. Our sympathetic nervous system readies our body for action by regulating our heart-rate, breathing digestion, and alertness so we can fight to defend ourselves or flight to save ourselves. There are times when we are so afraid, we just freeze. This is akin to playing possum.

While fear, shame, and guilt prevent us from doing things that could harm or kill us, we can use anger and contempt to dominate others into feeling afraid, ashamed, and guilty so we can secure our existence. These emotions are necessary for our survival, but do not give us joy, peace, and love we need for happiness.

If we lived solely at a subconscious level, we would live in the natural. We would live like animals following the laws of nature –  survival of the fittest and might makes right. However, God gave us “complete authority” over the animals (Genesis 1:26). He gave us a thinking brain so we can reason, create, and problem solve. We have a more sophisticated brain than the animals so we can live well and be happy. God gave us a subconscious mind so we can exist and a conscious mind so we can live (happy).

Our subconscious mind is also our memory storehouse. While our instincts are inborn, the information stored in our subconscious mind come from our experiences. It stores everything that happens to us and especially remembers the dangerous events as a way of reminding us to not do it again so we can continue to exist. For example, we remember to not touch the hot stove. 

The subconscious mind is our unawareness that directly affects the awareness of others. It determines how we behave and what we believe which can be obvious to others, but unknown to us. To be aware of our unawareness, we must be conscious of our thoughts and actions. Many times, other people will bring it to our attention, usually because we offended them. For example, my husband struggles with talking about emotions. When I start a conversation about feelings, he subtly winces and rubs the back of his neck. Is he subconsciously saying this is a “pain in the neck”?

When you are aware of your unawareness and understand your subconscious mind, you can better determine your happiness.

Understanding Your Own Core

To get to the core of happiness, you must first understand your own core. Let’s take a closer look at the core of our being by comparing our subconscious and conscious minds and how each contributes to our happiness.

                      Subconscious                      Conscious
                Active before birth                Active after birth
                Survival priority                   Living well priority
                Reacts                                   Responds
                Source of emotion                Source of reason and logic
                Auto-store memory              Manual memory
                Never sleeps                        Routinely sleeps
                Infinite                                 Finite

•   Active:  In my previous post, I explained how quickly after we are conceived our subconscious mind develops. This primary brain is our spark of life, regulates our vital functions, and is dedicated to keeping us alive. Our conscious mind forms before we are born, but doesn’t become overtly active until after we are born. By age 4, we develop conscious memory and our subconscious mind takes on a more covert role. It remains active, but gets fed by the information our conscious mind puts in it. Our subconscious mind does not mature much further after age 4. Therefore, it is like us at age 4; our inner child, who has no concept of time, believes what it is told to be truth and reality, and interprets communication very literally. 

•   Priority:  Once you have something you really like, you don’t want to give it up. We like existing and our subconscious mind’s priority is for us to do just that. When we experience any kind of threat, the subconscious mind is alerted. It readies our body for action and causes us to behave in ways that continue our existence. The subconscious mind’s priority is its owner. It doesn’t consider how the resulting behaviors affect other people or our relationships. Therefore, these behaviors make the owner look like he/she prioritizes himself over others, making him seem self-centered and selfish.

While our subconscious mind’s priority is for us to exist, our conscious mind gives us the ability to figure out how to live well and make life enjoyable. We problem solve, create new ideas, and reason out issues with our conscious mind. It gives us the ability to gather information so we can make better decisions and allows us to filter through information so we can be understanding, accepting, and patient with others, giving us the ability to form happier relationships.

•   React/Respond:  To stay alive, we must be quick to react. But, to live well and long, we must learn to respond to certain conditions. When we are threatened, our subconscious mind reacts. But, our conscious mind has us think about possible outcomes and effects so we can determine a better course of action.

We typically associate reactions with something negative and responses with something positive, e.g., “He had a bad reaction to the bug bite.” “He responded well to the treatment.” When we react, we base our decisions on emotions and usually regret the outcome. When we respond, we think through the situation and are happier with the outcome.

•   Emotion/Logic:  Our gut instincts that come from our subconscious mind are linked to emotions that cannot be explained. These natural emotions are fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt. Everyone knows these, but they are difficult to describe. They make up the safety feature that preserves our existence. When over used, they are unreliable and cause emotional distress that leads to physical ailments. Clearly, they are not happy feelings.

Our conscious mind takes longer to develop and has a larger surface area than our subconscious mind. Therefore, we have a greater capacity to think. Our ability to think gives us the freedom to make choices (free will). We can choose how to behave, what to have, and how to feel. We can choose to be happy.

•   Memory storage:  Our subconscious mind has auto-save and takes in every bit of information it encounters. Because it is our alert system, it takes in information through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. If the information is non-threatening, it’s filed away so we can call it up if we need it. If the information is interpreted as painful or a threat, it’s kept readily on hand as a reminder and means to avoid pain. Childbirth is an exception to this. If women remembered the pain of childbirth, they wouldn’t continue to have children, and we would become extinct.

Storing information happens before we are born. Since this information is stored before our conscious mind develops, it is subconscious memory. Did you ever know something and not know how you knew it? Most likely, you took in the information before you were born or consciously aware. 

To store information in our conscious mind, we must be consciously aware and think about it. Many times we use associations, such as images, abbreviations, or mnemonics to help us remember the information.

•   Sleep:  If our subconscious mind slept, so would our vital functions and that would be the end for us. It sorts through information that was triggered by events of the day. Sounds, smells, tastes, touch, or sights we encounter during the day can activate certain subconscious information and cause us to have dreams or nightmares.

Even though our body is at rest, the threatening information alerts our body to respond as if the event were really happing. We unconsciously feel afraid and go into fight/flight mode. Our heart rate increases, we breathe faster, we sweat, yell, and tremble. We are startled awake. After we wake, our conscious mind reasons out the situation, assesses for danger, determines we are safe, and we can go back to sleep.

Sleep is necessary for us to heal, grow, and refresh. Using out conscious mind to clear our subconscious mind of bad information and keeping our natural emotions at rest gives us better sleep that contributes to healthier minds.

•   Infinite/Finite:  How do you measure imagination, creativity, emotions, and all the information we take in on a daily basis? You can’t. Our subconscious mind is as infinite as our soul is eternal. It has capacity beyond our awareness. Our conscious mind, however, can only comprehend so much information. We have a finite degree of comprehension and intellect. We can quantify our level of intelligence, but we cannot quantify the senses of our subconscious mind.

Balance Your Minds, Get to Core of Happiness

It is in both our subconscious and conscious minds we find the means to and core of our happiness. We must maintain a good balance and a good relationship between them in order to maintain a good level of happiness.

My next post shows you how to see what’s in your core and how it determines your direction for happiness. Stay tuned!

Getting to the Core of Happiness:  

#4 First Come, First Served: Brain Development and Happiness

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We are not born happy. If we were, we would lie content and peaceful in our cribs and never draw our mothers’ attention to get fed or comforted. We would rely on the guess work of our mothers for our existence as they would have to guess what we needed and when we needed it and we could, in all probability, die. Instead, we use a negative form of communication to get our mothers’ attention. We cry and scream. This way of seeking attention is not done by thinking. It is done by the information we already have that comes from the part of our brain that is already developed — our primary brain. This part of our mind is the first to come and the first served. It’s objective is more about our survival than our happiness.  It’s our brain development that determines our happiness.

Our Primary Brain

We instinctually know we need to eat to survive. There is a part of our brain that tells us if we don’t have food, we will cease to exist. Feeling hungry alerts us to our need for food. This alert also lets us know there is a threat to our existence if we don’t eat. So, we intuitively cry and scream for attention and as an expression of our fear and anger.

The part of our brain that alerts us to threats is our primary brain.  It’s the first part to exist, beginning to develop less than one month after we are conceived.  This area of the brain regulates heartrate, breathing, digestion, alertness, and wakefulness. It also houses our survival instincts and emotions, which include fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt – feelings that preserve our existence. Since our primary brain came first, it is natural that it is served first, making fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt our natural primary emotions.

Our primary brain is also responsible for our primary knowledge. We instinctually know good, bad, joy, and sad. We know respect, honesty, truth, and accountability are right and just. However, this inherent knowledge isn’t activated until our thinking or logical part of the brain develops and most of that brain development occurs after we are born. This part is referred to as our conscious mind.

Brain Biology

When we are born, we have about 100 billion brain cells (neurons). Brain activity does not come from the neurons themselves. It occurs when neurons connect to each other via electrical impulses (synapses). We have fewer connections before we are born, and at birth we have about 2500 connections per neuron. These initial connections control our vital functions and instincts. As neurons mature, more synapses are formed. By age 3, we have about 15,000 connections per neuron. As we mature so does our brain, making more connections until we are in our mid 20’s and can continue to make new pathways as long as we are able to think and are mentally stimulated.

Many of our neurons have predetermined connections that will be made as long as we get the right kind of stimulation. Good intellectual stimulation (reading, writing, arithmetic, and vocabulary) will form more connections in our thinking brain and make us more consciously aware, gain better problem-solving skills, and develop the ability to reason. Conversely, if we are not intellectually stimulated during our developmental years, our conscious mind’s growth will be stunted.

Our Subconscious Mind

Since our primary brain is located under our conscious mind and was here first, it is like our brain’s foundation. Therefore, we refer to it as the subconscious mind. Unlike the conscious mind, we are not aware of what information the subconscious mind has in it or what information it sends out. The subconscious mind directs our behaviors and attitude without our conscious awareness. For example, when we do things without thinking such as walking, gestures we make while talking, our facial expressions and mannerisms, and verbal expressions we use while speaking we these subconsciously.

If our subconscious mind is overstimulated there is more activity in it and we will overuse our primary emotions. We are overstimulated when we are exposed to situations that make us feel more unsafe than safe, more insecure than secure, constantly threatened, in constant danger, and rejected or abandoned. These situations prompt feelings of fear, anger, contempt, shame, and guilt, which become chronic feelings and develop into disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Since our subconscious mind came first, our primary emotions are naturally the first emotions that come to us during challenging times, and can easily come first even in good times, such as when someone gives us a compliment and we dismiss it because we feel embarrassed or distrusting.

Balance Between Subconscious and Conscious Minds

Unlike the animals, we have a subconscious mind and a sophisticated conscious mind. Our subconscious mind’s focus is for us to survive and our conscious mind’s focus is for us to live well. We need both to be happy. If we have too much activity in one or the other, it throws off the balance that allows us to be both intuitive and logical. Too much subconscious activity makes us overly fearful, overly angry, overly ashamed, and overly guilty. Too much logic makes us overly reasonable (unemotional) and disconnected from others.

Happiness is a Choice

We not born happy, but we can choose to be happy and therefore, must learn to be happy. We must balance our intellect with our emotions and in doing that we must think first. Therefore, our brain development determines our happiness. The better we develop our ability to think first and balance our emotions, the better decisions we make and the happier we are.

God put our thinking brain in front of our heads and our emotions behind. He also reminds us the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Perhaps His way of telling us to think first and let our emotions follow.

Serve the First One Here

We choose to be happy by choosing to be peaceful in difficult situations, to be joyful despite the behaviors of others, to love people who aren’t lovely, and choose to believe the best. We learn to be happy by serving the one who came first – God.

Brain Development and How It Determines Our Happiness:  

 

 

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