God designed our brains to survive this cursed world. Unfortunately this includes losing some cognitive functions when we’re stressed.
For the month of March, we’re going to talk about how God designed us to operate, looking specifically at the Anatomy of our Brains and Nervous Systems. These are the 2 main bodily systems that make up our mental health from a physical perspective.
By understanding how God created us, we can begin to look at why He created us in this way. From there, we can understand how satan is distorting God’s creation to hurt us. Finally, we can find the right resources to help counteract satan’s attack, to bring the peace of Jesus into our mental and emotional selves.
Today, we’re going to start by talking about our brains.
God designed our brains with 3 main parts, that have 3 individual jobs, but work in tandem to run our entire lives.
The 3 main parts of our brains include:
The Brain Stem part of our brains is responsible for survival. It controls our breathing; heart rate; Fight, Flight or Freeze responses; all of our automatic functions that keep us alive.
It’s called the Reptilian Brain because it’s identical to a reptile’s. Their brain’s literally just exist to keep them alive with survival instincts.
The Limbic System part of our brains is responsible for emotional things. It controls our emotions, memory, imagination, dreams, rewards, pleasure and pain, and safety.
It’s called the Mammalian Brain because it’s identical to a mammal’s (think your dog or cat). Their brains include both the Reptilian Brain and the Mammalian Brain. They exist to keep them alive with survival instincts, and emotionally bond through their emotions and memory.
The Neocortex part of our brains is responsible for cognitive thought. It controls our logic, reasoning, self-awareness, analysis and planning.
It’s called the Human Brain because it’s unique to humans. It allows us to know and understand that we exist in this world. It also gives us the ability to know and understand God our Creator, which animals can’t.
When our brain determines we are safe, we live in the state of Rest & Digest, and all 3 parts of our brain are online functioning optimally.
When our brains gets stressed (the bad stress), they prioritize our survival. This means that they will promote the essential survival functions, and shut-down all the non-essential functions.
Here’s the order of that priority:
Our brain stems and limbic systems are online keeping us alive. They record these moments in life as memories along with any detail about this “potential danger” (ie. stress) so we can avoid it in the future. This is a gift from God to keep us alive, and help us automatically avoid these situations later in life.
Our Neocortexes shut offline and literally don’t function. Consider them unplugged, like a power outage. We have no cognitive functions when we’re in survival mode. This helps us save our lives without needing to think (and overthink) about it. (God knew we’d overthink it and mess up our own survival).
When we’re actually in physical danger, this is awesome. We don’t need to think about how to run or fight physical danger, like a mountain lion or a mugger in a dark alley. We need to run and fight like heck to survive.
It’s when we’re in emotional overwhelm (ie. stress), that it becomes an issue.
Our brains, as awesome as they are, don’t know the difference between physical danger and emotional overwhelm. These survival instincts kick in assuming the worst, and now we have no cognitive function even when we’re physically safe.
This is why when we’re stressed we can’t think clearly and we make really irrational decisions that have unfortunate consequences. We lose our keys, we forget our schedules, we agree to things we can’t show up for, we spend money we never should have, etc., etc.
Satan knows this. He uses this vulnerability to attack us and convince us to do all kinds of things that don’t help us. This is why we need some help.
Queue mental health resources to help us release our stress.
When we shift our brains out of survival mode, we bring them back into the state of Rest & Digest. This brings our Neocortexes back online, giving us cognitive function, along with a whole bunch of other benefits.
Christian Stress Release is here to do just that. We help you shift your brain out of stress (ie. survival mode), back into the present moment (ie. Rest & Digest). We help you get your brains fully back online so you can think clearly and get back to your lives in the state of peace.
Here’s to coming back to the state of peace and rest, the peace of Jesus and the woman God designed you to be.
You deserve that ♥
– L aura
