When was the last time you did a brain check?

Self regulation is all about checking yourself before you wreck yourself, and that starts with our own brains. Before we give into that primitive urge to judge someone else, our personal duty is to, first, allow ourselves a “pause santé”, or health break, to acknowledge our mental and emotional state. Notice how I did not include “to acknowledge and judge”? I did this because I meant to. If you really want to give your brain a pause to check on it you gotta let go of the judgment. My last check-in was this afternoon, upon starting this blog, and it was completed successfully in like ten minutes!

Checking-in is not as easy as it sounds, hard to believe, yes, but indeed it is. Sometimes you can keep going so long on a task that you forget to eat or drink or breathe in enough oxygen. All of those deprivations would affect our brains.

You can feel it too, right? When your inner world starts to spin because of the flurry of interactions happening in unison. And I’m not talking about a symphony. I am talking about the reality of managing our day to day lives. Life has evolved from complex to complicated to chaotic in a matter of a few years. After a while of chronic stress our brains can go into autopilot and detach from our body, so to speak. When we are feeling more detached we feel less. Literally. We detach from our feelings so that we can stay on course to survive. It is a natural instinct built deep within our DNA. However, if we detach from ourselves completely, how do we get the auto-pilot off?