more angry and frustrated. In effect, your feelings are now controlling your
thinking. Your body is now driving your mind.
As the cycle goes on, your angry thoughts produce more chemical signals
to your body, which activate the adrenal chemicals associated with your
angry feelings. Now you become enraged and aggressive. You feel flushed,
your stomach is twisted into a knot, your head pounds, and your muscles
start to clench. As all those heightened feelings flood the body and change
its physiology, this chemical cocktail fires up a set of circuits in the brain,
causing you to think equal to those emotions.
Now you’re telling your associate off ten different ways in the privacy of
your own mind. You indignantly conjure up a litany of past events that
validate your present upset, brainstorming through a letter recounting all
those complaints you’ve always wanted to lodge. In your mind, you’ve
already forwarded it to your boss before you even arrive at work. You exit
the car dazed and crazed and a breath away from homicidal. Hello, walking,
talking model of an angry person ... and all of this started with a single
thought. In this moment, it seems impossible to think greater than you feel
—and that’s why it’s so hard to change.
The result of this cyclic communication between your brain and body is
that you tend to react predictably to these kinds of situations. You create
patterns of the same familiar thoughts and feelings, you unconsciously
behave in automatic ways, and you are mired in these routines. This is how
the chemical “you” functions.
Does Your Mind Control Your Body?
Or Does Your Body Control Your Mind?
Why is it so hard to change?
Imagine that your mother loved to suffer, and through long observation,
you unconsciously saw that this behavior pattern enabled her to get what
she wanted in life. Let’s also say that you’ve had a few tough experiences in
your own life, which created quite a bit of suffering for you. Those
memories still elicit an emotional reaction, centered around a specific
person at a particular place at a certain time in your life. You’ve thought
about the past often enough, and somehow, those memories are easy to