Like suppression of feelings, suppression of urges has consequences, especially if the need for suppression of the urge is in conflict with one’s desires. In addition to the chronic muscle tension and possible pain, these consequences include feelings of discomfort and longing, distracted and impaired thought processes, obsessive thoughts about wha

In the suppression of urges, then, it is not just the brain but the neuromuscular system that is activated to contain the urge. If one is threatened but cannot fight or escape, the skeletal muscles in the arms, legs, and trunk that might have become fully active instead become tensed at a low level of contraction. If you’ve ever witnessed a cat (or

How do we get back to ourselves, to find the MPFC switch to access our present embodied states? Experience dependent brain development etches brain pathways in both directions. You have to practice finding yourself, again and again, in order for those pathways to regrow. If you are too far gone into the land of thinking yourself out of situations,

In the short term, suppression can be an effective means of homeostatic self-regulation because it alerts the body to activate defensive and protective means against the perceived stressor. Over the longer term, however, it is not an effective strategy and its continued use can begin to erode the very psychophysiology that makes normal self-regulat

As a psychologically experienced entity, awareness can feel very substantial, the very substance of our existence. Yet unlike water, the fluid of neural network activity does not have mass. It is in a sense, insubstantial as a physical entity.

Embodied self-awareness involves interoception—sensing our breathing, digestion, hunger, arousal, pain, emotion, fatigue and the like—and the body schema—an awareness of the movement and coordination between different parts of the body and between our body and the environment. Conceptual self-awareness is engagement in a thought process of categori

Neural learning is reflected in physiological changes in the nerve cells and their connections. Practice leads to the growth of an increasing number of interconnecting fibers that can synapse between cells. The more synapses between adjoining cells, the more likely there will be a direct communication between them, and the stronger the neural netwo

threatening events, especially if they are chronic, can fundamentally alter our embodied self-awareness.

We can assume that the horror was a spontaneous and emergent emotion as Sacks connected—in the subjective emotional present of embodied self-awareness—his change in body schema to his interoceptive self-awareness. He graciously admits to us that he could not stay in that emotional present: the horror was too disturbing.