“5 major brain functions”
Created by Mark Waldman, Monica Evason & Simon Reeves

Most of the time we stroll through life reacting to the world around us without giving a second thought as to why we’re thinking or feeling the way we do.
Then shit happens…. ….and we have to face our fears. That’s when we have to make a choice. Let our mind control us….or learn to control our mind.
It starts with understanding that none of us is perfect…. That we’re all work in progress…and that we can’t do this on our own. We’re humans and we learn and grow best from each other.
Each and every day we discover something new about our brain….and yet we’re still far from knowing everything. For example just 5 years ago we thought the brain stopped developing at the age of 25. Turns out that’s absolutely not the case….it never stops developing. We have this incredible super power called neuro plasticity. Trouble is most of us don’t even know we have it.
Take Billie…. he lost his cerebellum from a brain tumour. He couldn’t ride a bike anymore as that’s the part of the brain responsible for balance and movement gone….but he missed what he loved most. He got on that bike every day for 15 minutes. It wasn’t easy. Within 8 months Billie was
riding a bike again. That’s neuroplasticity at its best. By being clear with our brain what we want, we can get there.

The problem is our thoughts because they just don’t stop. Not even when we’re asleep. How many thoughts do we have going on at one time? Hundreds of them, maybe thousands in a single minute, nobody knows for sure, and 99% of them are unconscious thoughts we’re not even aware we have. Some are fantasies, some are memories, and a few of them are simply the words we are thinking. Most of our memories are negative because our brain has one main function – to keep us safe. We have fears and worries about what happened in the past and about what might happen to us in the future. If we want to be more positive, we need to work at it. And we need to remember that our memories and fantasies are not real – just stored information to keep us out of trouble and help us find creative ways to achieve our goals. It’s hard to fully understand or explain a lot of what the brain does without us even being aware. So, a few of us got together and came up with a simple model to help make the complicated easier to  understand.
Our survival brain is millions of years old. It’s when we’re at our most basic. It kicks in when the going gets tough. Food… Sex… Survive. We don’t think in this mode, we function. When shit happens, we revert to instinct brain. We
go into automatic pilot. The emotion part of our brain ….that’s also millions of years old. It develops with our basic brain before we’re even born.
This is where fear and love and anger and sadness – even playfulness -are activated. It’s also where our curiosity, desires and passions come from. Children are strongly driven by these core emotions and adults learn to control them, suppress them, or ignore them. That’s okay when it comes to anger because anger can ruin our friendships with others. But when we’re told to stop crying when we feel hurt, that cuts off the important grieving processes of the brain. When our natural playfulness is given limits, it reduces our ability to relate to others. Inadvertently and often with our best intentions at heart, our parents and teachers shut down important emotions that are essential for survival, social relationships, and our happiness.

Knowledge is power.
If we know how to tap into our naturally positive emotions that are in there somewhere, we can use them to help build the social brain. This is the one that grows as we do. It gets stronger and develops as we learn from experiences – the good ones and the bad ones. The better we get at understanding ourselves and handling the stuff that comes our way, the stronger that part gets. It’s also the slowest growing part of the brain, taking about 30 years to develop. We need to learn how to understand how other people feel. We need to grow empathy, compassion, and forgiveness, and that takes patience and time.
The same is true for the thinking brain. It grows slowly and gets stronger with age and experience. We have to develop logic and reason. We have to learn how our behaviour impacts others; how to decide what the best action will be in a given situation, and we have to learn how to plan our future to get what the other parts of our brain really want. Most importantly, we have to use our thinking skills to tap into the imagination brain to find creative solutions to difficult problems. How do we do that? By daydreaming.
By consciously using our imagination to explore the world in different ways.

However, too much daydreaming can cause anxiety; interfering with our ability to make wise decisions and can lead to a procrastination loop. If we really want to be happy and successful we need to use and balance all the parts of our brain: survival skills, emotional skills, social skills, thinking skills and our creative imagination. To be at our own personal best we need to recognize what makes us tick. An important part of that is discovering,
accepting and embracing who we are. That’s easier said than done because part of our brain instinctively resists change. It’s easier to stick with old thoughts and habits. Even if they are holding us back. That’s why it’s important to wake up and take the time to start using the many tools we have to retrain our brain, to make friends with our brain.