1.
Create a BPMN diagrams to model the
following Five Steps of the Neurocycle process.
The first step is to Gather. This
means choosing to pay attention to your behaviors (what you say and do) and increasing
your conscious awareness. This awareness becomes a directing force that
instructs the brain how to respond on a chemical, energy, and genetic level.
You’re literally pulling the thought tree into the conscious mind to deal with
it by gathering awareness of it. You can change something only when you’re
conscious of it—that’s why the nonconscious tries to catch your attention by
sending you emotional and physical warning signals through the subconscious
mind. Never ignore these prompts, no matter how much they may upset you or
someone else. They’re rich with information.
With the Gather step, you embrace the
physical, emotional, and informational memories intertwined within your
thoughts—you start “pulling up” the branches, leaves, tree trunk, and roots.
This step forces you to really tune in to the prompts from your nonconscious
mind.
The goal
is to choose to pay attention and focus on your behaviors in terms
of the signals coming from your nonconscious mind. Questions to ask at this
step could be:
1.
What are you experiencing through your five senses? Gather
awareness of these physical warning signals emerging from your body.
2.
What is the information in the thoughts bubbling up from your
nonconscious mind into your conscious mind right at this moment? Gather
awareness of this information, noting how many thoughts there are and what they
are.
3.
What feelings are attached to the information the thought
contains? Every thought has emotions as part of its structure—they’re stored in
the nonconscious mind. When thoughts move into the conscious mind, we feel the
emotions of them. Just gather awareness of the feelings attached to each
thought.
The second step of the Neurocycle
is to Reflect. This is where you ask, answer, and discuss what you have gathered
awareness of in step 1 through the “w” questions. The purpose of this step is
to understand your behaviors and communication, and how they’re related to what
you’re thinking, feeling, choosing, and experiencing to find the origin, or the
root cause, of what you’re experiencing.
The aim of this step is to shift
your focus from the behaviors to the thought that triggered these behaviors,
then to the perspective, then to the root cause. This challenges the brain to
move into a higher gear, which is what it’s designed for: deep, intellectual
thinking. This reflective step makes a thought susceptible to change by
activating the theta, delta, and gamma waves in waves of energy and weakening
its connections in your mind. As your insight into what’s going on grows, you
can start directing the energy flow in the brain that tells the brain and body
which chemicals should be released, which genes should be activated and
deactivated, where chemicals should flow to, and, ultimately, what neuroplastic
structural and chemical and energy changes should occur in the brain.
Another way to do the Reflect step
is to use the “5 Why” technique created by Sakichi Toyoda, the Japanese
industrialist, inventor, and founder of Toyota Industries. The method is
simple: you just ask yourself
Why?
five times as a way of
drilling down to the root issue. However, if you feel the need to use all of
the “w” questions more than five times, you can—whatever works for you.
Additionally, in this step you
question the thought or emotion by asking yourself,
Is this based on a fact
or assumption? Is what I am thinking true or false?
Too often we cause
ourselves more mental distress than necessary because we don’t stop to question
our thoughts. This questioning really loosens up thoughts in the brain, making
it easier to reconceptualize. Some more questions to guide you at this step
include:
1.
What am I experiencing physically as I reflect on the thought? Try
to describe this in as much detail as possible.
2.
What is the information on the thought? Try to describe in as much
detail as possible by answering the “w” questions: who, what, when, where, why,
and how.
3.
What feelings are attached to the information in the thought? Try
to describe in as much detail and as specifically as possible.
Step 3 is to Write. The brain
makes or “writes” proteins when genes are switched on by your thinking,
feeling, and choosing. When you write down what you’ve been thinking about in
step 2, it consolidates memory and adds clarity to what you’re thinking about,
allowing you to better see the area that needs to be detoxed or the thought
that needs to be built. It essentially allows you to visualize your thoughts,
bringing suppressed thoughts out of the nonconscious to be reconceptualized.
Writing brings order out of chaos by
“putting your brain on paper.” If we don’t get our suppressed thoughts out,
they stay rooted in our mind, causing mental and physical damage. Toxic
thoughts have incorrectly folded proteins and an imbalanced electromagnetic and
chemical flow with less oxygen and blood flow. They’re unhealthy and can lead
to inflammation in the brain, which can cause all sorts of issues.
Research shows that writing can
even improve immune system function!
1
We saw this in our clinical trials with the experimental group, who were using
all 5 Steps. When they went through step 3, they experienced a statistically
significant drop in their cortisol and homocysteine levels, which predict
immune system health. When you write, you stimulate a flow of neurotransmitters
in your brain that help clear your thinking. You activate an area in your brain
called the basal ganglia, which allows for cognitive fluency. This improves the
smoothness and insightfulness of your reasoning, and you can start seeing and
understanding things you didn’t before. Writing can be done on paper, on your
phone, or even as recorded voice memos. Writing can also be done using a
process I developed called a Metacog, which is an incredibly effective way of
getting into the nonconscious mind and finding the root issue. See appendix B
for how to make a Metacog.
Step 4 is to Recheck what you’ve
written. This is an editing process (pruning and grafting the tree) to check
for accuracy and to find patterns in your thinking, kind of like a mental
autopsy. You shift from the “why, what” to more of the “how, when” questions.
This process allows you to reconceptualize the toxic thought and turn it into a
new, healthy thought habit in the spirit of the kintsugi philosophy. In this
step, you’ll evaluate what you’ve written in step 3 and think about the new
healthy thought you want to build. You will also be able to rethink your
reaction to the information, evaluating how the toxic thought you’re working on
is changing, and then reconceptualizing it—little by little, day by day.
Some questions to guide you as you
do this step include:
1.
What am I experiencing physically? Is there a pattern? How is this
linked to the information and feelings of the thought?
2.
What are the patterns of the information in my thoughts? How can I
reconceptualize this information?
3.
What feelings are attached to the information in the thought? What
patterns do I see? How can I reconceptualize these feelings?
Step 5 is call Active Reach. This
is where you
practice,
apply, and
teach
what you’ve been
working on. An Active Reach is the action you do during the day to practice the
reconceptualized thought, and it comes from the Recheck step. You decide what
the action is each day as you work through the 5 Steps. It’s meant to be
simple, quick, efficient, and easy to apply. It could be a breathing exercise
or a simple statement you say to remind yourself what you learned from the
first four steps during that particular day. It can be as simple as “practice
not saying
if only
today.”
You can do the same Active Reach
as the previous day or a brand-new Active Reach; that’s completely up to you.
The Active Reach step is essential; change requires action, not just
information. Application is essential to growth—it’s practice, and practice
makes perfect.
Some questions to guide you as you
do this step include:
1.
What is my physical trigger?
2.
What is my reconceptualized information?
3.
What are my reconceptualized feelings?