A Mapping Revolution

Let’s get clear

If you read the first article in this series, you’ll be aware that there are many areas involved in your frustration at not being as productive as you believe you can be. Add to this the fact that you may not be making as good or as clear decisions as you need to successfully navigate to your goals, and it could seem like a very bleak and disappointing situation indeed.

But you’ll also remember that I mentioned there is a movement solution to almost all of this – in fact, I would go as far as to say there is a movement solution that will positively impact all of the areas that are currently holding you back. And to kick us off, we are going to look at a mapping revolution.

In the same way that you need an up to date map to navigate your geographical landscape, you also need an up to date brain map to navigate your internal and external environment. You see, your brain is a highly complex prediction engine. To make the most effective predictions and decisions, your brain needs a complete picture of both your body and the environment around you. Let’s take a brief journey of discovery…

Garbage in…

Imagine you are in a completely enclosed room with banks of monitors all around. Each monitor has headphones attached and there are other pieces of information coming in all of the time through printers and digital devices. Your job is a dispatcher of emergency services and you must send the correct response to each incident you see and hear about from the information available to you. In most cases, you get it right. You’ve learned along the way and you’re now pretty good at interpreting the patterns of data that come through to you.

Now imagine that some high priority data is coming through in a pattern that you recognise, so you dispatch the appropriate service as you have done in the past. Within a few moments you are getting reports that you dispatched the wrong service. You generated a huge overreaction to a minor incident. You can’t work out what went wrong, and then it happens again and again. Unknown to you, someone has tampered with the data feed coming in. But you can only rely on the data coming in to you have to act on it, no grey areas. You are now stuck in a cycle of dispatching inappropriate responses until the data feeds can be made more accurate again.

This is exactly what happens in your brain. The only direct connection your brain has to the outside world are its neurons related to smell. All other data is indirect and comes from various areas of your nervous system. To help dispatch the correct response, your brain has some amazing efficiency tools that it employs:

1. Despite what you may have been told, your senses don’t send in a continuous stream of linked data. For example, your eyes are not like a video camera. Your ears are not like microphones. Instead, certain markers are sent through that help your brain trigger patterns or predictions that it’s built up over your lifetime. Some of these patterns are in your DNA, passed down from many generations of humans (there is some evidence that there are patterns going right back to the first lifeforms). Others are directly from your own experiences across your lifespan so far. By using this predictive pattern matching and generation system, your brain can produce responses very quickly and efficiently. But of course, it relies on accurate information…
   
2. Your brain contains lots of maps of your body. This is how it knows you have arms, legs, toes, knees etc. In fact, your brain only knows about anything outside of itself because of these maps. So, if these maps are incomplete, blurry, fused or otherwise inaccurate the decisions your brain is making are likely to contain errors.

So, to improve your brain’s decision making ability, you need to have clear maps and robust prediction models. Your pattern matching functions rely on the information flowing into your brain, so you need to ensure that it’s as accurate as possible, is integrating well, and prioritised appropriately.

All of this highlights the first pillar in the system I’ve put together to help improve your productivity and decision making: Brain-Body Maps.

This is where you begin your journey to improving your productivity and decision making. This is where you start to reconnect to your body and your environment; where you start enjoying moving forwards rather than remaining frustrated and disappointed. So, how do you update those maps? Where do you start?

Let’s look at some quick wins and allow me to demonstrate to you just how powerful and in control your nervous system is. Watch the video below and follow the instructions – it only takes a few minutes and you’ll be really glad you did.

So there you go, a super quick example of how you can almost immediately improve your range of movement with some incredibly simple exercises. Can you imagine how much better your life would be if you could move with more fluidity and freedom all day every day? Would that bring more energy to your life and work, improving your productivity and decision making?

The system I’ve put together uses dozens of simple exercises that are either used alone, in sets or stacked, to influence the various areas of your brain that deal with movement quality, thought processing, balance, emotions, accuracy, anxiety and a whole bunch of other qualities that you can modulate to improve your current situation.

Often, you’ll use a specific exercise recipe to target an output that’s completely unrelated to the exercises you are doing. Eye exercises are an excellent example of this as you learned form the video above. You won’t always do them to directly improve your eyesight (although that can be one of the outcomes), but to improve your balance or your pelvic range of movement, or even reduce joint pain. Once you begin to feel the power of this approach, you’ll want to experiment more and see how far you can go with it – it really is that exciting!

Next time, we are going to take a look at the second pillar: Breathing Skills.