With all the information out there about the mind heart and body, I am writing this post to help clarify their relationship to each other.
Please read through the list that follows. It supports how incredible the mind, heart and body are..
Mind, Heart, Body factoids
The “brain which is our “three-pound universe” contains 100 billion neurons, 50 trillion synapses and signals travel at 300 mph speed!.
The mind is home to approximately 6200 thoughts per day
We take 25000 breaths per day plus or minus.
Our hearts beat 100,000 times per 24-hour period and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 5 billion times!
Your heart generates the most powerful energetic field in your body.
The electromagnetic field your heart generates is 5,000 times stronger than the field generated by your brain.
Pretty amazing spec’s , people may appear like the silent type, but inside there is a lot going on.
Mind and Brain background information.
The mind is the seat of consciousness, the essence of your being. Without a mind, you cannot be considered meaningfully alive.
There are those who still believe consciousness is like an unexplainable. ghost in the machinery of our brain.
Yet the mind is not made up of any cells and is hypothetical, according to the chart below. You also cannot touch the mind!
Does a thought exist? A thought exists as electrical and chemical activity in the brain which can be measured both with an EEG and CAT scanner. So yes, thoughts do exist as organized electrical activity in the brain.
This does not really explain how electrochemical activity is translated into what we perceive as a thought or part of our consciousness.
Brain is the central organ of the human nervous system
Mind is a faculty that manifests itself in mental phenomena such as perception, thinking, sensation, reasoning, memory, etc.
It is made up of blood vessels and nerve cells.
It is not made up of any cells and is hypothetical.
It has a definite shape and structure.
It does not.
Brain coordinates, movements, feelings, and different functions of the body.
It refers to a person’s conscience, understanding and thought process.
You can touch the brain.
You cannot touch the mind.
However, “neuroscientists sometimes say that we have one brain, but two minds: a mind that makes conscious choices, based on self-reflection and awareness; and a mind that makes automatic responses based on instinct and habit.”
“We are aware of a tiny fraction of the thinking that goes on in our minds, and we can control only a tiny part of our conscious thoughts. The vast majority of our thinking efforts goes on subconsciously. Only one or two of these thoughts are likely to breach into consciousness at a time.”
The mind is much more powerful than most people might imagine. Within our minds we have the ability to change our perception of reality as well as to gain a much deeper understanding of what underlies our thoughts and actions.
The way your heart beats affect all other processes in your body. Your heart rate is intimately tied to your bodily functions and mental, emotional states.
Heart rate variability (or “HRV”) is the variation in time intervals between consecutive heart beats averaged over time. Your heart rate speeds up during inhalation and slows down during exhalation. Variability in your heart rate is good and desirable.
Experiencing emotional or physical stress causes an increase in heart rate, elevation of blood pressure, and release of stress hormones. All these result in a greater workload for the heart, which can be dangerous.
Concsious breathing exercises are an essential skill to help slow down our heart rate and reduce the stress on our heart from poor breathing techniques.
“Hyperventilation and other incorrect breathing patterns are often the norms for stressful people. They breathe too quickly, too slowly, too shallowly, or hold their breath frequently. These unconscious breathing patterns can lead to many complaints, both physical ,mental and emotional.
“Cardiac coherent breathing is a form of coherent breathing that focuses on matching your breath to your heart rate. Over time this can help with increased cognitive and emotional functioning.
Some cardiovascular benefits of coherent breathing include:
I also mention the gut or enteric system briefly to point out its relationship to our mind, heart and body health. It will be the subject of another post.
The gut or enteric system
Useful information next paragraph for learming where certain emotions and feelings are experienced in the body.
“Researchers have discovered that the gut and brain are closely connected; and that this relationship serves an important function not only in managing emotions and stress but also aiding digestion. Emotions are felt in the gut. Feelings such sadness, anger, nervousness, fear, and joy can be felt in the gut. The term “feeling sick to the stomach” describes a situation which involves mental or emotional anguish which can produce stress in the mind and the body. We can also feel excitement in our gut which can be described as “butterflies” in our stomach.”
The brain and the gut are connected and constantly in communication. In fact, more neurons reside in the gut then in the entire spinal cord, according to research published in the book Neuroscience.
The neural signals for your heart rate, breathing, digestion, and other bodily functions are carried by the vagus nerve which runs throughout your upper body ending in your brain where they’re assigned meaning. The health and function of your vagus nerve is referred to as “vagal tone.” Low vagal tone is linked to numerous physical and mental conditions.
Coherent breathing, in part works by improving the functioning of this nerve.
“Vagus nerve: The vagus nerve is the biggest part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls many of the body’s functions, such as breath rate, digestion, and heart rate. It is also responsible for fight, flight or freeze responses. Coherent breathing can stimulate the vagus nerve, which moves the nervous system out of fight or flight and into a more calm state.”
There must be divine intelligence behind the creation of human beings!
Staying in the present moment is the ultimate (yet elusive) goal of any meditation practice. There are many types of meditation. This post will focus on a breath centered meditation. Learning to meditate is like learning any other skill, it requires practice to develop, with the benefits making it time well invested
Swami Vivekananda is considered as the introducer of meditation to the Western countries. He defined “meditation” as a state “when the mind has been trained to remain fixed on a certain internal or external location, there comes to it the power of flowing in an unbroken current, as it were, towards that point.
Mind versus Brain
The three definitions of mind and brain below come at it from a more comprehensive perspective than those found in ; “A Primer on the Mind, Heart and Body.”
Dr. Jennifer Weinberg, MD, MPH, MBE, a preventive, and lifestyle medicine physician, describes the brain as “the hardware” that allows us to experience the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions that we collectively call the mind.”
Ray Oakley, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Psychiatry and Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University advises; “According to the mind–body or biopsychosocial paradigm, which supersedes the older biomedical model, there is no real division between mind and body because of networks of communication that exist between the brain and neurological, endocrine and immune systems..”
Quantum Consciousness
Dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, hypothesizes that consciousness resides in a field surrounding the brain. This field is in another dimension. It shares information with the brain through quantum entanglement, among other methods. And it has certain similarities with a black hole.
In other words, the “mind” is a field that exists around the brain; it picks up information from outside the brain and communicates it to the brain in an extremely fast process. He described this field alternately as “a holographic structured field,” a “receptive mental workspace,” a “meta-cognitive domain,” and the “global memory space of the individual.”
In Dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer’s interesting quote above he writes; the mind “picks up information from outside the brain and communicates it to the brain in an extremely fast process. An idea of how fast this might be and the complexity of the brain is described next.
The Cleveland Clinic infographic above advises that signals in the brain travel at 300 miles per hour over 500 trillion synapses and 100 billion neurons!
What does Mindbody Connection mean?
Sandstone Care, a mental health provider states that;” The mind-body connection works by the feedback loop between your body and your mind.
Painted Brain, another mental health provider offers this excellent definition ;”One of these connections is the Mind-Body Connection, which is the link between our emotional and mental health (such as thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors) and our physical health. Our biology impacts our mood. How our body feels impacts our emotions.
An example of this mind-body connection is how your body responds to stress. Constant worry and stress over jobs, finances, or other problems can cause tense muscles, pain, headaches, and stomach problems. It may also lead to high blood pressure or other serious problems.”
I have omitted spirit in this post as in mind-body-spirit. There are two other posts on spiritual matters under the Resources tab on this website.
Awareness and Mindfulness
Self-awareness or mindfulness mean being fully present and aware of where we are and what we are doing. It means not being overly reactive or overwhelmed by what is going on around us, but just being aware and reflective.
Mindbody connection and mindfulness are the same, moving the mind and body in the direction of increased harmony, balance or coherence.
We can talk about mindfulness at length about it, but to understand it we have to experience it directly, through a breathing meditation or other practice. This is because mindfulness points to something intuitive and pre-conceptual.
How many thoughts per day do we have?
In 2005, the National Science Foundation published an article summarizing research on the number of human thoughts we have per day. It was found that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.
There was another interesting study (Leahy, 2005, Study of Cornell University), in which scientists found that; “85% of what we worry about never happens. The conclusion is that 97% of our worries are baseless and result from an unfounded pessimistic perception. Yikes.
We now understand with the help of advances in technology, that the 12000-60000 thoughts described above come together as thought worms that add up to about 6,200 per day. The thought worm study was released in 2020 by a group of Queen’s University researchers in Canada. This works out to approximately 6.5 thoughts per minute and seems more realistic. Maybe could have come up with a different name than thought worms!
Automatic Thinking
The conscious mind contains all the thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes of which we are aware at any given moment. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally.
Automatic thoughts are the thoughts and images that involuntarily pop into our conscious. They make up how we “read” a situation
Our automatic thinking minds constantly process information without our full awareness. Many (even most) of our thoughts and mental images spring to mind without any conscious initiation or involvement on our part. They just seem to appear out of nowhere. While automatic thoughts may seem inconsequential, they can actually play a very important role in our emotional health.
Automatic thoughts have the potential to trigger intense negative emotions. Usually, we are more aware of the emotions themselves than the thoughts that trigger them. However, in most instances it is the automatic thoughts that play the largest role in determining how we feel, not the situation itself.
For many people, the mind stays stuck. It ruminates over negative events. It focuses on what should have been, could have been and wasn’t. It is self-defeating and self-degrading. The mind and the self-talk it offers is, for many people, their own worst enemy.
Neuroscientists sometimes say that we have one brain, but two minds; a mind that makes conscious choices, based on self-reflection and awareness; and a mind that makes automatic responses based on instinct and habit.
With practice, a Breathing Meditation allows us to make better choices by developing the observer mind..
The above is an eye-opening bit of information for me and certainly supports why conscious breathing and or meditation are ESSENTIAL SKILLS.
Meditation and Conscious breathing
Your mind is often underutilized because you aren’t focusing it on the right things. However, if you set a clearly defined goal, and point your mind there, your mind will help you travel where you want to go.
You are the one who should give instructions to your mind, not vice versa. If you do not learn how to use this amazing tool then it will use you for your whole life
Integrative psychiatrist James Lake, MD, of Stanford University, writes that “extensive research has confirmed the medical and mental benefits of meditation, mindfulness training, yoga, and other mindbody practices.
Conscious breathing also improves the quality and effectiveness of meditation by; assisting in changing the brain wave activity from the stressful beta wavelengths to more relaxing and healthier alpha and theta wavelengths.
There are many health benefits to intentional or conscious breathing.
When you meditate, you will have periods of time focusing on your breath as it comes in and out of your body. And other times, finding your focus being swept away by the automatic thinking mind, and then snap out of it and return to the breathing, again and again. Rinse and repeat.
It is a great investment of your time and energy.
I am including a short video on a breathing meditation. There are many online, you just need to find one that resonates with you.
You have heard of IQ or EQ and possibly SQ which is social and/or spiritual intelligence. Another acronym that is emerging as our lives become more globalized, is CQ or cultural intelligence. This short, upbeat video simplifies what is required to adapt and succeed in a diverse work or other social setting. See below.
