What Love Does to Your Brain

How Love Lights You Up
When you’re in love your eyes light up, your face lights up and so do four tiny portions of your brain.

Neurobiologists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College in London used MRI brain scans to peer into the brains of college students in the throes of that crazed, can’t-think-of-anything-else stage of early romantic love.

When the subjects were shown photographs of their sweet hearts, the MRI images showed that four parts of their brains lit up.

The researchers compared the MRI images to brain scans taken from people in different emotional states, including se.xual arousal, feelings of happiness and coc.aine-induced euphoria.

But the pattern for romantic love was unique. Interestingly, looking at a picture of their loved one also reduced activity in three portions of the brain active when one is upset or depressed.

Is Love Addictive?
When you fall in love your skin flushes, you breathe heavy, and your palms tend to sweat.

Why? Because your brain is experiencing a biochemical rush of dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine close chemical cousins to amphetamines.

But it’s easy to build up a tolerance to these stimulating bio-chemicals. Then, as with any other tolerance, it takes more of the substance to get that special feeling of infatuation.

Some neuroscientists theorize that folks who jump from one relationship to another are hooked on the intoxication of falling in love.

But interestingly, in the case of enduring romance, simply the presence of one’s partner stimulates the production of endorphins. Endorphins are the feel good biochemicals also behind the experience of runner’s high, and are natural pain-killers.

The Biology of Romance
Recent research suggests that romantic attraction is actually a primitive, biologically based drive just like hunger or thirst.

The biology of romance helps account for why we might travel cross-country for a single ki.ss, and plunge into hopeless despair if our beloved turns from us. It’s the drive for romance that enables us to focus on one particular person, although we often can’t explain why.

What we’re seeing here is the biological drive to choose a mate, to focus on one person to the exclusion of all others, claims Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University.

Research has proven that romantic attraction activates portions of the brain with high concentrations of receptors for dopamine, Fisher explains. And dopamine is the chemical messenger also tied to states of euphoria, craving and addiction.

Other scientific studies have linked high levels of dopamine and a related agent, norepinephrine to heightened attention and short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness and goal-oriented behavior.

Sound like love?

When they first fall in love, Fisher explains, couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: Increased energy, less need for sleep or food, and highly focused attention.

The Psychology of Love
Poets and song writers have long claimed that the power of the biochemical state we call romantic love is enough to blind one’s judgment.

We all know how new lovers tend to idealize their partner magnifying their virtues, and explaining away their flaws.

But though love may be blind, take hope.

Pamela Regan, a Cal State LA researcher, believes such idealization may be crucial to a long-term relationship. If you don’t sweep away the person’s flaws to some extent, you’re just as likely to end a relationship, she claims.

This at least gives you a chance, Regan feels. If you think of romantic attraction as a kind of drug that alters how you think, then in this case it’s allowing you to take some risks you wouldn’t otherwise take.

Not a bad thing.

But if passionate romance is like a drug, as the MRI images suggest, then it’s bound to lose its kick. But perhaps viewing romance as a biologically based, drug-like state can at least provide some balm for a broken heart.

Healthy Romanticizing
In a 1996 experiment, psychologists at the State University of New York at Buffalo followed a group of 121 dating couples. Every few months the couples answered questionnaires to find out how much they idealized their partner, and how well their relationship was doing.

The researchers discovered that the couples who idealized each other the most were closest one year later.

The Issue of Self-Love
How does the love of one’s self  also known as a positive self concept or good self-esteem fit into this picture?

Recent research indicates that depressed people who feel ‘unloved’ are 50% more likely to get cancer.

Negativity, fear, anger and depression are not just in your head. They are biochemical states. Remember neuroscience has proven beyond a doubt that we can consciously create the biochemical states known as joy, happiness, motivation, and even ecstasy.

Increase Your Success Energy with Powerful Sleep

A lot of people feel tired, and blame it on not getting enough sleep or on other external factors. Basically, the fact that they’re tired is always out of control. What they don’t know is that there’s a reason for feeling tired, and that there’s a simple method to change tired to energized in a heartbeat….

Most of us feel tired during one of the following four situations:
1) After waking up in the morning.
2) After intense physical activity or long hours of work.
3) After sitting in one place for a long period of time.
4) During the evening, or in the late evening hours.

What do all these four situations have in common? There’s one very common process that happens in our bodies in all four cases. During all of these we all experience very similar symptoms of tiredness. These include yawning, rubbing our eyes, feeling sllooowww, and having the urge to just get into bed and sleep.

Why Do We Get These symptoms?

Our bodies have a natural temperature rhythm. Our body temperature rises when we are awake, and promotes feelings of alertness. Our body temperature also falls when we’re sleeping, and promotes feelings of drowsiness and a desire to sleep.

The natural DROP of body temperature in our bodies is a CUE for our body to produce feelings of tiredness, drowsiness, and the strong urge to sleep. I call this the natural sleep response.

When we’re exercising or putting excessive physical demand on our body, our body temperature RISES rapidly.

However, when you END the physical activity, there is a RAPID body temperature DROP until your body temperature regulates sometime after. It’s during this DROP that most of us think there’s no other way out but to sleep, and we usually jump into bed and do just that.

The feeling of the body temperature drop after long hours of work is usually mistaken by us as a deep need for sleep. In reality, we don’t need to sleep, we just need to cool down. Allow me to give you a personal example:

As a kid I used to work at a FULL SERVE gas station for 8-9 hours in a row. This meant I had to be on my feet running around pumping gas for 8-9 hours with one 10 minute break. It was hell. Even when I had the early morning shift I would come home and feel TOTALLY DRAINED and TIRED, I usually fell asleep and slept till the evening.

However, as I began learning the inner science of our sleep system and the inner sleep clock, I tried a little experiment one day. Instead of going to sleep I came home and played fetch with my dog out in the yard for about 45 minutes instead. To my surprise, after just a few minutes of a little light activity throwing a plastic chewed up Frisbee across the backyard, the feeling of tiredness faded and I was able to stay awake and alert WAY into the early morning hours.

How did this work?

I simply allowed my body temperature some time to return back to the normal pattern. I gave it time to come down. When it returned back to normal, I didn’t feel tired and the intense pressure to sleep faded.

This same body temperature drop happens after you sit in one place for a long time. Listen, you could take a person who is robust, athletic, and naturally energetic, but if you put them in front of a TV for 3 hours, THEY WILL GET TIRED! This is simply because our body temperature drops when we’re NOT MOVING.

That’s why the biggest antidote to feeling tired is exercise and movement, NOT SLEEP.

During the morning our body temperature is low too, which creates feelings of drowsiness and tiredness, however, most of us chose to mask this feeling by consuming large amounts of caffeine. The other main temperature drops happen in the afternoon, and in the mid-evening.

In the Powerful Sleep system I describe the EXACT methods to gain a full understanding of your body temperature rhythm, so you can create a quick RISE of body temperature in the morning, and delay the body temperature drop in the evening. This allows you to stay awake and ALERT longer, have more energy and MORE TIME time is a precious commodity.

Kacper Postawski is an innovative sleep science researcher and the creator of the Powerful Sleep Secrets of the Inner Sleep Clock which can teach you how to sleep up to three hours less per night and have more energy, not less. Read more by clicking here.

By Kacper Postawski, Creator of Powerful Sleep

 

STOP SLEEPING YOUR LIFE AWAY.
It is possible to reduce your sleep by at least three hours and come up with more energy than when you slept 8 hours. Sleep expert Kacper Postawski spills the beans in his fascinating new ebook Powerful Sleep. While most people think sleep is just sleep, it is actually a complex and fascinating system which you can OPTIMIZE in order to sleep less, and create an abundance of energy in your life. Learn more here: Powerful Sleep

How Can I Build My Confidence?

Confidence is  essential to happiness, and  essential for any real personal, professional or business achievement.

What is self-confidence?  Most people agree on the outward signs of confidence:  The ability to express oneself in front of other people, the willingness to try something new, and the ability take action in spite of what others may say or do.

Actually – no one is born confident. Self-confidence is built through life experience, and especially the feedback you receive as a youngster about your experiences. But if you have a lifetime of negative beliefs about your own abilities, then you will have low self-confidence.

If you want to build confidence, a good personal mission would be to discover your own unique personal strengths. We all have them. The truth is, none of us ever reaches our maximum capacity.  At its best, life is an on-going process of learning and expansion.

Here are some  actions that can help build your self-confidence.

1. Recognize your own successes
Nothing builds confidence like success, but too many of us fail to appreciate and recognize our own successes. You know how you feel when someone else compliments you for something you’ve done well. Make it a point to personally recognize your own successes, no matter how small they may seem. Or if you are really want positive change, make a serious commitment to build confidence in your TRUE potential.

2. Believe in your potential
You may not today be the person you wish to be. but believing in your potential will help you move in that direction. Just take it on faith at first, and seek out your personal purpose for living.

3. Learn from your setbacks
Everyone experiences disappointments and set backs, and it’s just human to become discouraged at times. But you can use setbacks as positive experiences if you view them as learning experiences.

4. Act as if
Acting AS IF is one of the most powerful life-changing tools known to mankind. Since your unconscious mind cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is acted… the more confident you act, the more convinced your subconscious mind will become that you ARE confident.

The QUANTUM MIND PROGRAM
A supercharged online training to create the actual brain states of self-achieved people like self-made millionaires in your own brain. An amazing, proven-effective experience.=> MORE INFO!

 

posted by Jill Ammon-Wexler
Amazing Success

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