Turn the Lights On

Categories: Blog, Pressing RESET, #PressRESET, CNS, Movement, Performance Aug 19, 2023

Your brain’s main job is your survival. It is not concerned with how you feel as much as it is concerned that you are alive. It spends its existence filtering billions of bits of information from moment to moment to determine if you are safe or if it needs to take evasive action to protect you. Every moment, it relies on its ability to process information to determine your survival strategy. 

This means that whatever information it receives, as well as whatever information it does not receive is filtered, weighed, and measured to ensure you make it across the street safely. 

This means everything essentially matters to your brain, especially the information you do or do not generate. 

If this is confusing, just understand that the brain is always asking one question: “Am I safe?”

This answer is largely determined by the information you give through your movements, emotions, and thoughts. One of the primary sources of information your brain is constantly sifting through is your movements. You are designed to move, and your movements and positions feed the brain valuable information that either makes it feel safe or makes it feel threatened. This means how you move matters, and what you do matters. 

The absence of movement and reflexive movement (compensatory movement) are also information-missing information. Missing information is like a room with no lights. If the brain is missing information, it has no illumination to see and know that everything is as it should be, and therefore, missing information becomes a threat. When the brain deems the body is threatened, it inhibits the body’s expression potential to keep it safe. This means the brain may weaken the body, slow the body, tighten the body, restrict the body, and even pain the body to keep the body from moving into dangerous territory. Basically, the brain inhibits the body when it doesn’t feel safe. 

For example, imagine that you are inside the edge of a pitch-black, dark warehouse, and you are asked to sprint as fast as you can to the other end. All the lights are off, and you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. Even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to do it. It would be hard for you to even walk at a regular speed to the other end of that warehouse because your brain would want to protect you from the information that it is not receiving. Without lights, the brain doesn’t know what hazards are in your path, and it will naturally slow your movements and reduce your inclination to sprint across the room. 

But now let’s imagine that we turn on all the lights, so many lights that there are not even any shadows, and you can clearly see from one end of the room to the other. You would now likely be able to fully, freely, and confidently sprint to the other side of the room unencumbered. In the presence of having all the information about the warehouse due to all the lighting, your brain wouldn’t need to inhibit you and would allow you to freely express your speed and agility. 

This is what movement does for us, especially the RESETs that we talk about in Original Strength. It turns on the lights so that our brain can see that we are safe so that our brain can let us move well, feel well, and be well. If the brain feels safe, it doesn’t need to help us survive. It can allow us to thrive instead. 

This is why it is SO important that you move the way you were designed to move. This is why it is even more important that you keep your tongue on the roof of your mouth where it is designed to be held. The tongue is like the master dimmer switch that turns up the brightness of all the lights to remove all the shadows. It completes the movement information so that the brain can feel safer about where everything in the body is and what it’s doing. 

I know it sounds silly, but when the tongue is in the “up position” against the roof of the mouth, the lights are brighter, and everything about the body moves even better. When the tongue is in the “down position” or off the roof of the mouth, everything is not as bright and clear, and the brain is missing information. In the absence of this information, the brain feels less safe, and it restricts or inhibits some of the body’s expression potential. 

So, if you want to optimize your life, move often and keep your tongue where it belongs. If you are not sure where that is, just swallow and notice where your tongue goes. That’s its “home” position. Simply by doing this, you give yourself the opportunity to feel amazing in your own body by providing your brain with the “safe” information it is looking for. In other words, live in your design. 

If the brain is always filtering information to determine if we are safe, we should not be the source of unsafe information. The world can do that for us. We should be the constant source of safe information, and we can be. Tongues up, my friends! 

 

 

 

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