When your brain detects overwhelming pain, physical or emotional, it shuts down to protect you. John Kenny describes how his ruptured knee ligament caused his leg muscles to switch off, and how the same mechanism creates emotional numbness and depression. Reactivating both requires conscious focus on what matters to you.
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Hello, I'm John Kenny, and welcome to this video today. Today I'm going to talk about brain and pain. Now, our brain is really good at trying to protect us from pain. Now, in an emotional way, that can cause us some problems. Because if our brain shuts us down from our emotions, then we can really struggle with life. Let me give you an example of this in a physical sense. A couple of years ago, I ruptured a ligament in my knee, and for several months after that, I was limping. And it wasn't until I went to physiotherapy that what I'd realized had happened is that my brain had shut down my leg muscles because my leg muscles would be pulling into my knee. And the reason I was limping is because my brain had switched off these leg muscles to protect my knee. Now, in the long run, that wasn't a very good thing for it to do because my muscles in my leg then diminished, and I found it really hard then to walk. So much so that when I went to see the physiotherapist, when I was sitting on the bed and she told me to lift my leg up, I couldn't do it. So I had to teach my brain to get this muscle switched back on again, and I really had to focus and concentrate in order to start to get this leg to work. Now, in an emotional sense, our brain does exactly the same thing. If we get to a point of pain that our brain cannot sustain any longer, it shuts off our emotions. In my opinion, this is why we get to a state of depression, especially when all of the things that are going on in our lives causing negative emotions, our brain becomes overwhelmed, and then it says, you know what, I just don't want to feel this anymore. So it shuts off from these emotions. And then we can enter this place which is a void, which is emptiness, which is blackness, because we just don't want to feel anymore. And what we need to try and do is focus. The way I had to focus on my leg is the way we need to try and focus more positively on our environment, what's going on in our lives, what we want from our lives, in order to be able to switch those emotions back on, but in a positive way. So we're not just focused on the negative so our brain wants to shut down again. That it's more positive, we're moving forwards, and we can live a life that we want and a life that we choose. Thank you for watching this video today. I hope you found it helpful. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what we've discussed, then please do get in contact on www.johnkennicoaching.com, where you can fill out a contact form there on the website, or the phone number is there, and just give us a call. If you feel that coaching might be useful to you and help you in your life, we can also look to arranging a complimentary consultation, and we can talk about the issues that are going on for you and how you want to move forwards.
You take care of yourself, and I'll speak to you again soon.
