HOW TO WIRE YOUR LIMBIC SYSTEM FOR LOVE | Jessica Carson

Welcome to Wellness Force Friday, a special edition bite sized podcast that fuels the start of your weekend with actionable steps for your wellness journey through an inspiring message or story from a trusted influencer who's a positive force for the physical and emotional wellness of our global collective. If it's your first time listening to the show, be sure to hit subscribe for access to our more in depth and full length featured episodes with over 100 expert guests where you'll learn the best tools and ways of to understand those connections between our emotions and healthy habits to live life well and enjoy the process. All right, let's drop in together for this week's message. Jessica, welcome to Wellness Force Friday.

Thanks so much for having me.

I found you online, which is where a treasure trove of information exists on your website, which we'll link in the show notes today. ColorfulCortex Co and it was an article how to wire your limbic system for love. And we chatted for a few moments before we hopped on the recording here. And I think in this age of digital connection, understanding what real love is, exploring emotional contagion, which I'm so excited to dive in with you today on, is more important now than ever. Tell us what you do and why.

You do it right now. I mean, in terms of my 9 to 5, I help develop and innovate new products for the American Psychological Association. With my background in psychology but also entrepreneurship, that is such a unique opportunity for me to blend really all of my worlds together. So that's what I do by day, but by night I love exploring and writing about psychology, especially in the context of relationships. They're the thing that we all want and none of us really seem to totally get or fully understand. You know, more so than friendships or our work environment. Our partner tends to be the person that we spend the most time with. And so really understanding all of the nuances that happens within that dynamic I think is so endlessly fascinating and important.

I can feel your fascination and I think we've explored this on the show a few times with different guests, different authors of books where we understand this connection between our emotions, our heart really, and our habits in life. Which habits dictate the quality of our life. Taking a breath to look back, I want to see where a threshold moment was that you crossed. Tell us a little bit more about like the message you want to inspire with us today.

Yeah, so I started writing about sort of the intersection of psychology and relational and social dynamics when I was undergoing a big shift in my life and found that, you know, infusing my own experiences into my writing and including, you know, vulnerability and humor and sassiness to topics that at their heart, at their core, are rooted in science and psychology. That. That was sort of the unique gift that I had to. To offer.

Beautiful. And I think really the message that I got is that we are in control as long as we can understand why we do what we do. However, general control is a myth. We know that the flow state being in the Alpha 2 brainwaves, it's something that we're all trying to achieve moment to moment, day to day. But when we look at a message for the wellness Force community, if you had to say a message that you were really gonna dive in with us today on, what would that message be in a few sentences?

So it would be having a better understanding of your mental health, of your psychology, can truly inform your self discovery and your self journey, but that it doesn't have to be thought of in these rigid, sterile ways or stigmatizing ways that we have thought of them in the past. And that it can be viewed in this very relational, very relatable way that we all have the same experiences and that by telling them through our own stories and using our own voice and our own embarrassing moments and our own shining moments, you know, we can start to break through with ourself and others.

This was an article that was sent to me by four different colleagues and they were all asking me questions around it. And it was again, how to wire your limbic system for love. We understand somewhat about the limbic system, this reward ward circuitry in our brain. But why did you write this article and why did this come through you?

Yeah, so at the time that I wrote this, I was dating someone who just sort of had that je ne sais quoi, you know, really was quite electric to be around and really enjoyed being around him, and I enjoyed who I was around him. So I became really interested in this idea that our partner, this person that we're spending so much time with, especially when you think about if this is somebody that you live with and you're sleeping in the same bed with at night, I mean, that's a lot of hours you're spending in very close proximity to a person. And so this got me on the subject of emotional contagion. This being the idea that energy and emotions are contagious and that if you think about the human body as essentially a technology, an electrical, energetic technology, our emotions and our energy kind of exist in the cloud around us. And so you Know when we get in a certain proximity to people, whether they're our friends, our co workers, or our boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, we're absorbing those energies. And this is what's called limbic resonance, where we really start mirroring the emotions of those we're around. And in some ways, like the case of this person that I was dating was quite positive. But I've also had the experience where you're dating someone and it kind of looks alright on the surface, but you just feel like you're in a funk and you don't know where it's coming from. And so, you know, the idea behind limbic resonance is this mirroring of our limbic system around those with which we spend a lot of our time. And also this idea of limbic regulation. So the idea being you can really start to train, for better or for worse, your limbic system to operate and process things in a certain way based on the love or lack thereof in your life.

And I think the really fascinating piece for me is that mammals develop this as a cue for evolution. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, there's this beautiful quote from, it's called the General Theory of Love, which is where this idea of limbic resonance, you know, really started becoming popular. So within the mammalian brain they developed this capacity for limbic resonance, which is a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's states. When you think about this, especially mammals born being cared for by their mothers for long periods of time, that sense of bonding, emotional closeness, security, trust, it's very important that the limbic system start resonating with and responding to what's in its environment so that it learns that it can trust its environment. And so, in a way, one of the biggest things that modulates our limbic response is other people, which is a big responsibility when you think about it.

Yes.

But the great news is it's all trainable, right? So even if you did not grow up in a home where from the get go we're getting sort of wired for love, literally, it's not too late, you know, you can really develop that by models in your friendships and your relationships. And I think that the most sort of exciting opportunity is in your relationship with your romantic partner, because they're the person that you, God willing, are spending the rest of your life with.

Right. And I think all of us can relate. Relationships will push every kind of personal development button you ever thought you had because you learn more about yourself in relationship. And by the way, it could be man, man, woman, woman, woman, man. Whatever kind of relationship you're in, you will get pushed to your biggest growth edges. I love the part in your article where you talked about the limbic revision. It's like almost these emotions become water where we're around certain people and before we know it, we're speaking like them, we're adopting their habits. It's why some of the studies suggest that when you hang around people with unhealthy eating habits or smokers, you're so much more likely to be able to literally, through contagion, attract those unhealthy habits. How do we do the rewiring? What does that initial step or two look like for limbic revision?

Yeah, I mean, this really gives credence to the saying, you know, you're the sort of amalgam of the five people you spend the most time with. This is the neural basis of that. This is the science behind what might otherwise be sort of a pop science statement. And so, you know, to get this process going, what it requires is consistency, reliability, all of these things that are so hard for us in relationships, especially in a time where distractibility and inconsistency is the norm. You know, whether sort of you are the one in need of the regulation or you are the, maybe you say more stable one in the relationship who's offering that to somebody else. You know, the idea would be offering that in a consistent and coherent way such that the other person can really start developing that trust. Because just like with exercise, just like with eating habits and patterns, they form over time. And so this isn't something like you're going to go on a brilliant first date and all of a sudden you're going to be synced up. Right. You know, this is an ongoing process. And so it's really. It involves an element of commitment. I think a lot of us are intimidated by frankly.

And emotional intelligence is something that. There's a many myriad of shows on Wellness Force around this. And we always look at emotional intelligence as a continuum. It's something where we're always adjusting, we're always adapting to the people around us. But you actually wrote something that blew me away. Eye contact.

Right.

Although it occurs over a gap of yards, it's not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate opposition. Can you dive into that with us?

Yeah. So it's that same. It's coming from the same place that the mirror neurons, the empathy that comes when you see someone else yawn. Often you Yawn. That connection, that intimacy, that vulnerability that comes from eye contact is really profound. In fact, I recently got a kitty and one of the things that they tell you with a kitty is, you know, don't make too much eye contact because that, it's unnerving. It really requires vulnerability. She's a mammal. She's under my feet right now. So elevate that to the human level. And it's something that still makes us feel quite uncomfortable. But being able to do that in a moment of trust, a moment of loyalty and commitment is a very, very powerful experience.

Do you think long term relationships are destined to fail?

Well, I'm still single. I will say that that's just a disclaimer, but I don't think so. I really do believe that we are built with all of the necessary APIs. Again, going back to the body as a technology to experience these deep states with another person for an extended period of time. And I have plenty of articles that talk about why you can't expect your partner to be everything and why relationships might fail. But I do think that at a fundamental level, we are built fully capable of having long term relationships.

What do you think right now your current mission is? You're blogging, writing@colorfulcortex.co. what's your greatest mission? What's your greatest growth edge as a practitioner? A yoga instructor, Someone who is really fascinated by the human condition and how we can connect more in this disconnected, sometimes age of technology. What do you see your greatest mission as right now?

Yeah, so my background is psychology and neuroscience via the NIH National Institutes of Health. I then moved into startups and venture capital and spent a few years in the innovation space. And so through the myriad of experiences that I've had in a short period of time, what I've recognized is that my mission, my mantra, is to fuse mental health and innovation using whatever sort of tools and technologies necessary, from things like apps to spirituality, frankly, and melding all of that in a truly innovative way, that the wonderful thing about the mental health space is there's so much green field, you know, there's so much work being done. But in terms of innovation, bringing it 2.0, bringing it to the next level, there's so much to be done, which is so cool.

And I think when we look at these tools too, you've talked about the technology tools from spirituality to breath tracking, activity tracking, mood tracking, we're gonna see this more and more. Jessica, where can people learn more about you and what you're working on this year?

Yeah, so you can learn more about me and please do connect with me on my blog, Color Cortex, or on social media or LinkedIn, of course. But also, you know, because I am a full time employee at the American Psychological Association, I would encourage anyone who is innovating in the psychology space to shoot me a note. One of the things that I am focusing on in my role there is showcasing innovation and thought leadership in psychology that previously hasn't been done. So would love to prop up anyone who is doing great work in the space.

You have such an eclectic past and as you've explored this intersection between tech, spirituality and the human condition, what do you define wellness as now? What does wellness mean to you?

The way that I kind of think of wellness is, you know, it's sort of like a California day, you know, the weather where the temperature on the outside is kind of. It's so much the same temperature on the inside of your body that you feel like you're just kind of floating. You feel, you know, it's not windy, it's not too hot, it's not too cold. It's this perfect alignment, you know, this perfect sort of integration where everything just feels natural and flows, going back to the idea of flow state. That's what wellness on a physical level feels like to me. And I think that, you know, viewing wellness, of course, as a holistic effort, extremely inclusive of mental health, psychology and an understanding of neuroscience, with an understanding of why these bodies operate the way they do, we can get closer to understanding the self.

I love what you explore, and I think someone's feeling the same way because this is all about for people to take inspired action. If someone wants to rewire their limbic system for love, what's one thing they can do this weekend?

Well, I would say if you're in a relationship, it would be, you know, take a few moments, really be meditative about reflecting on the way that you feel directly before and directly after being in close proximity to your partner. I know some partners who require a good amount of time apart or sometimes even sleep in different beds because of that intense, energetic exchange that happens with prolonged periods of close proximity. If you're not in a relationship, I think it's a really fun experiment to go out to a bar, go out to a restaurant this weekend with your friends and just test it out. Go talk to different people and see if you can sense and feel in your body the energetics, the emotions that you get when you're talking to that person and see if you can start refining that sensitivity to the subtle energies and emotions that are around you. We're such cool little antennae and you know we can tap into it at any point. It just takes practice like everything else.

Jessica, thanks so much for what you do in our wellness space and for sharing this gift on the show.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me me.

Thanks for listening to the show. If you're ready to take inspired action from this week's Wellness Force Friday podcast, let me hear your voice. Tap your show artwork, click the link in purple that says review this podcast. Write down your thoughts about this episode and what you're committed to creating this weekend and into the next. Don't let this conversation stop here. In your same show artwork, tap on the link that says join the Facebook group for added accountability and connection to support the physical, physical and emotional wellness for the collective and ourselves. Okay, now you get to go out into your world and create impact for the people you care about. So until I see you again real soon, I'm wishing you love and wellness.