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You don’t want to yell at your kids because you don’t like being “that mom” and you also don’t believe it’s good for them in the long run. But sometimes you just lose your patience and some days it’s harder than others. There is a reason for this. It’s your lower brain. Your lower brain memorizes behaviors, thoughts and feelings and repeats them. It’s concerned with immediate survival and helping you get more of what is pleasurable and avoid what is painful. It likes comfort and familiarity because that is what it has memorized.
This lower brain is an amazing tool that helps you to be effective in many areas of your life while operating on “auto-pilot” but sometimes our memorized patterns are not what we want to keep doing. Such is the case if you have memorized that yelling at your kids is fast, easy, and gets results.
So what to do? Well, first you must notice what’s happening. Observe the lower brain with the cerebral cortex (the higher brain). The higher brain is capable of overriding the lower brain but struggles to do so when it is tired. Observation and awareness of the lower brain will take it from feeling like it’s automatically happening to you, to noticing that you are choosing it. Make sure you do this with curiosity and not with judgement for yourself.
Then, you must become aware of the thoughts that are creating the feelings driving your action. When you begin by choosing new thoughts, your actions and results will automatically follow.
Give it a try!
