“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” – First People’s Two Wolves Legend
This is a well-known and much-referenced story. But I think it has particular applicability for what so many of us struggle with in our mental health journeys. Chronic negative thinking.
If you struggle with chronic negative thinking, you’re likely feeling the effects of this in a variety of ways. Frequently getting caught in painful mental thought loops. Maybe feeling a low-level simmering mood of resentment or fear, having a really hard time focusing on the positive, etc..
But did you also know that if you struggle with chronic negative thinking you’re literally changing the neural structure of your brain? It causes a cascade of impacts in your physical body. And, according to some, it potentially predetermines your reality?
In today’s post I want to share with you more of the neuroscience behind WHY “feeding the right wolf” is critical for our overall well-being (and certainly for our mental health!), and share a wide variety of tools and resources you can use to help you stop “feeding the wrong wolf” and tend to the other instead.
How chronic negative thinking literally changes your brain.
What neuroscience and magnetic resonance imaging have been able to show us in the last several decades is astonishing: the brain is “plastic.”
What this means is that far from our brains being “fixed” and “rigid” – a thought popularized by famed Harvard psychologist William James in his landmark 1890 text The Principles of Psychology – we have the capacity to change and grow our brains by creating new neural pathways throughout our life.
One of the most popular studies on this was done on, of all populations, London taxi cab drivers. It showed that, in the course of learning the voluminous amount of complex information and geography continuously required for their jobs, the grey matter in their brains literally grew.
You may not be a London taxi cab driver. But every day and in every way you are or are capable of forming new neural pathways, too.
