What if Your Brain Learned to Play Nice?
How to tame the bully in the playground of your psyche!
Make no mistake. Your brain is a competitive player, ambitious to be top dog and dictate terms and regulations to every other part of you — your heart, intuition, body.
For your brain, there is no team in “I.”
Everything can be figured out. Emotions can be put under control. Your body must also obey. And intuition? Useless, compared to the superior machinations of your brain.
Paradoxically, this kind of reliance on intellect can lead not to riches, but ruin. Not love, but isolation. Some of the most brilliant people become addicts, serial divorcers, imprisoned, homeless — convinced that their brain knows it all and will get them out of any fix.
Being too smart for your own good leads to pathological narcissism.
As long as you surround yourself with less smart people who lack the kind of healthy narcissism that keeps them from challenging you
As long as you have “weaker” colleagues, partners and spouses upon whom to outsource your own self-contempt, your own “unacceptable” emotions, you’ve got it made.
As long as you compartmentalize, keep everyone and everything in its place, including yourself, your brain will march around like the self-declared dictator that it is, inspiring fear, envy and obedience.
The trouble — and possible blessing — is that sooner or later, your heart, body, intuition will attempt a coup.
You may feel a deep and terrible longing to actually experience love. You may face the fact that you can’t get by on power bars and three hours of sleep.
You may begin making decisions based not on what makes sense or what your brain tells you is best, but what you know is right for all of you, not just your brain.
What would it be like if your brain learned to play nice?
What if sometimes your heart led, sometimes your intuition? What if your body didn’t need to get sick and exhausted in order to get you to slow the f — k down?
In other words, what if you had a true democracy in which all your players had key parts? What if you valued, not over-valued your brain and all the awards, diplomas, credentials it had earned (probably at cost to the rest of you)?
What risks would you take? And how would your life be different?
Think about it.
— Mary Wallach
