Recently, one of my clients told me that her thinking was often muddled. Clear thinking is crucial for carrying on a conversation, making decisions, and practically everything we do. Thinking can be clouded by a host of conditions including stress, dehydration, and poor nutrition. Now, studies reveal that rejection and criticism also have a significant influence on how well a person thinks.
In a series of experiments at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, participants were exposed to a series of situations that resulted in manufactured feelings of rejection. The participants were given before and after intelligence and analytical skill tests. The researchers were amazed to learn that the intelligence scores plummeted by 25 percent and the analytical reasoning skills declined 30 percent on average.
We are born with the fear of abandonment. As humans, one of the most powerful drives we have is to connect, and be accepted. When rejected, some people\’s self-esteem tends to become unstable.
A person\’s self-esteem is forged in the first seven or eight years of life. Low self-esteem is fostered in an atmosphere of conditional love. It robs an individual of the psychological defenses needed to ward off the slings and arrows of life. One of the most vital responsibilities of a parent is to cultivate a robust self-esteem in their children. It is unconditional love that nurtures healthy self-esteem. So equipped, an individual can brush aside the occasional rejection that is bound to occur.
During research at Montreal\’s McGill University, social psychologists found that people under stress tend to pay more attention to frowning faces than smiling faces. Like the Law of Attraction suggests, whatever you focus on, you will attract more of. A person\’s depressed mood filters out positive situations, causing more focus on social threats like rejections and criticisms. These in turn will feed muddled thinking. Negative emotions can inhibit cognition, memory, and generally fracture human wholeness.
Bestselling author and international speaker, Brian E. Walsh retired from a 30-year management career to further his earlier interest in NLP and hypnotherapy. He returned to formal study, and within four years had achieved his PhD.
Dr. Walsh regularly conducts workshops and teleclasses on enriched learning. He is a master practitioner of NLP, an acupuncture detoxification specialist, an EFT practitioner, and a clinical hypnotherapist.
His eZine, “Personal Enrichment Digest” has subscribers around the world. His most recent release is a 90-minute DVD of his presentation, “Enriched Learning”. He has also co-authored with John Gray and Jack Canfield in the self-help book, “101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life: Volume 2.”
His website is http://www.WalshSeminars.com