What Happens If Things Go Wrong?

When a brain develops optimally and nothing gets in the way, all the abilities of intelligence unfold in the right order and the mind grows ever more finely-tuned and ever more intelligent. For most of us though, this didn’t happen; all sorts of things have got in the way of our biology and slowed us down. Many different things can do this, but the important thing to remember is that there are only two ways any network can go wrong.

These two ways are called ‘nonuse’ and ‘wronguse’, and their names speak for themselves. Nonuse happens when a network is not used enough, and Wronguse happens when a network is being used for the wrong things or at the wrong times (eg networks are being forced to do processing jobs that other nets should be doing, or getting inappropriate information, or being forced to develop or perform in the wrong order).

It gets even easier, both these kinds of problem share the same major cause, and this is Public Enemy Number One for neurohackers: Anxiety.

"Do you want to know what it is?"

"Anxiety is everywhere, its all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your TV. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth".

(Paraphrased from Morpheus, 'The Matrix')

Often anxiety is thought of as “stress” by the general public, because it is presented like that in the popular media. Medically though, “stress” and “anxiety” are worlds apart, much like ‘surprise’ and ‘shock’. They are both particular clinical states with clear physiological differences. And it is important for you to learn the difference between stress and anxiety right away, because stress is vital for your intelligence and anxiety is deadly to it.

Stress and relaxation are both healthy physical responses; we exercise a muscle by stressing and relaxing it repeatedly, and we stress and relax intelligence by learning new things and understanding them and by doing new things and mastering them. This affects the brain’s plasticity and we build new brain cell connections. Chronic stress though (where there is no physiological & hormonal relaxation) is anxiety, and anxiety prevents plasticity and is a killer, of both body and mind. Medically, anxiety pushes the body into a state of endocrine (hormonal) shock, causing immune deficiency, rapid aging, exhaustion and mental confusion.

Currently, 95% of people have raised levels of anxiety hormones that are harmful to their immunity, are risk factors in mental and physical health, constantly kill off brain cells, and accelerate the process of aging. If you are not among the 95%, you’re very unusual (or probably neurohacking already). For the rest of us, once we recognize anxiety for what it really is and start to control it, we will progress much faster.

The techniques in these tutorials for anxiety control and input control will help you return your brain chemistry to a healthy natural balance –and this is most people’s first neurohacking step. (If you want to know more about anxiety before going on, read “Anxiety & input control: the basics”, in the Basics section of the library.)

We can have unconscious anxiety and never even know it’s there, but it’s still affecting your hormones, your brain chemistry and your intelligence.

It’s easy to think that chronic anxiety doesn’t matter, or simply forget about it, especially if most of it is unconscious and we don’t feel consciously fearful, worried or nervous. We just assume we haven’t got it (or rather, it hasn’t got us). But unconscious anxiety affects all of us; not just worriers or nervous people.

Once you realize how much anxiety affects intelligence you’ll realize how even unconsciously it can hold you back (and how much smarter you can be without it!) and you’ll also see how much it is affecting other people and consequently whole societies. Even if you never feel insecure, sail through life serenely and refuse to worry about a thing, other people’s anxiety (and consequently their judgements and decisions) are going to affect your life and health bigtime.

That’s why we encourage the DIY approach and self-responsibility, but that does NOT mean that you’re responsible for anybody else! The best gift you can give to others in NH is an example of how to live intelligently and well without anxiety, and you should never ‘preach’ to others and never try to coerce them “for their own good”. Intelligence includes respect for other minds and understanding what should be under your control and what should not.

Okay, now that you have some tools to work with, we’ll take a look at the intelligence you’ll be working on.