Cognitive Health

In our daily lives, many of our actions and behaviors are automatic. Have you ever wondered at times how you drove home and arrived safely while your mind was fully occupied with other thoughts throughout the drive, such that you didn’t even remember the drive home? This is an adaptive function of our mind to automate certain action and behavior, based on prior experience or conditioning. The automated responses (behavior, action, feeling or emotion) usually happen below the radar of our waking conscious awareness, so we could use the conscious mind for other tasks.

These automatic reactive actions and behaviors that occur below our conscious awareness are the conditioned patterns that drive many of our daily activities. The cumulative physical, mental and emotional inputs in our lives from childhood to adulthood create the basis of this conditioning process. This conditioning process may be adaptive, such as in the example of driving home while being fully preoccupied with other thoughts; or it may be maladaptive, which may become the source of phobias, fears, low self esteem, emotional outbursts, neurotic behavioral patterns, musculoskeletal pain, somatic dysfunctions, unstable emotions, and unnecessary psychological suffering. Many of these maladaptive responses may interfere with and impair our daily activities, personal and professional relationships, and may become barriers of healthy living and well being. Unless the maladaptive conditioning is recognized and undone, the reactive behaviors and responses usually continue. When the reaction is unpleasant or painful, there is also a natural tendency to resist, repress or push away. This tendency could paradoxically strengthen and deepen the subconscious conditioning and prolong the suffering.

The good news is that one can undo and let go of these conditioned responses. Using biopyschosocial intervention techniques, including certain meditation techniques, we can facilitate the client to be more aware of the underlying maladaptive conditionings, to release it and allow the automated response to disappear. In some deeply conditioned behaviors, there are layers of conditioning, which may require repeated interventions to root out completely. With some basic training, many individuals may be able to do this by themselves in a short time.

At Acuprolo Institute, these techniques are one of the interventions that we use to assist our clients to dissolve many of their maladaptive behaviors, which may assist them in relieving many musculoskeletal pain syndromes as well as visceral somatic dysfunctions, by removing the psychological pain and suffering, on their road to achieving their optimal health and well being.