Why the Right Brain?

Have you heard of the right brain?

You may not know but we have two sides of our brain that actually operate very differently. 

The left side is our logical mind. It keeps track of time, plans, organization, words, language, working towards long term goals… think math and science…think the mindset that is rewarded in traditional job settings, school settings and so on. This masculine side of the brain, this type of thinking is typically associated with success, achievement, long term goals and planning.

Then there’s the right brain. It’s more creative, emotional, intuitive, feminine. It connects many different seemingly unrelated topics, it is in the present not as connected to time, it operates more in visuals and feeling into things. Think of how you looked at the world, how you played, how you operated when you were young. That is a good depiction of the right brain and often as children we are more balance between the two sides. This side of the brain isn’t always discussed in a positive way, it isn’t viewed as useful as the left brain, maybe it’s even seen as immature? For a lot of people… it’s harder to tap into, myself included. It isn’t reinforced as much and so many of us slowly lose the ability to tap into this side of the brain.

I never gave the right side enough credit. In fact, for a while I used to try and plan every second of my day to be productive. If I was reading a book, it had better be about nutrition. If I was watching Netflix, it better be about something educational. Reading that, it sounds so ridiculous and unachievable. We are not made to be moving 100 miles and hour all of the time. We can’t constantly be moving forward, at least not in the linear way we typically think of.

So what does using our right brain look like?

it’s when you disconnect from linear time,

it’s the moments you give you brain freedom to create..whatever that looks like for you,

it’s the seconds you allow yourself to make a mistake (which I have by no means gotten used to),

…where you are able to gain insight

…find creative solutions to problems

…see the big picture

See, if you don’t give your brain that space. The left brain can take over and while you may be able to hold on to that pace for a short while, it will eventually catch up with you. Whether that’s in your health, in your work, in your relationships…

Maybe this is why I always end up decorating cakes when I am procrastinating due to over scheduling. The left brain overwhelms to the point where you can hold on and you have no choice but to completely shift, to surrender?

Right brain can look like anything from drawing to singing to dancing to playing to imagination to meditation to any type of art or expression to writing. The right brain allows to do something just for the sake of doing it, just for the sake of feeling, enjoying, experiencing something different…and sometimes it ends up being productive and sometimes it doesn’t. Usually though, that experience ends up lending itself to something much greater than if we decided to “grind” and work another hour on our computer or if we chose the thing that felt like we “should” do it, rather than the thing we really wanted.

I encourage you to find one way this week to engage your right brain. It is easy to think of some things that might work but can actually be very challenging to engage with them at first. As adults, we aren’t used to play, we aren’t used to doing things for fun, we are always thinking about the long term result of our current actions which leads us to either living in the past or the future.

The right brain is now and when you engage with now, you can actually find that you have a lot more time and energy to do the things you need to in order to move forward.