It is amazing to observe how certain habitual behaviours can affect the experience of human consciousness. You may have heard about left brain activities (more verbal), and right brain activities (more visual), as a rough generalisation. You may have even done some psychological testing to see if you have a more left oriented, or right oriented brain?

In the testing that I have done in the past, my result has been a very equal split between left and right brained focus. Apparently I use both sides of my brain equally.

Left brain – verbal

Lately, since I have mostly given up blogging and am less active on social media, I have been writing a lot less, and I am starting to notice the effect that this lack of left brained activity is having on my general mental health. To make matters worse, perhaps, for the past few nights, I have not been reading before sleep either, so my verbal (or perhaps literary) left brained activity has been significantly reduced.

I do notice the change. I notice that when I get to the end of a work day, working with tech, code and visual manipulation, I feel like I have been literally ‘grinding’ away all day. My head feels like a block of concrete that has been ground with an axle grinder all day. It is not a particularly nice feeling, I have to say.

I suspect that a good balance of left brained activity, such as talking, writing and reading can help to soften the effect of all that ‘hard edged’ right brain activity. It may be that a good mix of different cognitive activities can make for a more satisfying working life.

It is funny, because the image that I have posted above, seems to indicate quite the opposite! Happy to be corrected on this. 🙂

Left or right brain preferences

When I tell people that I really prefer the ‘marketing’, ‘strategy’, ‘communications’ and ‘relationship building’ part of my work over the ‘technical’, ‘problem solving’, ‘visual’ and ‘structural’ part of my work, it is often the shift between these two different domains which causes so much cognitive discomfort. Also, if I have not been doing enough of the verbal stuff, the technical stuff is even MORE of a grind. I do quite enjoy both, but I think I need certain levels of each to be really professionally content.

Sometimes I feel as though writing skims a certain ‘top layer’ off my mind and allows me to get deeper and to engage more fully. The author of the ‘Artist’s Way’ – Julia Cameron, would certainly agree with me. As she recommends 300 word ‘morning pages’ every day as a kind of mental hygiene to skim the top layer of thoughts for the day. It does seem to work like that.

Each of us is unique and different and what works for each of us would be different. I am curious to find a nice balance between left and right, so that I am working at my most effective.

Switching between them! :-/ OUCH!!