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Take an intuition break
by Laurie Nadel, Ph.D.
Do you find yourself losing concentration during certain times of the day? Perhaps it comes as a sudden touch of fatigue, or a subtle mental fuzziness. All of a sudden, you feel droopy. Your eyes may tear. You can't stop yawning, you sigh. Maybe you find yourself staring out the window, your mind faraway from the tasks at hand. If somebody speaks to you, you find yourself startled by the sound of his voice. Or you don't understand what was said the first time and ask the speaker to repeat himself.
These are signs that your body is entering an ultradian rest response. If you observe yourself carefully during the day, you will find that this pattern recurs approximately every hour and a half. Noticing this pattern can help you tap into your intuition during the times when your physiology is naturally attuned to it. During those periods when you lose concentration or get tired, the four main regulatory systems that link mind and body realign.
These four physiological systems are:
1. The autonomic nervous system that regulates most of your body's important functions.
2. The endocrine system that regulates production of your pituitary, thalamus, hypothalamus, and thyroid hormones, among others.
3. The immune system.
4. The system of information substance chemicals (neuropeptides) in your brain.
Your drowsiness and loss of attention are telling you that these important changes are taking place. These feelings of distraction occur in part because of a shift in cerebral lateralization, that is, the right hemisphere of your neocortex becomes dominant during the ultradian rest response. The parasympathetic nervous system becomes activated, too, producing changes in moods and feelings. This is a time when you are more likely to say "Aha!" or get a rare, sudden insight into yourself.
According to Ernest Rossi, author of The Psychobiology of Mind/Body Healing, "during the ultradian rest response, your body goes into an intuitive mode. You are more receptive to impressions from your unconscious."
If you try to ignore these signals by pretending that they do not exist, you may find yourself feeling irritable, uncomfortable, and depressed. If, however, you recognize and accept your body's messages, you can use the ultradian rest period for relaxing, creative intuitive work.
TAKE AN INTUITION BREAK
This is the best time to take a break rather than forcing yourself to push through the fatigue. You can think of it as your intuition break, time to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and allow impressions from your intuitive right hemisphere to flow through your mind. If you are working on a project and would like help from your intuition, this is the time to ask for it. It is also a good time to meditate or work with some of the techniques in this book.
As you become more aware of the physiology of intuition, you will find that your body's natural rhythms can help you ease into an intuitive state. You can meditate productively at any time during the day, but by recognizing the onset of your ultradian rest response, you can enhance your results by spending time in silence while your body does its neurophysiological work. By meditation, we mean spending some quiet time with yourself, perhaps as little as ten minutes a day. Along with meditation, an ultradian rest period is an optimum time to do visualization, self-healing, or any other technique that makes you more conscious of information from your unconscious mind.
Not only will you be more receptive to your intuition during this period, but the inner work will flow without any effort on your part. Says Rossi, "This is the time when it's easiest to access our own intuition, your own internal imagery. Thoughts are most likely to be closer to the unconscious. This is a time when the unconscious wants all the energy it can get. If you train yourself to just watch and observe and not intrude, you're going to fall into what is called reverie or hypnagogic state, what I call its more naturally intuitive state."
The ultradian response is a time when all the mind-body communication systems are most fluid, most flexible, and also most vulnerable to being damaged if we interfere with them too much. If we let the ultradian response have all the energy, it can most efficiently do all the healing it needs to. Rossi observes, "Most forms of healing, including shamanism and the holistic forms of healing are rituals for helping you to get into this ultradian response because it's so easy to entrain."
In The Psychology of Mind-Body Healing, Rossi proposes that you take a break every hour and a half. The traditional English workday reflects this pattern with coffee served at 10:30 AM, lunch at noon, and tea break in midafternoon. "You work until, say, 10:30. Then an hour and a half after that it's lunchtime. Throughout the day you should take those breaks, even thought most of us don’t take them as seriously as we need to," Rossi says.
You can start by observing your own rhythms and noting down the signals your body presents to you at particular times of the day. Become familiar with your own patterns so that you can recognize and tap into your own ultradian rhythm. You may want to keep a list for a couple of days to identify your own ultradian indicators.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ULTRADIAN RESEARCH
As far back as 120 years ago, scientists reported periodic changes in physiological processes and noted their effects on human productivity. The Basic Rest-Activity Cycle was identified in 1969 after EEG experiments on sleeping subjects revealed nine-minute patterns of low- and high-frequency brain-wave activity. During the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, scientists noted changes in heartbeat and respiration, and some muscle contraction and expansion. Although it is harder to observe the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle during waking hours because of other distractions, these sleep researchers concluded that the same cycle occurs during waking hours, as well.
In the 1970s, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Veterans Administration, and the military spent millions of dollars to research ultradian rhythms because they suspected these cycles might be connected to periodic decreases in workers efficiently. The government studied the effects of shift changes, continuous tasks, and long-distance flights. The flight studies noted the existence of twenty-four-hour circadian rhythms in some of the human regulatory systems that, when out of synch, produced jet lag symptoms such as disrupted sleep cycles. The 90-minute ultradian rhythms were identified by Daniel Kripke, a psychologist working at the US Naval Base in San Diego.
Naturalistic hypnosis, as practiced by Milton Erickson, M.D., might be a natural physiological process, part of your body's normal rhythm. More than a century ago, the French psychologist Pierre Janet, one of Sigmund Freud's teachers, attributed the spontaneous lowering of mental energy as the source of psychological problems. During that state of lowered mental energy, impressions from the outside world imprint themselves with a particular vividness. Rossi believes you can use your ultradian rest period to heal those traumatic state-dependent memories.
Ultradian rhythm experiments are now underway at a South Carolina clinic and the Himalaya Institute. One project seeks to determine whether people experience psychosomatic symptoms when they ignore their ultradian rhythms. "I do have experimental evidence for everything I do say," Rossi says, "But the evidence was not designed to test this hypothesis." Rossi's theoretical model is the integration of findings that already exist.
"After a century of observation, we now have a psychobiological framework," he says, pointing out that with the outlines of a theory, "we known where to pursue some research."
Excerpted from Dr. Laurie Nadel's Sixth Sense: Unlocking Your Ultimate Mind Power
