Mentomic Skills Overview
A brief overview of the Mentomic Skills through which our conscious mind achieves mastery, or at least positive influence, over mental and physical functions usually considered autonomic. These skills lie right at the heart of the mind - body connection, and harness it to help us Flourish. Practices in this area range from millenia-old meditation, to NASA astronaut ATFE (training) for avoiding space-sickness, and controlling blood pressure and performance - debilitating anxiety.
In zZense Technology, we are understanding these many practices in light of the latest psychology, neuroscience and socio-psychophysics knowledge. From that understanding, we are selecting a set of existing and newly developed skills. We can train ourselves to achieve proficiency in these Mentomic Skills and better Flourish.
This folio, and indeed the systematic study of Mentomic Skills as a category, is in its infancy. Please stay tuned to this work in progress.
What are Autonomic Functions and Why do they Matter?
Our autonomic functions are supremely important to us, and yet they can be just as supremely frustrating. They include our emotions, digestion, blood pressure, muscle tone, sexual arousal, and many other organ and brain functions. These functions are critical to our life and normally work smoothly. Yet they can act up and even enslave us -- anxiety that overwhelms and "chokes" performance, life-threatening high blood pressure, and so on. They have great impact on our PosEmotion, our Relationships, our Achievements, our health and Vitality -- in short on many aspects of our Flourishing.
These functions are called "autonomic" because they are under control of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), with its sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. These branches are often thought of as the "fight or flight" (sympathetic) and the "rest and digest" or "feed and breed" (parasympathetic) systems. In many cases these branches drive opposing physiological responses.
The Mentomic Skills
In the list below, various alternative names for each skill are shown in parenthesis. Clicking on a skill expands its description.
AutogenicDeep resting that balances the body's sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and facilitates conscious suggestions to influence our autonomic functions, for better mental and physical health
Autogenic Skill uses the mind - body connection to address a range of issues including chronic pain, sleep and stress-related disorders, blood pressure control, and even motion sickness during space flight without drugs and their side-effects. Although largely unknown in America, Autogenic Training (AT) has been used for almost one hundred years, is part of the mainstream medical system in Germany and widely used in Japan, practiced by world-class athletes and other top performers, and even employed by NASA to train astronauts.
Once proficient, we can use this skill to enter an Autogenic State of mind and body in just a few minutes. This replicates deep sleep and activates the body's natural repair and regeneration capability. Further, the Autogenic State is sometimes call a self-hypnotic state because it enables the body to be receptive to simple "scripts" for correcting a specific condition or behavior.
ZonalA skill to get "into the zone", achieve peak performance, escape performance anxiety, engage and experience "flow"
This skill is under development. Please leave a comment if interested.
See the additional information by clicking one of the above Mentomic Skill headers.
-g