2024届高考英语一轮复习外刊阅读学案：Nurturing Serenity Natural Ways to Calm Your Nervous System（这8种策略可以让你保持冷静，建立你的情绪健康。）

Nurturing Serenity Natural Ways to Calm Your Nervous System These 8 strategies can keep you calm and build your emotional health. KEY POINTS Thoughts and feelings are inherently part of a chemical process that is regulated by your nervous system. An overstressed nervous system can disrupt the neuro-chemical balance in your brain. A dysregulated nervous system leads to dysregulated emotions and behavior. Daily affirmations aren't isolated statements but seamlessly intertwine with imagery and goal-setting. As a cognitively oriented psychologist, I spend a lot of my time helping people to observe and change their thinking. This is a process that requires people to use their conscious mind to override their automatic one. Thought comes before emotion, and when you develop the skill of learning how to direct your thoughts, you are also learning how to manage your emotions. Thoughts and feelings, however, are inherently part of a chemical process that is regulated by your nervous system. Your nervous system is responsible for producing the neurotransmitters that your brain uses to transmit thought and create emotional responses. When your nervous system is overstressed and/or isn’t working properly, the neuro-chemical balance in your brain gets disrupted, and it can negatively affect your thinking and your emotional responses. This two-way street, where your thoughts can affect the chemical balance of your brain while the chemical balance of the brain can affect the way you think and feel, can create a negative feedback loop that can be hard to break. For example, if you’re thinking about things that make you feel anxious, your brain releases more cortisol, which can make you feel even more anxious, and this will lead to more anxious thoughts, which leads to more cortisol. If your nervous system is unbalanced, it makes the process of trying to work on your thoughts extremely difficult. This is why many people find change so challenging. So, to really benefit from the li