What Is the Balanced Mind?
United States Department of Homeland Security
Key Points
- Our minds include a combination of thoughts and feelings.
- The prefrontal cortex and left hemisphere are the thinking mind.
- The limbic system and the right hemisphere are the feeling mind.
- The mind works best when we use all of it.
- The gift of the thinking mind is that it is verbal.
- The gift of the feeling mind is that it is nonverbal.
- The role of the balanced mind is to:
- notice our thoughts and feelings.
- evaluate.
- upregulate or downregulate.
- integrate or synthesize.
- make decisions based on intuition, prior experience, or spiritual inspiration.
- navigate dialectical dilemmas.
Materials Downloads
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Transcript
Greetings, and welcome to the seventh video in this module. In this video, we will learn about the thinking mind, the feeling mind, and the balanced mind, and why we need all three. So, let’s get started.
Let’s start off talking about the thinking mind. So obviously, this is the part of the mind that does the thinking. No surprise there. Think of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive functioning, so tasks such as planning, or making decisions, or thinking about things like cause and effect or pros and cons or short term vs long term, etc. Or think of the left hemisphere, which is more linear, more logical, more linguistic.
Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.,Reutter, K., & DePasquale, D. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook for PTSD: Practical exercises for overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (1st ed.). New Harbinger Publications.
The main gift of the thinking mind is that it is verbal, and this truly is a gift to the mind because language is one of the most complex and most amazing things we do as humans. To this day, nobody fully understands language and how it works, but it’s because of language that we have culture and civilization. So, that’s the thinking mind.
Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.,Reutter, K., & DePasquale, D. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook for PTSD: Practical exercises for overcoming trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (1st ed.). New Harbinger Publications.