Unstoppable Body and Mind

Episode # 9- Relationships

On this episode, we discuss the concept that relationships are the thoughts we have about people.

We explore the ideas that we can let people be who they are, and that they are just there for us to love.

Choosing love is always an option, and always the best option.

Learn how in this episode.

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind—Episode 9–Relationships.

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind.

 

Hello, today we are going to talk about relationships. So, this might be a new way of thinking about relationships for you. It was for me, definitely. A relationship you have with a person is basically the thoughts you think about that person. So relationships are kind of all in our head. If I think that I'm in a difficult relationship or a toxic relationship, or if I think my husband loves me or if I think he doesn't love me or if I think my boss doesn't respect me, all of those are just thoughts. They're sentences in your brain. They're not facts.

 

Here's an example to show how relationships are in our head. You might have one friend that you really love and adore and think is awesome. And other people might not feel that same way about her. She's the same person, whoever she is. But different people could have different thoughts about her, and therefore a different relationship with her. 

 

People might have different thoughts about a relationship. This happened to me in college, actually. There was this guy who was flirting with me and I thought we might go out. We would talk on the phone. And after about a week, he told me that he got engaged. So yeah, my thoughts about this turning into a potential relationship were obviously different than what he was thinking. 

 

I feel like I have have a relationship with mentors or influencers in my life. People like Brooke Castillo or other musicians that I really like, because of what I listened to from them. I feel like I know them or that I can relate to them. I love what they stand for maybe or feel like we're like minded. But I really don't even know who these people are. They're more like just a projection of my thoughts that I put on them. 

 

Literally, your brain has its own system to interpret and make sense of the world and all the sensory input that it receives. It's like this filter that your brain has to process information. And the thoughts that are produced by the brain are also affected by your personal filter. I love this analogy from Byron Katie.  In Loving What Is, she talks about our mind as a projector. If we have dirt on our lens, so like bad or insecure thoughts about ourselves, then everything we see will have dirt on it. So we look at all these people and see the things we want to change in them, the ways we want them to act differently, the things we want them to do or say, when really what we need to do is clean the dirt off our own lens.

 

I have three teenage boys right now. And it's fascinating to have them get into these long discussions verging on fights. They'll get so upset about the way that someone does something or says something. And it's obvious that they think it should be a different way. They should have said it differently. For example, one time they spent an hour arguing about a movie they saw and one of my sons said he really liked the movie, but there was this part about the childhood that he thought they should have explored more and spent more time on. Then the other one said, “Well, if you think they should have done it differently, how can you say that you really liked the movie?” And the younger one just likes to debate and kind of verbally spar. And the older one, I could just see him becoming more and more frustrated, he would not give up on trying to convince the younger one that he said it wrong. 

 

Negativity often begins when we have expectations, and then we're upset when they're not met. And we use them as an excuse to feel bad. If we're already thinking negatively about ourselves, our brains will look for and see that negativity in others. And then we may feel that negativity ourselves in our emotions because we're blaming or judging or criticizing. 

 

Remember, Joe Dispenza talks about how our cells can actually become addicted to certain hormones or neurotransmitters. So if your cells are used to a certain amount of cortisol, and they're feeling depleted, then you'll look around in the environment for things to make you angry. And you'll think thoughts about things or people or what they did or said, so that your cells get that hit of cortisol. As your cells get more and more used to it and they replicate, they grow more receptors for those higher demands of cortisol. 

 

If we're not conscious, we can become more and more negative. This takes a toll on our body because the chronic stress on our cells can lead to break down and disease. As we know from the model, our thoughts create our feelings. Negative thoughts create negative emotions. So why are we choosing to feel disappointment or anger or frustration rather than love? What if we could get ourselves addicted to love? Love feels great. And in fact, love is always an option. 

 

We don't have to expect people to behave in certain ways for us to be happy. Love is not an action. Love is a feeling, and since our feelings come from our thoughts, we are the ones in control of our feeling of love.  What people do or say or how they treat us:  that all goes in our circumstance line. It's a circumstance. It's a neutral fact. And we determine what we think about it. And that determines what we feel. 

 

We don't get the feeling of love from other people or how they treat us. How crazy is that? I never realized that I thought love was out of my control. Either someone loved me or they didn't. And I would always just try to act in certain ways to get love. Because that's how I thought you did it. But we get the feelings of love from thoughts we think about people. Remember, love is always an option, so we can feel good whenever we want. Feeling love does feel better than those lower vibration emotions. 

 

Why would we not choose to feel love towards someone if love feels amazing? Why are we denying ourselves that feeling? We get stuck thinking we can't love a person because of what they did, that they don't deserve it from us. But really, not feeling love is only hurting you. If you're feeling anger or resentment or disgust, you're really only hurting yourself. Now loving doesn't mean that you unconditionally approve of behavior. You might need to take action to protect yourself at times, or in order to get the results that you're wanting in your life. 

 

We will talk about boundaries soon. Because there may be times that you need to limit your contact with someone. But you're basically never trying to get someone to act in a certain way. Once you allow adults to act however they want, which they're going to anyway, so allow isn't really an accurate word to use. But mentally, you're allowing them to act like they want without you making it mean something and then if you need to, you can choose to remove yourself from the situation. You may limit your contact with someone. But you're doing this in a clear, loving way, not a punishing or controlling way, like you're trying to manipulate that person into acting a certain way for you. Loving someone means when you think of that person, you just have feelings of love, because love feels better.

 

Knowing this is the secret to all relationships:  your relationship with anyone else is determined by your thoughts about them, and you're the one in control of your thoughts. You can let other adults be exactly who they are. Let people forget, leave messes. They might lie or cheat or steal, they might too loudly. They might say things you think are mean. Or they might do things you think they shouldn't have done, but don't have expectations that they need to fulfill to make you happy. That is a feeling you create for yourself. In fact, that's your job to make yourself happy. What if you think about the people in your life and your relationships as them just being who they are and being there for you to love. You don't have any expectations that they have to be worthy of your love, that they have to do certain things or say certain things or act certain ways. 

 

If you have a dog, imagine the love your dog has. That's a good example to me of unconditional love. My dog goes out of his mind when he sees me. He is turning in circles and wagging his tail and jumping all around. In fact, we need to get a trainer because he goes so crazy when he sees people—he's so excited. And it doesn't matter to him what we look like or if we've been paying him attention or not. Or if we've barely just petted him five minutes ago, but then we're walking through the room again. He just gets excited every single time. 

 

What if you could allow your spouse to just be whoever he is. And you could show love for him because it feels good for you to do that. You could love him, and there's nothing he can do about it. I suggested this concept to someone once when we were talking about his marriage. He was saying how unfulfilled he felt because his wife didn't show these physical signs of love. He expected that she hold his hand back when he held her hand or kissed her back. And he said that he just needed these things in order for him to feel love from her. And I said, “What if she's just there for you to love?” And he got really angry with me and he said, “That makes me mad.” He did not believe that at all. And he definitely had resistance to this idea. 

 

But the truth is, once you let people be who they are, and let go of the idea of trying to control them, then you realize how much energy you're just wasting trying to get others to behave in a certain way to make you happy. Focus on working on your own thoughts and feelings to make yourself happy. Those around you will appreciate it. There's nothing better than being with someone who just loves you. They're not always trying to make you a better version of yourself, or nagging you for one thing or another.

 

And you might find it interesting how you act. When you're just loving someone, you might actually do those dishes just because you want to, not because someone is trying to guilt you into it. When you're feeling loving, you'll probably act kinder to yourself and others. That's in the model too, right? Your feelings create your actions. So you're going to act usually in a more loving way. That's just one awesome side effect. That's why unconditional love is really the best gift you can give yourself.

 

No, feeling love doesn't mean that you have to act it out. You don't have to call up your husband's acts or tell your boss that you love them. You don't even have to change how you act towards them. You don't have to act it out or even act kindly towards them if you don't want to. But you get to feel that emotion inside of you and you get to own it. You have to know that you're in control of your own feelings and others are as well. The best relationships are when both people realize that and they come together to support each other because they want to.

 

Now I, of course, believe the stress that we create and the negative emotions that we can create from our perceptions of relationships can contribute to how our body is feeling and manifesting diseases or physical symptoms. And I want to tell you a personal example with me. So you've heard me talk a little bit about my ulcerative colitis. And as I began to think about the time in my life when I developed the symptoms and what was going on for me, I started to realize that I felt a huge component of it had to do with my relationship with my parents. Now, I think my parents were awesome. I think they were fantastic. They gave me so many opportunities. And I think they really did their best to give me a good foundation for teachings and a good life. But I also believe that in the course of human nature, there is a period of time that young adults tend to blame a lot of things on their parents, and often maybe even deflect a lot of their personal feelings towards their parents. And I kind of had this underlying belief from my childhood that my parents were never satisfied with me, they always expected more from me. And I really carried that into adulthood. 

 

And I think it ultimately ended in this internal contention that I had and these physical symptoms. So the time that I began developing the symptoms, I had just had my fourth child in 5½ years, and I had been working just ten hours a week, but then I returned to full-time work, so we had a lot going on. And looking back, I was definitely putting a lot of pressure on myself. Now fast forward about ten years and I began this journey of starting to figure out the link between the mind and the body for myself. And with all of the coaching tools that I was learning from the Life Coach School, I started taking responsibility for my emotions and stopped blaming my parents and my upbringing and my culture for my feelings of unworthiness. Now, I still kept having some negative or uncomfortable feelings around my parents, feeling like they maybe were judging me. And so it was actually when I was doing some work from Byron Katie reading, Loving What Is. And she says if you have painful thoughts, it's because you're thinking something that's in contrast to reality. I realized that if I really looked at the evidence, my parents had done nothing but support me and tell me they were proud of me, and in other ways help me. So another thing I learned in theory, but it took some work to apply it to myself, was knowing that what I did, or my actions, were just circumstances in my parents’ circumstance line.

 

I'm not in their model, other than what I do is in their circumstance line, and then they choose how they think, or feel or act about that. And I had to also understand the fact that we are not supposed to be happy all the time. And there was a possibility that I had caused my parents some pain because of disappointments they might have, and that I did not have to take responsibility for that. That was their model. My actions were in their circumstance line, and then they chose what they thought about it. And people are not supposed to be happy all the time. There is sadness and there is disappointment in everyone's life, and that is part of life. I shouldn't beat myself up if I had caused my parents that. Another thought that helped me was this all happened the way it was supposed to happen. That's from Byron Katie as well. Everything that has happened, happened exactly how it was supposed to. How do you know? Because that's how it did happen. So they were the perfect parents. For me, I was the perfect daughter for them. I acted exactly as I was supposed to act. And all of these things happened exactly as they were supposed to. So nothing can be said or done about it. So no need to argue with the past or waste that mental energy. 

 

So that's what led to my understanding that I was the one that was putting all of that pressure on myself, which is absolutely true. I've been doing that for years. And once I realized all of that, I began to unravel that for myself and share that information with my parents. That was a real key in helping me heal with my ulcerative colitis. And the last time I got a colonoscopy, they said I had no active disease. So, I really believe that physical and mental can be very connected. And it's our job, if our body is giving us these signals, to interpret them, and to try to figure out what it is that could be the deeper sign of what we might need to learn and what we might need to let go of. 

 

If you are struggling with a relationship right now, I want you to ask yourself these questions and write them down without filter, as if no one is ever going to read them. Maybe tear them up if you have to later. But ask yourself some questions: 

How do you want to feel about this person?

How do you want to feel right now?

Would it feel better to like this person or dislike this person? 

Do you know that you have the option to love this person unconditionally, regardless of what they do or don't do? 

What is stopping you from unconditionally loving for your own sake?

How could this person be teaching me about love?

 

And that's what I've got today for you on relationships. Now go love those people in your life for your own sake.

 

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And, of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know who wants an unstoppable body and mind.

Episode # 8 - Perfectionism, People Pleasing, and Your Health

In this episode, we talk about the health consequences that result from perfectionism and people pleasing.

You will learn how to fight the chronic stress that perfection and people pleasing cause, through developing Gratitude.

 

Follow Betsy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bodyandmindlifecoach/

 

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXZSYYGL2cfJl-oEOzqspA

 

Website https://bodyandmindlifecoach.com

 

*Free Nervous System Modules- 4 free videos explaining the nervous system, how it affects your health, and how to regulate it  https://view.flodesk.com/pages/620ffa96e0eda1a0d870b5a6

 

*Curable App- 6 Weeks Free with this code http://www.curable.com/betsyjensen

 

If you like this podcast, please give it a five star rating and review on Itunes  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-unstoppable-body-and-minds-podcast/id1493360543

 

Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind—Episode 8–Perfectionism, People Pleasing, and Your Health.

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind. 

 

Hello, welcome to Episode 8, where we're going to talk about perfectionism and people pleasing. Fun, huh? Perfectionism. Let's start by defining it. Perfectionism is holding yourself to a nearly impossible standard in everything you do. And people pleasing is having an intense desire to be well liked, often resulting in overextending yourself for others and putting your own needs last. These personality traits are very common. Most of us would identify as either a perfectionist, a people pleaser, or both.

Why are we like this?

 

Joe Dispenza says we can inherit certain behavioral traits in our DNA. So we may see examples in our family of perfectionism or people pleasing. Plus, we have a culture that rewards pushing yourself to achieve or to try to be well liked by people. Perfectionism and people pleasing are often developed in childhood as kind of survival mechanisms.

 

So a child may perceive the environment as chaotic and have the idea that being perfect would make sure you're not adding to anyone's stress or getting in the way. So with me, for example, I grew up in a very religious culture and interpreted that I always needed to be more perfect. I had a feeling of judgment towards myself and others and always felt like there was more that I should do. 

 

Kids might also learn to people please. If there is a lot of conflict, they don't want to add to the conflict by being confrontive or saying no, so they do what they're asked. People pleasing is basically trying to get someone to feel a certain way or act a certain way because of how you act as an adult. 

 

Perfectionism and people pleasing are still good traits in our society. If an employee is a perfectionist, holding himself to the highest possible standard, working hard and trying to outperform, that could be great for his boss or company. People also reward people pleasers—people who sacrifice and put their own needs last. What a noble thing to do, right? But at what cost? Today we're going to talk about how pushing ourselves relentlessly and putting our own needs last not only affects how we show up with others and the results in our lives, but also how perfectionism and people pleasing affect our health. 

 

Okay, so let's talk a little more in depth about perfectionism. Many of us are taught to believe that happiness is this thing that's out there. And if we can just look a certain way, or have the latest things or do things just the right way, then we'll get that prize of happiness. But unfortunately, our brains often prevent this from happening. Because our brains adapt quickly. 

 

If we have something that does make us happy, usually it does not take long before our brains adapt to that level of happiness. And it's no longer satisfying. Plus our brains have a negativity bias. So that means our brain is always kind of looking for something negative. When we do have happiness, we don't really enjoy it because we're always a little bit worried that we might lose it. It's like waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

 

Often perfectionists will try to achieve things. And even if they are successful at achieving, they might still be critical of themselves and think they could have achieved it quicker or a little bit better. Or they could have improved. 

 

And what if a perfectionist fails? Most of us do not learn that if we fail, maybe it's because we set our expectations too high. No. What we make it mean is that there's something wrong with us and that we are not enough.  No matter what we achieve, the perfectionist has a way of always thinking things could have been better. 

 

This is why low self esteem often goes along with perfectionism and people pleasing. An LDS psychologist in an article I read said that perfectionism is the damaging belief that one's worth is inherently attached to always doing better, or being their absolute best.

 

So let's look at the idea of perfectionism in the model. So let's take a circumstance like getting second place in a dance competition. The thought is, you're not good enough, the feeling, unworthiness. 

 

When you feel unworthy, what do you do? If you have a normal brain, then what you'll do is look around for more evidence of how you're unworthy and surely you could find some examples from your past. So your action could be thinking about your past to prove that you're not worthy. There could also be more of an inaction. Some people who feel unworthy would just want to hide or maybe buffer to try to escape their life, like eating or drinking or buying something or getting on social media. We could maybe convince ourselves not to try again. We definitely, if we're feeling unworthy, wouldn't want to be practicing or trying to improve from that place of unworthiness. We would more want to hide or not try, because there's no point. 

 

Another normal thing that our brain does when it's feeling unworthy is to criticize harshly. We are usually our own worst critics. So shaming ourselves, we know, does trigger the reward centers of our brain. So there must be some evolutionary benefit to having shame and harshness and criticism. I think many of us believe that it's helpful to us, but when we really look at it, we can see that shaming ourselves and being critical to ourselves actually does the opposite, and does not help us with achieving our goals. So in the result line of this model, your brain proves the thought that you're unworthy by looking for evidence to prove it, and you prove your unworthiness by not practicing or not showing up the ways you want to. It's like you sometimes will fail ahead of time, making sure that you fail by not trying or not practicing or not working on things. And then you prove your brain right. The brain of a perfectionist is always in this state of urgency, intention. The demands they're putting on themselves exceed what they could ever possibly perform. So chronic stress is almost inevitable. 

 

Chronic stress on the body is one of the main contributors to disease and pain. Feelings of anxiety release stress hormones that increase your heart rate and send your nervous system into the fight or flight mode. So this is supposed to be something that your body uses for short-term situations. So if you were being chased by a tiger, it would be important to move all of that blood to your extremities, not worry about your digestion, increase your heart rate, increase your breathing rate— fight or flight. But many of us are living in a state of chronic stress, a state of constant unworthiness and never feeling like we're enough. 

 

Joe Dispenza says our cells become addicted to the adrenaline that the stress provides. So our brain will seek out examples of stress if we're feeling a little depleted. And there are always examples to be found in our environment. So the feedback loop continues. But these cells that are constantly in a state of arousal begin to break down. Often when we're in chronic stress, we're not sleeping well. And without that restful sleep, the cells can't repair or regenerate. There's been links with the hormone cortisol, which is part of the stress response as well, that has been shown to increase inflammation. And when the same neural networks are activated over and over, it's just like a road that has a lot of increased traffic.  The cells begin to suffer overuse, and with more demand, the cells are produced more quickly and more cheaply. And this is what causes aging to our cells and ultimately, to our bodies.

 

Proteins are the key to anti aging. Skin, muscle, bone, and hair cells are all made of proteins. So the more overused the proteins, the less effective they are at their job.

When disease or pain occurs, perfectionists are more likely to try to take a pill and just push on with their high drive and push for success and needing to succeed. They can sometimes drive themselves to the point of complete exhaustion or illness. 

 

If you look at the emotions related to perfectionism, with David Hawkins’ map of consciousness, you'll see that the vibrations of shame, fear, worry, desire and greed are all below 200. Meaning these emotions that perfectionists tend to feel primarily are destructive. Their vibrational energy that's low means that you'll seek to draw energy from other people around you, or from yourself and your own body in the form of disease or illness. When perfectionists have pain or disease, they tend to have feelings of anxiety that amplify the pain. 

 

At the same time, when stressed, the body's less able to access the natural pain-relieving chemicals that the body produces;  things like feeling joy, relaxing, spontaneity, acceptance of the present moment, and gratitude are emotions that naturally cause the brain to release chemicals that inhibit pain. But these emotions are particularly hard for perfectionists to feel. 

 

So it's no wonder that perfectionism is linked to chronic pain. Many of us think that if we're not constantly pushing ourselves or expecting more, then we'll end up not accomplishing anything. Our brains like to go to the worst-case scenario when we think about changing beliefs. If I'm not relentlessly harsh on myself, then I'll just be sitting on the couch eating potato chips the rest of my life. I'll just be lazy and I'll never achieve anything. Really, do we have to go to the extreme opposite?

 

Remember, in the model of perfectionism, the result is not satisfaction with achievements. If anything, the feeling of unworthiness and stress from unmet expectation is more likely to result in us buffering or trying to escape our life. That would be more likely when we would try to sit on the couch and eat potato chips—when we're feeling unworthy. But if we know that we're inherently 100% worthy, that no matter what we accomplish in this life, or don't, we're still 100% worthy of love, just by being a human. And then if we can come from a loving place, we actually are more likely to want to set goals to make an impact, to make a change, because we're coming from this 100% place of worthiness. It becomes more fun. 

 

Why not see what I can accomplish from this place of abundance because I know that I can help people and I can do things I'm passionate about? And that's when you can really create results. So being hard on yourself and demanding perfection is never helpful to your emotional or physical health. Think if you have any tendencies towards perfectionism, and question whether holding yourself to this unachievable standard serves you. 

 

A couple of strategies that I've learned from the Life Coach School regarding perfectionism, is to get okay with producing B- work. So this was a really hard one for me. In fact, I did not even realize that until a couple of months ago, when someone corrected me, I'd heard this term and I always called it B+ work. My brain just naturally was like B-, I don't think so. But I'm okay with the B+ work maybe. But at this point, I think I'm okay with B- work, because I'd much rather produce things and have them out there and take the risk and be vulnerable than to stew in my perfectionism and never produce anything. Because it's never going to be perfect. When I have that mindset, I'm so much more productive because I don't think things have to be perfect before I can produce them. But believe me, it still feels vulnerable. 

 

The other thing, though, that I think has really helped me with perfectionism is to practice making decisions. So, we are often faced with lots of decisions, and it's something that I never felt like I was good at or that I could do. I practice the thought that there are no wrong decisions. I give myself a certain amount of time, and then I make the decision. And I don't look back. This helps me get out of feeling stuck in perfectionism, where I feel that place of overwhelm and confusion.

 

Now on to people pleasing. What is people pleasing and how does it affect our health? Not only am I a recovering perfectionist, but I'm still kind of working on people pleasing as well. I definitely grew up as a people pleaser. And it was just within the last few years that I realized that it's something that I even can change, and that I want to change. Because really, it's not doing me any good in my life. Do you think you might be a people pleaser? Here are some examples of people pleasing from Curable: 

You avoid conflict at all costs. 

You would rather pretend to agree with someone then cause contention.

You're very uncomfortable with the thought of someone not liking you. Even if you don't like that person. 

You're afraid of letting people down or disappointing them.

You take on more than you can handle because you have a hard time saying no. You're very attentive to the feelings and emotions of those around you, but don't draw attention to or acknowledge your own feelings. 

 

I know that I've been people pleasing when I find myself thinking that people should act a certain way or treat me a certain way because of what I've done for them. Many of these people pleasing behaviors are developed in childhood and stay unexamined. But people pleasing is really not a nice thing. It's a form of manipulation. So, for example, if you say that you'll bake cookies for the school, even though you don't really want to, but you want people to think that you're a good mom or a good person, so you agree to do it, but then you end up feeling resentful, and angry, and maybe you even blame other people, but it's really your own fault. You could have said no, or you could have asked how else you could contribute. Maybe you'd be happy to buy cookies, instead of making them, but as a people pleaser, you would just agree to do it and then suffer the negative feelings yourself later. 

 

Whenever we do something to try to get people to think about us a certain way, there are two major problems. The first one is we cannot control other people. Very literally, you might have a little bit of influence with your own children. But other adult humans are going to act how they're going to act. And we really cannot control them. In fact, trying to control other people is one of the greatest sources of negativity. The second problem with people pleasing is that even if people do like the fake version of you that you're acting like, then they aren't really even liking the real you. It sounds so logical, pointing it out like that. And I swear I've seen it on TV and movies a million times where someone acts like a person that they're not in order to get people to like them. And then they realize they have to be this phony version of themselves, and it's unsustainable. They can't keep up the facade.

 

Like people pleasing, the inability to say no leads to stress. Research is now discovering the relationship of traits like people pleasing and chronic pain. And especially people pleasing seems to be linked to mysterious ailments where no physical explanations can be found. Think about what your body could be trying to signal to you with mysterious pain. Remember, you can use pain as a message from your body to check in and clean up your thinking. 

 

Dr. John Sarno explains in The Divided Mind about a concept called TMS, tension myositis syndrome. He says that perfectionists and people pleasers who he calls “goodests,” basically people who have a high conscience and want to do good and want to be perceived as doing good. So people who are perfectionists and people pleasers are more susceptible to suppression of unconscious feelings and for manifestations of pain. 

 

Remember, when we talk about unconscious feelings, 95% of our 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day are subconscious. They're just programs that our brain runs automatically without us having to think. Some of our subconscious thoughts are in the form of rage that wouldn't be acceptable for us to express in society. And that's why we repress them. 

 

This rage comes from basically our inner child. If you think about a child that's inside of us, this timeless part of us in our subconscious, that wants to be treated as such:  wants to be taken care of, and wants love and doesn't want to have responsibility or to have to follow rules. When we have feelings like this from our inner child, and the potential of rage, our subconscious mind acts to control some of these negative feelings so that they aren't expressed by distracting the brain. And it does this by sending less blood flow to certain areas of the body so that it causes pain.

 

So here's a real life example, you could feel resentful of the loss of freedom and sleep that you have when you have a new baby. The subconscious brain knows that acting on these thoughts would be unacceptable. Of course you love your new baby. So the brain creates a diversion to keep you from realizing these thoughts consciously. The brain sends less blood flow to an area of bone or muscle or joint or nerve, resulting in pain. Preferably, it's one where there might be some corresponding structural damage, or a site of an old injury, having less blood flow, and this creation of pain distracts from these potentially dangerous emotions, by keeping you focused on relieving the pain. 

 

One sign you have TMS is that when your pain is relieved in one area, shortly afterwards you develop a new pain or symptom in another area. He calls this the symptom imperative. I saw this a lot in physical therapy, where someone would come in after having a shoulder surgery on one side. And after they recovered a few months later they were back for their other shoulder or for their back pain or for the knee pain that just started. We were basically chasing the pain or fighting the pain. 

 

Dr. Sarno tells about thousands of cases of people who have had their symptoms resolved just by realizing and identifying with these perfectionistic or people pleasing tendencies and telling their brain not to continue to create the diversion, basically telling their brain they know what it's doing. And that all that pain is just from mild oxygen deprivation. And by confronting the brain about it. And this pattern, it's almost like a Pavlovian response that the brain has to react to create this pain. And it can be reversed with time and practice. 

 

So what do you notice in yourself with these disruptions? Do you identify with perfectionism or people pleasing, or both? The first step as always, is just to acknowledge it.  Observe it, like Eckhart totally would say, become the watcher of your brain. You don't want to be judgmental. This is just to watch and observe. Question your beliefs. See if the result in your life and your relationships is what you want them to be. 

 

Now, what is an emotion that we can practice that has shown health benefits? It's gratitude. In eleven-thousand different studies, they've shown that developing a grateful mindset improves not only mood and sense of well being, but also health in the form of decreased heart attacks and strokes. Just as we can look for examples of imperfections around us and find them, we can also look for things that bring us joy, and things we have gratitude for. We can train our brains to look for and find examples of things that bring us joy or make us happy. By going off autopilot and retraining our brain, we can find joy in the present moment. And we can have the ability to focus on the happiness that's already there.

 

I challenge you to write down three things that you are grateful for each day. Or make a list of things that bring you joy, and try to incorporate as many of these in your life as you can.

 

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And, of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know who wants an unstoppable body and mind.

 

Episode #7- Self Care is Not Selfish, and Other Common Myths

You owe it to yourself and to those around you to practice self care.

This episode will tell you all about how to practice self care for your whole self.   And bust the common myths of self care:

1-Self Care is selfish

2-Self Care has to cost money

3-I don't have time for Self Care

4-Self Care has to look a certain way

5-Self Care means doing nothing

 

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Episode # 6- How to Get the Results You Want

In this episode you will learn to use the Model to get the results you want. 

We go through a model with the result of sleeping through the night as an example.

Plus three brain-hack strategies to help make behavior change more successful and rewarding.

 

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Podcast #5- The Model- How to Solve Any Problem

Learn the Model and apply it to any problem in your life.  

Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, Results

We will take some real life examples including a model on neck pain.

 

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Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind. Episode Six- How to Get the Results You Want. 

 

In this podcast we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind.

 

Hello, today we are going to talk more about the model. So if you want to review the model, listen to Episode Five. 

 

But basically, it's a way to break down any situation into the circumstance, thought, feeling, action and result. 

 

Now really looking at our problems in the model allows us to see what the circumstance is.  Which is basically something objective that a court of law would find.  

 

We learn how much is coming from our thoughts, and how our thoughts create our feelings.  

 

Feelings cause our actions, usually not showing up the way you'd want to. 

 

And the result is what your actions cause. Our results always prove our thoughts true. That's just the way our brain works. 

 

If you find that you're trying to do a model, and the result is not proving your thoughts true, it's probably because you have mixed models, which is very easy to do when you're first starting to do models. 

 

Remember, you have 60 to 70,000 thoughts a day. So it's very easy to get sidetracked on a different model. 

 

So now that you can understand your problem and the role you play, and where you have the power to change, how do you solve the problem?

 

It's tricky.

 

In life, we want an easy answer. So I warn you this does sound deceptively easy, but be patient with yourself in the application. Remember, the brain is programmed to be efficient. And there are lots of strong neural pathways that are activated with these thoughts that you've been thinking for decades possibly. And the cells even are used to getting certain neuro chemicals. 

 

Joe Dispenza explains this is how we can get addicted to certain emotions like anger, or judgment or shame. To make a change in our brain requires energy. Most of our models are based in the past our brain is very efficient and sometimes has even formed these models when we were children, trying to make sense of the world. 

 

But remember, that past is gone now. The only thing that is left from the past is the stories that we retell in our brain. And you know what happens to stories that get retold over and over and slightly morph over time. 

 

I watched a program on Netflix called Memory Explained. They said that 50% of the details about a memory change with each passing year, yet people are still convinced they're 100% right. 

 

Thank you brains. 

 

But we all do this. So if you've been telling a story from your past, over and over again for years or possibly decades, chances are that it's kind of a super glossed over photoshopped, almost social media worthy story.  

 

Sometimes we call it story fondling, which is just what our brains do to make sense of what happened and how it fits into our context. We might mold the story so that we are put in the best light, almost like using a filter to reflect what we believe and want to portray back into the world.

 

Maybe thinking this way we can continue to be a victim or blame someone else. In fact, one good way to know if we're living in the past is that we have a lot of stories of victimhood. When we blame someone for making us feel or do something, we have a model that is based in the past. 

 

If you also are having an emotion in your model that is guilt or shame, that is a model from the past. 

 

Another example that I like to use in every situation is the model with pain. Pain would be a model that's based in the past. Joe Dispenza says we wake up and remember our pains each day. So it kind of makes sense that the brain's programming is just reliving the story of the pain and this kind of background program that it runs efficiently over and over and over. 

 

In fact, research has shown that brains become more hypersensitive to pain and have a lower threshold of what's needed to register pain when pain becomes more chronic. 

 

What if we could Question each model from the past that has been causing us pain?  If it's from very long ago, the thing that we may be calling a circumstance may not even be 100% true, or really what happened in reality? 

 

If you're noticing that something from the past is causing you pain, can you accept the thought that things happened just as they were supposed to? Remember, Byron Katie's observation, that the only times we have pain is when our thoughts are in contrast to what happened in reality. 

 

If we could tease out each model, like a knotted up ball of string that we untangle one string at a time, and the more conscious we become, the more we can begin to choose and shape our future. 

 

Speaking of the future, you've probably already guessed now that the way to solve any problem using the model is by putting what you want in the result line? 

 

Really, you could put it in any line of the model because it's like a building with floors. And the model is like an elevator you can take up or down. 

 

But let's start with the result line, because that's the best way to show how you can get what you want with the model. So imagine what you want in the result line. Do you want more money? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to start a business? Do you want to learn to play an instrument? Do you want to find love? Do you want to play tennis again? 

 

You can literally put anything you want in the result line.  Do you want to make a million dollars? Put it into a model.  

 

What actions would you need to take to make a million dollars?  Working back from the actions, what feelings would you need to have to generate those actions? And what thoughts would you need to think to feel those feelings? 

 

Let's get more specific with a model about pain. 

 

So the result that I may want is to sleep through the night.  Then I think, what are the actions I might need to take in order to sleep through the night?   I would probably start by journaling, just letting my mind go into a receptive mode and writing down whatever I might think of. 

 

One way I might start is to ask my body what it would need to do to sleep through the night without pain, then just grab some paper and start writing without a filter without thinking.  Just fill up pages. 

 

Maybe I might decide to drink some herbal tea, or not to drink liquid past a certain time. Maybe I might think to listen to some soothing music, or try a meditation app. I could try some yoga nidra which is sleeping yoga, which is restorative and has comfortable positions. Or I could think of taking a bath. Maybe I might try reading a book like Divided Mind by John Sarno, that looks at pain in a way different to what I'm used to. That is how I can help my brain rewire. 

 

If you want to have some fun you could look up the books by Louise Hay or her explanations online for why a certain pain or ailment in your body is manifesting in you. Like sciatica, she says is related to being hypocritical, fear of money or fear of the future. And neck pain is because of inflexibility or unbending or stubbornness. 

 

So those might be thoughts of things you can journal about. Maybe they relate to you and you can apply it maybe not.  But just a springboard of ways to get you thinking a little bit differently.

 

Maybe I could look into joining a pain coaching group which is something I do plan on starting. So we'll look forward to that in the future. There are apps like Curable that can teach you modern neuroscience, and how the newest research is suggesting a whole new way of looking at and treating pain. 

 

Gaining information is the first step and helping your brain rewire. You cannot continue to think the same way and create change. Here is an example of some information that might cause you to question your thinking about how you've been taught to view pain. 

 

MRIs are traditionally used to determine if there might be a cause for the pain or a physical need for surgery. But research has been showing that MRIs really should just be used for red flags for things like cancer or infection or tumors because they're not reliable and showing a structural cause of pain. 

 

A study I learned about from 2015 performed MRIs on people who did and didn't have back pain.  47% of the people who reported back pain had no abnormalities on their MRI findings. They had no signs of disc degeneration. 32% of the patients who had no lower back pain did show abnormal MRI results. They had clear signs of disc degeneration but had no

back pain.

 

They were tracked over the next year and 13 of the patients who had no back pain initially started experiencing back pain. But when they did another MRI, they did not see any physical changes that could show why or explain this onset of pain. 

 

Dr. Tim Flynn who hosts the International Spine and Pain Institute's podcast says that changes on imaging are just common with age.  We get “wrinkles on the inside”. These are normal age related changes, but we give them nasty names like “degeneration”, and “torn”, and “herniated”.  

 

For the majority of people and chronic pain, these structural abnormalities are unrelated to the pain they are experiencing. The action of learning more information could help with rewiring the way you conceive of your pain. 

 

And remember, this is not just for pain. This is for other body maladies like skin disorders, gi issues, allergies, or even asthma.

 

So back to our model, what other actions could I take to help sleep through the night?  I could brainstorm and list maybe pages of things that I might be able to do just in my imagination to help me sleep at night. 

 

Now, how would I need to feel to take those actions?  I would say I would need to feel trusting. I really like that emotion. For me, it really embodies hope and belief, empowerment, and letting go. 

 

You could look on an emotion chart to see what emotion you like the best. Try to feel it in your body.

 

What would I need to be thinking to feel trusting?

 

I like the thought, “I'm rewiring my brain and taking control of my health.” 

 

The thought is really important though, it has to feel true to you. If you don't believe that you can rewire your brain, this will not generate the feeling of trust for you. 

 

So just pretend and get creative here. Future models can be fun. We often don't even plan our futures with a purpose like this. Also, most of us start to think we are at the effects of our circumstances, or the all we're capable of doing is things that we've already done in the past. 

 

But what if you had a magic wand and you could pick out a result? Most of us don't spend any time thinking about the results we want. Once we're adults, no one is asking us what we want to do and where we want to go. We just settle into our routines. And we don't think about our plan, what we want to do or where we want to be in five years. 

 

We worry about the future. We want maybe something to be different in the future, so we can feel differently than we do now. But I think we should spend more time thinking about the results we want to have in our lives, and what we would need to do to achieve those results on purpose. 

 

In Becoming Supernatural, Dr. Joe Dispenza describes his walking meditation.  Where you totally embody how the person you want to be would talk or walk or even think by choosing, imagining, and visualizing details of the life you want to have, and the way you want to feel. This is the way you can achieve that reality. 

 

Just like a method actor, you could play the part of a wealthy person or the calm person, or the unlimited person you want to be. 

 

Your beliefs about yourself are all of your thoughts about yourself. So try to think of yourself more in these ways you want to become, or imagine how it would feel. Don't forget to pick an emotion that really moves or motivates you. Changing our brain takes energy. So the fastest way to create change and rewire our brain is to add the power of an emotion. By choosing with intent and purpose. Your mind can control your body rather than your body, controlling your mind.

 

So I want to share with you three different brain hack strategies that I found. 

 

One is by BJ Fogg. I learned about him from the Untangle Podcast by Muse. BJ Fogg wrote a book called Tiny Habits, which I'm reading right now. It's awesome. It's based on 20 years of behavior research. And he created a behavior model, which explains our behaviors, in terms of a few different factors so that we can not blame our behaviors and inability to change them on us having character flaws or problems with our self discipline.  But we can look at it more objectively about what all is going on. 

 

So what I want to tell you about from him, though, is kind of a brain hack to forming new habits. He says the best way to create a new habit is to break it down into the tiniest possible steps, like the tiniest step, like flossing, one tooth Or just putting on your walking shoes. But creating this habit that you do consistently and making it part of your routine, or a prompt that you're consistent with. 

 

So for example, if you're flossing your teeth, when you put your toothbrush down, you start by just flossing one tooth. And then the most important part is that you celebrate doing this first baby step. I found this part of it so interesting. 

 

So in a few days, you can start flossing all of your teeth but you start by just building the habit, putting your toothbrush down, flossing, one tooth, and then in a few days, if you want to start flossing all of your teeth you can, but if you go back to just flossing the one tooth, you still celebrate that when you start seeing success that you have with these tiny habits. Then the motivation that you have to change really snowballs. It's kind of like a life hack to get your brain breaking out of the models from the past and starting to see yourself as a more confident, dynamic person that can change. 

 

Then you start to naturally want to change and take on new challenges without needing to rely on willpower, or resistance or force. 

 

The other thing I found interesting is that if you want to decrease a bad habit, like stop eating sugar, you don't even focus directly on stopping the bad habit initially. He starts by having you build positive, tiny habits. So maybe you would build some habits around starting an exercise routine, or making your bed something where you can be successful and build that power. 

 

I love this.  I really think of David Hawkins and the vibrations of the emotions and how much more powerful you'll be if you're coming from a place of courage, or even neutrality than  if you're starting from a place of disgust or being critical of yourself.  Most of the time we start our habits in a place where we're not liking where we are kind of disgusted with ourselves and already negative. 

 

I love how in BJ Fogg’s model, the power of change is coming from success and positivity. So remember to start tiny, and celebrate the little changes. 

 

Life Hack number two. I also found from the Untangle Podcast, they interviewed the author MJ Ryan, who wrote a book called Habit Changers. It's not on Audible yet, and I've ordered it and I haven't gotten it yet. So I might be sharing more from this brilliant author. It sounds like an amazing book. But at least from her interview, I was able to understand a few of her main ideas, and I think they're valuable and habit change. 

 

She talks about how up to 90% of our behaviors throughout the day are automatic So our brain wants to be very efficient. It learns things like how to pour a glass of water or how to drive or how to believe certain things. And those behaviors are housed in the basal ganglia where habits live, and they just run and they're hardwired and they are hard to change.

 

So you really need to bring a lot of intention to changing a bad habit or forming a new habit. She says you end up doing the same old thing, not because you're weak, but because you're on automatic pilot. 

 

She has 81 game changing mantras in her book, which are mantras that help override the autonomic nervous system. So they're not mantras like I am calm, I am calm, where you might not feel calm, necessarily, when you say them.  She combines the statements with a few other key things. You have to have a “strong why” .  You have to pick one thing that you want to work on changing.  Pick one thing that you have the most motivation to change first, and to have a “strong why” you have to have a reminder of what you want to do. 

 

You might put it on a card that you hold in your wallet, or have a bracelet or something that reminds you of this phrase that you want to say. Now the phrase or a mantra should be directive. It should tell you what to do not I am calm, I'm calm, but something that's directive, like, “reach for a better thought.”

 

Now, this I thought was super interesting.  She talks about pairing your mantra with an action.

She references Amy Cuddy, a researcher who found the Wonder Woman pose or standing in a powerful position with your hands on your hips and your feet out wide. If people would stand like that for two minutes, it would significantly increase their testosterone, it would decrease their cortisol They would have more risk taking behaviors.

 

And in other studies, they found that similar positions, increase the pain threshold caused you to think more abstractly, and have helped people perform better in interviews when they're seated in a power position. 

 

I think that's so cool because I've been a physical therapist for 16 years working with pediatrics. So I know that the way that children learn first is through their motor actions. So think of maybe clapping or pointing you might see a child do something like that before they would actually say the word or speak. In fact, a lot of kids learn to do finger plays or things like patty cake before they would say the words. So learning a motor action like a sign for sign language usually ends up that that is one of the first words that that child also says the one they've learned the physical sign for.  So she suggests if you're working on patience or being more calm, you might want to touch your heart.

 

So this way, you're pairing a visual, if you have the reminder on a card, and audio hearing yourself, say the mantra, and a physical gesture, and that is much more powerful for change.

 

One of the mantras that I thought of when I was listening to the one she gave as an example, is “become curious, not critical.” 

 

I would like to do that with my hand on my heart. I think that's the place where I feel the vibration of gratitude. And she also says that when you touch one or both hands to your heart, you increase the production of oxytocin, which is the feel good or the love hormone. 

 

Here are a few other mantras that she suggests. “My response is my responsibility.” “Stop, breathe, rewind”. “You're on your own path.”

 

This one is one of my favorite favorites. “People do what people always do.” Isn't that great? It just relinquishes you from any power of trying to control anyone or judge anyone. You're letting people do what they do. And you're not surprised when people might disappoint you or not follow through, because that's part of what people do, right? 

 

I think of this with kids, kids do what kids always do. And that might mean sometimes siblings are fighting or sometimes kids are drawing on the walls, or sometimes they're disrespecting you, (according to you.) And that's what kids do. 

 

I think of this also, with our brains with all that we talk about. “Brains do what brains always do” when you catch yourself obsessing or worrying or going back to the past. You can just think up there's my brain. Again, it's working brains do what brains always do. 

 

The last Life Hack is from Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School. This is called the urge jar. I love this idea. It's so simple and brilliant.  If you're working on changing a habit,

then anytime you have an urge that you don't give into, you put a bead in the urge jar. 

 

So usually when we have an urge, we just try to resist it. And that's kind of like pushing that beach ball underwater. You can only do that for so long and have so much willpower. But with the urge jar, it's like a little hack for your brain, where you still get a reward, even though you haven't given into the urge. It's really fascinating how your brain likes this reward system. I really liked the urge jar and encourage you to try it. 

 

So I challenge you to think of a result you want in your life. Try doing a model work backwards from the result line. Don't worry about how you're going to get it exactly. You can brainstorm at this point. 

 

But if you could pick anything for yourself in the future, what would that result be? What actions would you need to take? What feelings would you need to feel? And what thoughts would you need to think? 

 

If you can get to the place where you can think and believe a thought on purpose, it won't even matter what the circumstances of your life are.

 

Thank you so much for listening.  I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an unstoppable body and mind.

 

Episode # 4 - How to Feel Better

Learn more about mastering your emotions in this episode.

 

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Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind- Episode Four- How to Feel Better

 

 In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind.

 

Hello, and welcome to Episode Four, where we're going to dive deeper into our feelings so that we can understand them better and learn how to feel better. 

 

But first, I wanted to ask if you did the exercise from the last episode? Did you have a chance to think about the top three emotions that you feel on a regular basis and the top three that you want to feel? 

 

I looked back through my papers and found when I started doing this work about five years ago, what my top three emotions were. And it was interesting to me that they were “worried”, feeling “tired” and feeling “productive.” I placed a lot of value on productivity, and feelings of worthiness around getting things done. 

 

And then a few months ago, I did this exercise again, without remembering what I had written.

And the three emotions that I wrote down were “gratitude,” which I've really been trying especially over the last year to cultivate, and “tired,” which was the same as in the first list and “worry,” which was also the same in the first list. But this time I wrote a dash next to it and “noticing and watching.” So instead of my worry, feeling like it consumes me when it happens and I have no control and I'm a slave to it, I notice and watch it and have begun to let it go.

 

So today's topic is “How to feel better.” I'm going to start out with a story. This is a story of a man who was struggling in his life and wanted to be enlightened. So he climbed a high mountain to meet with a Buddhist monk. And he told the Buddhist monk of all of his hardships, and tragedies, and all of the difficulties in his life. And the monk said, “This too shall pass.” And the man really took those words to heart. He went back and he applied that to all of the hard times in his life. And he started turning his life around, because he knew anytime he had

that were hard, that they would also pass.  

 

So he went back one day to thank the monk. And he told him how happy he was now that he had learned this way to get through all the difficult times in his life. He said, “I just feel amazing. I feel like I could do anything. I can't believe how happy I am.” And the wise monk said, “This too shall pass.”

 

We are meant to feel all of our emotions. We aren't meant to just be happy. When we're in sadness, we're not meant to stay in sadness. And when we're in happiness, we're not meant to stay in happiness. Even shame, the lowest vibration of 20, is a vibration that we should feel. It's an emotion that only psychopaths don't feel according to Brene Brown, shame researcher. 

 

So if we're trying to eliminate certain emotions from our lives, that's going to result in frustration. What we should aim for is becoming a master of our emotions and managing our emotions. That would mean we'd be willing to feel any feeling. We could feel discomfort, boredom, we could feel urges, we would not be afraid of failure. Imagine what we could achieve!

 

Being willing to feel any emotion is the fastest way to achieving the results we want in our lives. As Brooke Castillo says, “discomfort is the currency of your dreams.” So it's important to remember that we have negative emotions about 50% of the time. 

 

If you think about things in life, it's pretty much 50% good 50% bad, it applies in lots of areas. But just know that we have to have those bad things in order to know the good. And so there's kind of this balance in the universe of 50%, good, 50% bad. And if you have an expectation of that, then you won't be so frustrated. 

 

So even when you're doing a lot of work on your brain and you're evolving your brain, there are always going to be things that are out of your control. You can't control how other people act. As much as it seems like sometimes we can get a reaction from people that we can control them. In reality, we cannot really control what they do. And that can be frustrating. And then there are things definitely in the universe that are out of our control. There are natural disasters or there are accidents. There are things that happen that people would not choose to have happen, but they can't change. But by accepting that life is 50-50. We can eliminate some of the negativity that might occur if we were resisting that fact. 

 

When we fight against the 50%, negative that's in the world, we cause actually more negativity.

Imagine yourself like a boat that is floating in the ocean. Now if the water of the ocean gets very rough, the boat can still manage to stay afloat. As long as that rough ocean water does not get into the boat. So just know that half the time, the water in your life is going to be rough. But we can make it during those times if we turn inward and tend to ourselves. 

 

When I was a kid, I remember watching a TV show about a girl who couldn't feel pain. I thought that is amazing. I thought that would be so cool.  But then as I started to watch, I realized she wasn't invincible. Her body still could get damaged. She just didn't have that sensory response going to her brain and her brain letting her know that this was a danger and that she should stop. In fact, it was very, very dangerous for her. And she could cause permanent damage if she wasn't careful and always looking for other clues that she was hurting herself because she didn't have those pain signals. 

 

So our pain signals help keep ourselves healthy and prevent further injury. I think emotional pain is the same way. painful emotions and thoughts can cause us to look inwards at our lives, to look into ourselves to understand more, so we don't continue to damage ourselves. If you look from an evolutionary perspective, those painful emotions kept us acting in acceptable ways so that we could stay with our tribe and not risk our survival by being not accepted. If we hurt someone, we would want to feel some remorse or some guilt or some shame, more strong emotions to teach us not to repeat it. That was helpful for our survival. So our brain got wired like that. 

 

Have you ever sent a text to the wrong person? I've done that before.  I sent a text to the person that I was talking kind of snippy about. I'm glad I wasn't a little bit ruder. Some of the things I said in my head would have been less appropriate.  But it still had a tone of being pretty rude and I sent it to that person. I felt a lot of guilt and shame after that, I felt horrible. And I learned from that, to be very careful about looking at the number before I sent it to text. 

 

A neuroscientist from UCLA Dr. Alex Korb, found that pride, guilt and shame trigger the reward centers of our brain. So we're actually reinforced and rewarded by our brain for thinking things like pride, guilt and shame. The only reason I can think of is this must have evolved for social reasons. Again, pride might have helped us socially, when we accomplish things, and get rewarded with that social support, guilt and shame to keep our actions in line so that we're not rejected by our tribe. 

 

When we think about negative emotions, sometimes it's helpful to think of the positive things we get out of the negative emotions. I know that sounds a little weird, but going through negative emotions or negative times in our life, can help us be more empathetic with others. It can help us be a teacher to others. And sometimes it could help us realize how much support we have in our lives, or what kinds of things we should be grateful for. 

 

Our brain is very efficient when it responds to emotional reactions. Many of the emotional reactions that we have were formed when we were children. 

 

I can think of a time when I was 12 years old, I was flipping through TV, and I started watching Jaws. Yes, Jaws, that completely scary show inappropriate for children. And I was 12, so I wasn't even that young. But it was pretty mortifying, and I had a lot of nightmares about sharks from that. I probably spent hundreds of hours in fact thinking about sharks and researching sharks. We were going to go to our cousin's Lake cabin that year, and I researched from our encyclopedias, all about sharks, to make sure there were no freshwater sharks that could be possibly living in Couer d’Alene Lake.  And I knew that there weren't, but I was still scared when I was there. 

 

I was definitely producing a lot of neural pathways dedicated to this fear of sharks. And my brain was constantly on the lookout for scenarios of sharks. My mind even started to generalize and become super efficient and this subconscious way of looking for sharks and danger from sharks. I remember in a swimming pool, there were these underwater observation windows. And when I went underwater and saw the reflection of myself in a bathing suit that was black, I think, and just saw this kind of murky, shadowy figure, I immediately thought it was a shark and quickly swam and got out.  And it took me several minutes before I could really calm down and my rational brain realized how silly it was that I had reacted that way.  Our brain circuits become so automatic. I leapt out of a pool despite knowing there was no possible way that there was a great white shark inside an indoor swimming pool in Utah.

 

So I'm telling you the story because I want you to be non-judgmental, and be the watcher of your thoughts and emotions.  Especially the negative emotions.  Byron Katie says that emotions that are painful, are actually indicators that we have thoughts that are in contrast with reality.

 

So, if things happen in reality, good examples of that are things from our past. Everything in our past has already happened. It's in our reality. If we're spending a lot of mental energy, debating the fact that that happened, feeling like it shouldn't have happened, then we're setting ourselves up for frustration. 

 

Byron Katie says, “when we argue with reality we lose, but only 100% of the time.” So be on the lookout for those thoughts that are in contradiction to reality, because you know that you're just causing yourself unnecessary and extra pain. 

 

Emotions are what signal those thought errors to our body. So as we become more in tune with our emotions, and we start to feel maybe a clench in our stomach, that is an indicator for us to check in with our brain. What are the thoughts that are going on that's producing this clench in my stomach, which I associate with worry? 

 

One way of looking at how our thoughts can cause ourselves more pain is this example from The Mindful Art of Self Compassion. He says that pain is inevitable in life. But suffering is optional. And suffering is caused by resistance to pain. So the more we fight or avoid or resist the pain, the more our suffering is amplified. And if we think about it like a formula, Pain x Resistance = Suffering, the pain is multiplied by the amount that we're resisting it. And that equals more suffering if the resistance is greater, but if our resistance is zero, pain times zero is zero.

 

One way of decreasing that resistance is by staying out of what Byron Katie calls, “other people's business” and “God's business.” (you could also say the universe or nature.)

 

But knowing this can help with decreasing our pain.  If we let other people be who they are, and stop trying to control them, we can decrease our resistance to pain. If we let the universe or divinity have a realm of things we accept, we cannot control, we will have more peace in our life.

 

And the more we decrease our resistance and stop needing to understand why, we can look at those events we cannot control as things to teach us the lessons that we need to learn.

 

Thoughts that cause unnecessary suffering might be examples like this, “There should not be war”, “Parents should be attentive”, “People should not die young”, “Children should not feel pain”,”This person should not be president”, “Life should be fair”, “I shouldn't have pain”, “He shouldn't treat me that way”, “There should be no abuse.”

 

Are some of those hard to hear?

 

Let's take the example of,”there should be no abuse.”  Doesn't that sound like a good thought?

It seems like that's true, there should be. But it's contrary to reality. Emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse are more common and normal than we talk about. In fact, if you think about it, most of us have committed some form of abuse in our lives. Many people who've been abused, make it mean something so terrible about themselves, or about the abuser, that

they're unable to move forward.  Accepting that there's abuse in the world doesn't mean that you agree with it or condone it. Accepting that there's abuse actually makes it so we have a place to talk about it. We can acknowledge that this negative thing happens rather than getting stuck in the feeling that this should not have happened. 

 

We're the only ones that feel the consequences of these negative emotions decades later. If someone's feeling victimized, or feeling shame, or feeling hate towards the abuser, they're the only one that is suffering from those negative emotions personally. Imagine if we knew that abuse was part of the human experience, we could talk openly about it, and wouldn't have to add shame to an already negative situation. 

 

Some people want to fight for what they believe in. But usually what they believe in is kindness and love. And fighting is actually the opposite of that. We can only control ourselves. But if we would stop hating the hate, there would be less hate in the world. The best way to change is to work on your own emotional balance, and to act in love to change a situation rather than acting out of hate.  By doing this, you increase your power in the world, and your ability to change the world is greater, rather than stuck in these lower destructive vibrations or emotions. It's emotions of “power” versus emotions of “force.” 

 

Some of the negative emotions that we want to avoid are just the ones we need to work on to get the results we want in our life. If you're trying to achieve a goal or make a new habit, there are some negative emotions you'll want to practice learning to allow emotions like deprivation, discomfort, urge, boredom, dissatisfaction, failure, insecurity, rage and anxiety.  If we're unwilling to feel these feelings, it'll cause suffering, addiction, overeating, over drinking and behavior disorders. 

 

Mastering these emotions allows us to move on despite these emotions, and advance because we've been willing to feel them on purpose. 

 

Allowing emotions is different than indulging in emotions. There are some emotions that are called “indulgent emotions” that we can very easily get stuck in.  They’re feelings like “confusion”, “doubt”, “worry”, “overwhelm” or “victimization.” They are feelings that feel like they're necessary, but they really don't serve a purpose. And we're easily stuck in them. You could call them “dream excuses” because they stop us short of what we could achieve.

Just as I encourage you guys to go on a diet from negative self talk and stop saying it, we should all be trying to decrease and eliminate these indulgent emotions from our lives. Your brain will produce them, that's normal. I still feel them too. But become aware of them. become conscious of them, question them and watch them with compassion. You can change those circuits of your brain so they're less frequent and less strong.

 

“Confusion”- maybe you have a goal, and you're not sure how to achieve it. Do you ever have that happen where you just feel stuck and you don't know where to go? That could be the indulgent emotion of “confusion.” 

 

“Doubt”- have you questioned yourself before?  I remember asking someone about my pants. They gave me some feedback. It was good feedback. And in my head since I doubted myself, and how I looked in the pants, even when they gave me the good feedback, I still thought they probably were not telling me the truth, and I probably still did not look good. I still had doubt.  It kept me stuck in the same place.

 

“Worry”- I've heard this from another podcast that I believe was quoting another podcast. So the numbers may not be exact.  But what I heard was 80% of the time, the things we worry about don't even happen. And when they do happen 90% of the time, we handle it better than we think we're going to. Now like I said, I don't know if these numbers are right. But since I heard these statistics I've been watching this in my life. And it's true that so many of the things that I worry about, don't even happen.  It's kind of crazy!  But worry keeps you stuck. It's an indulgent emotion.

 

“Overwhelm”- this is an emotion I've felt a lot and I talked about in the first podcast. Overwhelm is something I've felt most of my life. And it ends up being a self fulfilling prophecy because when I feel overwhelmed, the actions that I take are to not do the work that I need to. And so by the next day, I still have all that same amount of work, probably even more to do, and it perpetuates that cycle of feeling overwhelmed. 

 

“Victimization” is another indulgent emotion. There are a lot of thought errors that occur with victimization- ”that shouldn't have happened.” We know that because it did happen in reality, that thought only causes us pain. Another thing that Byron Katie says that, “That was meant to happen. How do we know it was meant to happen? Because that's what did happen.”  The other thing with victimization is blaming the perpetrator for making us feel a certain way. But we know that's emotional childhood. Our thoughts are the only things that can make us feel any way. So we're giving our power away to this person who hurt us, maybe even decades ago, and going through all of this emotional pain that is unnecessary, and only compounds the original pain that was there. 

 

Now remember, when you're trying to get rid of these indulgent emotions, that they do occur naturally and this is going to keep happening.  In fact, do you remember when we talked about the homeostasis of the cells and that they're used to a certain amount of neuro peptides and neurotransmitters? So just like with addiction, Joe Dispenza describes how cells get used to higher and higher levels of these neurotransmitters and neuro peptides. And the next cells that are made have even more receptor sites to accommodate for the increased levels of hormones in the blood. So this can really happen on a physical level and can be how our body controls our mind. 

 

Why am I reinforcing this? Because it's hard to change our emotions. It's a process. Even down to the cellular level, you need to come to a new homeostasis. So there may be some discomfort. 

 

But we do have the power to make changes in our brain and in our life, especially with intent. If we can stay calm for this process, rather than going back into autopilot where things are familiar.  If we continue with this mindfulness, then our mind can control our body rather than our body controlling our mind. 

 

We can recognize these patterns of confusion, doubt, worry, overwhelm, and victimization. We can question them. Probably many of them were formed in your childhood.  I sometimes like to think, “Would I want the elementary school version of me making decisions for my life right now?” 

 

Our brain is efficient. We might not even know that we are thinking some of these things and have these beliefs, but we can become aware of them and question them and decide what we want to continue to believe.

 

Now how do we work on the feelings that we want to feel? You have to start by picking an emotion that you want to feel.  So emotions are one word descriptions. Sometimes we'll start a sentence off with, “I feel” and think it's a feeling. So if, “I feel like I want to quit my job”, that's actually a thought, that's not a feeling. 

 

The feeling might be more like “frustration”, or “anger” or “discouragement.” Online you can get charts that label emotions. Some of them have a few different faces. And you can see by the face that there's a look of anger or happiness or disgust. There also, emotions that are grouped by type, one of my favorites is a wheel, and I'll have to figure out how to do some show notes and attach some of these things. 

 

But as I was looking at the descriptions on this wheel, I noticed that about 2/3 of the words were what we would describe as “negative emotions.” I thought it was fascinating because I think even our language reflects this evolutionary tendency that we have to describe or think of things more negatively. And that helps motivate us to get the positive results and emotions that we want. 

 

“Whatever you're feeling, all you want to do is feel a little better.”- Kevin Trudeau. 

 

So this is normal for our brain. So when we're thinking of emotions that we want to pick, sometimes you could think of someone holding out a tray, a big silver platter of emotions.  And you can pick what you want to feel. 

 

Do you want to feel “exuberant”? Do you want to feel “radiant”? Do you want to feel “glowing” or “happy”? All of these emotions are available to you. 

 

Think about what we usually say when people ask how we are? We might say, “I'm fine”, or “I'm good” or “I'm stressed” or “I'm busy.”  “Hanging in there”,  or “I'm here.” 

 

Wow, of all the emotions that we could pick, that's what we'd pick? “I'm here.” “I'm hanging in there.”

 

I like to sometimes look at a list of emotions and pick one, like “fabulous” and use that and think “how I could feel fabulous during the day?”  Or “graceful.” How could I act gracefully all day? 

 

I've been compiling a list of emotions that I want to feel on purpose. So I'll read you a few of them to get an idea. Radiant, content, energetic, at peace, blissful, joyful, enlightened, compassionate, engaged, present, appreciative, empowered, invincible, creative, playful, thoughtful, thankful, hopeful, cheerful, responsive, daring, determined, unstoppable. 

 

That's about a third of the words that I have. So sometimes I like to look through that list and remind myself of the options that are available out there for me. I don't have to just feel “fine.” 

 

So if you're thinking of a circumstance, you'll want to pick the emotion that you want to feel. So for example, when you sit down at your desk in the morning, you might want to feel “inspired.” And we know that our emotions come from our thoughts. And so we need to think what thoughts we would need to think to make us feel inspired? So maybe you could think, “I can make it a great day today” or “I am achieving my goals”, “I enjoy helping people” or “I enjoy teaching or learning” or “I can make a difference today.”

 

But it has to be something that your brain believes. If you don't really feel like you're making a difference, and  you use that thought, “I can make a difference today” you won't have the emotion of “inspired.”

 

The more that you can believe or pair your thought with an emotion, the faster and stronger your brain will learn it. So feel in your body what it feels like to be “inspired.”  Think of times you've been inspired in your life. Imagine yourself mentally rehearse yourself sitting down at your desk, and think the thought, “I'm achieving my goals.” And then feel that inspiration in your body. And imagine yourself feeling it in your mind.  Replay this over and over in your head. 

 

Instead of getting angry when you're driving to work, you could be mentally rehearsing the person you want to be. You could be creating this feeling of peace and emotion anytime you desire. 

 

So start the journey. This is work that you can continue to practice throughout a lifetime. I've been learning this and practicing it for five years and I still need to do this work daily for my best results. I think of it kind of as mental hygiene, just like you would brush your teeth or floss your teeth every day. You have to do this work on your mind and clean up your thinking every day. 

 

So I'm going to challenge you to start thinking of an emotion that you want to feel on purpose. Mentally rehearse it like I just discussed and see how you can create these new neural pathways in your brain and start to change your life.

 

Thank you so much for listening.  I hope you learned a little bit about

your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. Of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.

 

Episode # 3- All the Feels

Listen to learn why emotions are important, what emotions are, and how to process them.

 

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Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind. Episode Three- All the Feels.

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind. 

 

Hello, this is Episode Three- about our feelings and how to process them. If you've listened to the first two episodes and are joining me now, please take some time, if you would, to leave me a rating or a review and maybe share this with someone. I know it takes some time and effort but it helps this podcast be found by more people. So I appreciate it. 

 

Okay, so to recap from our last episode, Our thoughts create our feelings and feelings are a vibration in our body. So today we're going to talk about feelings. And first of all start by talking about why feelings are so important. 

 

Basically, everything we do or don't do, is because of how we think it's going to make us feel. I'm going to repeat that- everything we do or don't do is because of how we think it's going to make us feel. 

 

So if we want to switch jobs, if we want to be thinner, or look younger, or be richer, if we want to eat something or drink something, if we want to have kids or not. If we want to watch something or read something or buy something, all of those things are because of how we think it will make us feel. 

 

And in fact, our society is based on this in a way, with the marketing system that continually tries to sell us things to make us feel better. While I was preparing for this podcast, I was at the grocery store and literally heard some girls saying, “should we buy a candle for our apartment? Would it make us happy?”   Their thoughts about their candle is what would make them happy, not the candle itself. 

 

But we have a lot of genetics telling us that we want to feel better. We want to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And like I said, the marketing system is designed to show us things that we can buy so that we can feel better. In fact, the whole marketing system would collapse if everyone realized that our feelings come from our thoughts and not from things that we purchase, or things that we acquire. 

 

So we're the ones that control our feelings. This is also called emotional adulthood. When we take the power of owning our emotions and not blaming someone else for how we feel.  No one else can make you feel an emotion. It comes from your thoughts. We don't have to change the circumstances to do it. In fact, we can't change the circumstances a lot of the time.  What we can do though, is change how we think about them. And that's the key to how we feel. 

 

I love this quote, “If you can't learn to find joy in the snow, you have the same amount of snow in your life, but less joy.”

 

It's like we give our power away, blaming the circumstance for our feelings. And then we live a huge part of our life trying to change these circumstances, to seek pleasurable feelings or avoid negative feelings. 

 

But this is normal. Like I said, this is what our body is programmed to do. We want to have pleasure. We want to survive as a species. But in our society now where we're not in mortal danger- being chased by animals, and trying to hunt and gather for food, pleasure is so concentrated. 

 

Instead of eating just berries, we could have candy. And we could buy whatever drinks we want. We could watch Netflix, virtually anything is available by streaming, maybe not anything, but you have a wide array even just compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Social media is another way that sometimes you can escape and have so many pleasures, a hit of dopamine every time someone likes something of yours that you've posted.  Without even having to leave the house.

 

Now emotions are what cause our actions. When I'm feeling bored, I might pull out my phone. When I'm feeling embarrassed. I may say something back that's defensive or mean. Emotions cause our actions and they're also very powerful in creating our memories. Basically, if you think of the things that we remember from our life, it's because we had a huge emotional shift in that moment. So you feel either very strong emotions, or a rapid shift of emotions from what you're used to. 

 

This is why most of us can remember so clearly, when big events like 9/11 happened, or I remember where I was when I found out Princess Diana had died. Now, when we think about our memories in our brain, and remember the events and relive them in a way, in this virtual reality of ours, we create those same chemicals that we had at the time that it was occurring. 

 

So if I continue to think about the regret that I have that I work late and miss my daughter's soccer game, then each time that I have those regretful feelings, I'm creating the same chemicals that are produced in my body and were produced at the time that it occurred. 

 

In fact, I've heard that method actors will use this when they are trying to have a sad scene- they might recollect something in their life that's happened personally that made them sad and recreate those same feelings.

 

Now in episodes one and two, we talked a lot about becoming more aware of our thoughts, and how a lot of our thoughts are unconscious. And we also need to tune into our feelings. Most of us don't ever really pay attention to what we're feeling at any given moment. For example, right now, what are you feeling? What's the emotion that you have right now? wherever you are. 

Many people only think of the very general emotions happy or angry or sad or fearful. But the more specific you can get with describing your emotions, you can see there kind of some nuances in the words.  So maybe angry- you might think is it different to be irritated? or to be annoyed or to be frustrated?, or to be indignant?  

 

I'm kind of a word person. So I like these little subtleties, like “surprised” versus “startled” or “content” versus “abundant.”  And I like to say those and feel them in my body.  Do they feel a little bit different? 

 

Now, why is it important to label our feelings?  Labeling our feelings activates our prefrontal cortex. So if you remember from Episode One, that's the highest part of our brain. That's the thinking part that is especially developed in humans. Many of our emotions, especially the fight or flight emotions originate in the amygdala. And that is part of the limbic system, which is just below the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex has this authoritative power, it's a little higher up. It's a little more advanced. And can actually calm the limbic system, or help with the fight or flight response. 

 

Labeling emotions for other people actually helps calm them down too.  In one of the trainings that I did working with children, we learned that you could say with children, instead of

labeling the emotion that might be a little complex or not age appropriate for them, you could say, “I see you're crossing your hands across your chest.” “I see you're frowning and turning away from me.” Those kinds of things, labeling them can help them get a hold of their emotional system as well. Brene Brown used an example of someone who, when she felt shame, would just label it and say, “shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.”  Brene Brown thought this was brilliant. And now I'm understanding why, learning a little bit more about the brain. It's because it helps calm down that neurological reaction that's so primitive and so reactive. In the amygdala, sometimes our body pains and emotions can be very closely tied.

 

I know for me when I'm having anxiety, or worry, I feel a tightening in my stomach- kind of a turning in my stomach. It feels a lot like I have an upset stomach. So when my daughter has an upset stomach and I'm taking her to school, I'll often ask what's going on with her emotionally, if there are any things at school she's worried about and tell her that sometimes my stomach feels that way when I have the emotion of “worry.”

 

What are we taught to do instead of labeling and recognizing our emotions?  There are three main things. 

 

One is avoiding our emotions. We've already talked about eating something or drinking something or buying something to make ourselves feel better. We could also overwork to escape from our reality or to pay for all the things that we're buying to make us feel better.  We are really taught to avoid in our society. In fact, when someone is having a negative emotion, a lot of times what our first reaction is, is “what will make them feel better?”  In fact, we say, “what's wrong?” if someone's having a negative emotion.

 

We can react to our emotions instead of recognizing them and processing them. So reacting is when we just act something out. So if we're very angry, we might yell, or if we're sad, we might cry. It's like this thing that our bodies do, where we might release, we might feel something. But this is acting out. It's not processing. Processing would be like us sitting in a chair, feeling vibrations in your body, not being angry and yelling at someone to try to get them to change their behavior. 

 

Another way we cope with our emotions is to resist them. It's like we deny that they're even there. Try to repress them. And the analogy I like to use with this is like a beach ball. If you're trying to push a beach ball underwater, you have to use this force and continually push down. And if you don't, then it rebounds up. So the emotion doesn't really ever go away. In fact, sometimes it can get a little bit stronger with all of this resistance that we're adding to it. And this can definitely effect our health when we're resisting our emotions. It's like closing a door, rather than opening the door and letting the emotion pass through us. 

 

A client I was working with is a good example of how resisting an emotion may have caused a physical effect.  She started by telling me that her throat lately had been more closed. And it was in fact impacting sometimes how she could eat food. It was even hard to swallow her food. And then we started talking about what was going on with her emotionally And she was feeling a little bit taken advantage of by her daughter. She was helping her daughter with several things and feeling a little bit victimized that she was so helpful and her daughter wasn't appreciating her. But the thought of saying something to her daughter made her think that she was being disloyal. So she wanted to repress that emotion of feeling victimized, so that she didn't bring up any of these contentions with her daughter. 

 

I started thinking about the throat chakra, and the purpose of the throat, which is to use our voice and to speak up and to say things. And we found it very interesting and found that there was a connection between the fact that she was repressing this emotion of victimization. She was not taking the action of talking to her daughter, and the fact that her throat was closing up. She was not speaking her truth or speaking out and was finding it even difficult to swallow or eat food. 

 

I believe we can use our physical symptoms as barometers or cues to our body that we need to check in with our mind. Byron Katie says that emotional disturbances are clues that we have thoughts that are in contrast with reality. So if we are feeling very sad that someone has died and we don't think that they should have died, then we are automatically generating more sadness and grief for ourselves, just by nature of thinking thoughts that are different than what happened in reality. 

 

Anytime that you have some kind of a “should” statement is usually a clue that you might have an emotion that's going to be painful to you. If you're thinking that, “parents should always be kind to their children,” and you had parents that weren't kind, you'll feel pain. If you're thinking that, “people shouldn't hurt each other,” you'll feel pain because in reality people do. 

 

Another common one I hear is that people should act a certain way for someone to feel loved. But the feeling of “love” is an emotion. It comes from our own thoughts. No matter how someone acts towards us. It cannot give us the feeling of love. It's only our thoughts about their actions. 

 

What should we do with our emotions instead of avoiding reacting or resisting them? as Robert Frost said, “the only way out is through.” 

 

We have to process our emotions. So what does that look like? Well, emotions are just vibrations in our body. And one thing we have to realize is that we don't need to be scared of feeling any emotion. So we can feel negative emotions, we can even feel very devastating emotions and still physically be okay. 

 

But if you're like me, you may be thinking, Wait, I don't want to feel negative emotion. In fact, when I learned about David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, and that the emotions below 200 were negative and destructive, I thought immediately, I never want to feel those emotions!

 

But feeling those emotions is actually part of the human experience. We are made to feel all emotions, and we're very capable of feeling them all. In fact, if we didn't have negative emotions, we wouldn't even know that there was such a thing as positive emotions. We would never know what it's like to be peaceful if we hadn't had contention in our life. We wouldn't know what it's like to be healthy unless we knew what it's like to not have health in our life.  We might have taken it for granted. 

 

I used to think that there was something wrong with me, because I was just not a happy person. I just wasn't happy all the time. And I thought I should be.  But if you think about it, would you really want to feel happy when you hear that someone has died? Or that someone has been abused? Would you really want to feel comfortable and peaceful and relaxed if you're trying to start a business?

 

Negative emotions can teach us and motivate us. Some of the greatest advances in society have come from negative emotions. You can see this with artists and musicians. Sometimes they've struggled in their lives, and they've created masterpieces out of their despair. 

 

But what if you could find out that the worst that could happen to you from trying something or from putting yourself out there was a feeling, and that you can feel any feeling? It's not going to physically hurt you.  What can we accomplish if we had that belief, and we had the mastery of our emotions to know that we can feel any feeling? 

 

Allowing an emotion is a skill you have to learn how to do it. And practice it. It's not the same as reacting or resisting, or avoiding. So if you're feeling angry, for example, you would notice that you're feeling angry, and you would observe it with compassion. You might describe the emotion. Try to describe it in as much detail as you can. What am I feeling? Where is it in my body? Is it a tightness in my chest or my shoulders? Is it a knot in my stomach? Is it a lump in my throat? Is it a flushing in my face? How do I know I'm feeling this feeling instead of another emotion? What is specific about this emotion? 

 

Question how you're feeling.  Instead of trying to get rid of the feeling or tightening up, lean into it. Breathe in to the vibration and the feeling. Be curious. Like you're studying it for an acting part. What is anger? How does it feel in my body? Open up to it and move towards it. And know that you can handle it. It's just a vibration in your body. Let it be heavy, or uncomfortable, or dark or agitated. But let it be there without suffering without judgment. Just like you're observing it for a science experiment, and describing it as objectively as you can. 

 

So maybe the emotion is fear because I'm going to go teach a class in front of a bunch of new people. And I feel a tightening in my stomach and in my chest. And I know that it's fear. And I can start to accept that it would be normal to feel fear in this situation. And I can describe what the fear feels like in my body, maybe even what color it has. Maybe it's a dark green. And I can start to see if there's ways I can release that fear or soften into it. I could question the fear- why it's there?  The fear might be there because I'm worried about being embarrassed or worrying about people not liking me. 

 

As I dig deeper, I can ask why that's there. I'm trying to get my approval from outside sources, from how people react to what I teach them. When I dig deeper, I remember that my approval and my worthiness comes from me, and not from outside circumstances or people. So I may start to soften in this process to where the fear is not as great, or has subsided. 

 

Now, sometimes you may have emotions that last quite a while. And so it's like carrying this “heavy purse” with you. My teacher Brooke Castillo calls anxiety her heavy purse and I feel like this a lot of times when I wake up with anxiety.  My brain is already going, worrying about things. And instead of resisting that emotion and saying, “everything's fine,” or avoiding that emotion and trying to not think about it, or reacting to the emotion and staying stuck in an anxious place without being able to move on, I pick up my heavy purse and I go throughout my day. And usually what I find is as I get busy working on something, if I have some goals that I'm working on, or helping people, that anxiety, that heavy purse that I'm carrying, starts to feel a little lighter naturally. But some of these emotions you may have to carry around until you're done with them. Just observe and be compassionate. 

 

So that's a little bit more information about emotions, how they occur in our body, what they are and how to process them. 

 

I want to challenge you to become more aware of your emotions.  What are the main three emotions that you feel on a consistent basis? What are your top three? And what top three feelings would you want to feel?

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.

 

Episode #2- The Power of Your Thoughts

Understand more about your thoughts, and how they create the results in your life.

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Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind- Episode 2- The Power of your Thoughts.

 

In this podcast, we learned to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to feel and to create the results we want in our life.  Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become Unstoppable, Body and Mind.

 

Hello, today I want to talk about the power that thoughts have in our life. Yes, the thoughts that

we think in our brain are very, very powerful.

 

Thoughts are sentences that happen in our brain. And as you may remember, we have about 60 to 70,000 thoughts per day, at a rate of 300 to 1000 words per minute.  These sentences just constantly go on in our brain. 

 

So examples of thoughts might be “it's hot outside today”. That's not a fact. Because there might be different people that have different ideas of what's hot. Definitely I know that that's true. Because what my kids think is hot is maybe in the 70s, or something hot to me would be in the 100s.

 

Another thought might be “he or she or it, or we or I shouldn't do that.” So we have a lot of these kinds of thoughts about all of those people, right? And if we think about why our brains work this way, it makes sense for survival.  That we would have some judgments about what people should or shouldn't do to stay safe, or to be part of our tribe. 

 

We do have oxytocin, which is a hormone that makes us want to fit in or be part of a group. It's part of social bonding. And if you think about that, again, in this survival setting, it might mean that we have a better chance of survival if we fit into a group and are accepted. 

 

So We have a lot of thoughts surrounding acceptance of ourselves and others.  Another thought might be, “he is a toxic person.” So this cannot be proved in a court of law. Although maybe several people agree and use the same word that he is toxic. It could mean different things to different people. And maybe not everyone agrees. So, “he is a toxic person” is a sentence in your brain that you may be choosing to think. And you may be choosing to think it over and over. 

 

So really, most of what goes on in our brain are just interpretations of reality we see through like a filter or a lens. As we start to question the thoughts we think, and the beliefs we have (which our thoughts we think over and over again), we start to be able to question whether our thoughts and beliefs are serving us and if we want to keep thinking them.

 

Thoughts are sentences in our brain.  Thoughts are also things.

 

You might have heard this phrase before in metaphysics or quantum mechanics, but basically the power of thoughts and intention can be shown. And I have a few experiments that I want to tell you about that I find fascinating, that demonstrate the power of intention.

 

The first of these series of experiments started in the 1800s with the double slit experiments to determine if light was a particle or a wave.  So basically, they set up different scenarios where they tested light to show that for sure, it was 100% wave, and it was.

 

And then when they reset the experiment to show for certain that light was a particle, it also 100% showed that light was a particle. So why couldn't it just be both? It's basically like going north and south at the same time. There's no way from what we know about waves and particles that it could be both. 

 

But what they came to from this conclusion was not necessarily the nature of light. It's still mysterious. But they did come up with the term “observer effect.” It simply means that by observing or measuring something, we influence or change its behavior. So when they were setting up those experiments, observing light different ways, they were actually changing the behavior of the light molecules. 

 

It makes me laugh because I think of this observer effect with my kids and my pets. There's something about going to take a picture. And it's like, even my animals know if I'm trying to take a cute picture or video of them, they automatically move. They stop what they're doing. So I know it's just a silly analogy, but I think of that with the observer effect. My trying to measure them/ take a picture of them, changes their behavior. 

 

The next researcher I want to talk about is Cleve Baxter. In the 1960s, he was interrogation specialist for the CIA. He was an expert with a lie detector. And he decided one day to put electrical sensors, the lie detector sensors on the stem of a plant. The lie detector in humans uses electrophysiology to measure the fight or flight response that humans have. 

 

So he put it on the plant and he thought about watering the plant and the plant didn't have any kind of reaction. And then he thought maybe I'll try to see if I can get some kind of signal elicited from the plant. 

 

He thought about getting some matches and burning the leaves. What he noticed was immediately when he thought the thought about getting the matches and burning the leaves, the plant registered a response. And continued to respond as he went and got the matches and burned the leaves. But the amazing thing about it was, the response from the plant was initiated with his thought. 

 

In the 1990s, there was a French researcher, Rene’ Peoc’h, who did experiments with newly hatched chicks.

When baby chicks are born, they imprint on the first moving object that they see. So if it happens to be the mother bird, they imprint on the mother bird, if it's a human, or even they've seen experiments with a balloon where the baby chicks would imprint. 

 

They made this little robot that had random number generators. So it would have a random number generator to see how far it would go. And then another number to see how far it would turn and then how far it would go again. And it was kind of like I imagine like a Roomba but even more random, I guess.

 

And when the robot is in the room, it shows a picture of where the robot goes. And it's just randomly all around in different directions. The chicks that were just hatched, watch the robot and imprinted on the robot. But he didn't want the chicks following the robot around, he put them in a cage. And notice then that the robot started hovering more around the cage. 

 

So somehow chicks that had this intention where they wanted to be next to the robot seemed to influence the random number generator, so that the robot not only was more on the side of the room of the chicks, but even tended to hover closer towards the cage. That was the heaviest pattern. 

 

Now he tried the same experiment with chicks that had not imprinted onto the robot. And the robot just did the normal random movements including both sides of the room, as If there were no chicks there at all. 

 

And then in the 2000s, Dr. Masaru Emoto, did experiments on water to show how thoughts and intentions impact the physical world. He wrote a book called “The Hidden Message in Water.” And he used Magnetic Resonance analysis and high speed photographs to see the crystal structure of water. He found that water that was exposed to the thoughts of love or compassion, or kind intention made these beautiful crystal molecule formations, and the water that was exposed to fear or negative intent produced formations that were disconnected and disfigured. 

 

He tried looking and analyzing the water, listening to different music. The water exposed to classical music had these beautiful crystal formations and heavy metal music had that more disjointed effect where it didn't seem to be a solid formation and didn't have the fluidity in crystal form. 

 

He tried experiments just putting words or pictures on bottles of water. The words “love” and “gratitude” and “thank you” produced beautiful crystal formations. But negative words like “evil”, or the phrase “You disgust me” produced those unstructured, disconnected crystal like shards. 

 

He found even that toxic water that was preyed on would transform into beautiful geometric crystals like that of clean healthy water. 

 

Now think about the fact that we are mostly water- 50 to 75%. So if changing words that we're thinking or intent that we're having, or even words we're writing onto water in a bottle could change the structure and coherence of that water. Just think about how that could impact packed our body in the water in our body by changing our thoughts.

 

One example is the self talk that we have to ourselves. And even the words we say out loud might be negative sometimes. I know that definitely for me, I was a very negative person towards myself. And I thought it kind of lighten the mood a little to say, “that was so stupid of me.” Or “I can't believe I did this”,” I'm such an idiot”, or “I'm just a wreck, I'm a mess.” And I would say this out loud to people. And I would think that 100 times over in my head.

 

And one thing I did for myself when I was doing this thought work and noticing my thoughts was that I decided to not speak to myself in a negative way again.  So it was a process. I first started by resolving not to say anything derogatory or negative about myself out loud anymore, and I would catch myself sometimes because I'd want to keep going back to that habit, but I resolved to just not say anything out loud that was negative about myself anymore. Sounds easy, but for me, it was hard. 

 

And then I really worked on just not even having those thoughts in my head.  When I did have them, I would notice them I would move on. But I wouldn't condemn myself or get mad at myself for having those thoughts. I would just observe that they were there. And as time went on, I got less and less negative about myself, because I wasn't talking that way. And I wasn't thinking that way about myself. 

 

The third interesting fact about thoughts is that thoughts create feelings or vibrations in our body. So in the book, “The Molecules of Emotion” by Dr. Candace Pert, you can read about her discovery of the opiate receptor in the brain. In the 1970s. She goes into a lot more detail and the book about neurochemistry and neurobiology. But I'm going to give you a very generalized overview of how our thoughts create our feelings. 

 

So when the brain has a thought, there's an electrical impulse, and the current travels to other nerves, or to other parts of the body through the central nervous system. Now initially, scientists only had tools to measure the electrical signals that nerves produced. So they only studied how the brain worked electrically through the nervous system. 

 

Neurons or nerve cells connect to each other by having a space called a synaptic cleft that's between the dendrites or extensions of the neuron. And neurotransmitters are what are released that bridge the gap and relay the nervous signal to the next nerve

cell. 

 

One example of a neurotransmitter is dopamine. Candice Pert was very influential in discovery and measuring the peptide system, which she called the “second nervous system” and the “chemical brain”. She said this works on a longer timescale, and over a greater distance than the neurological system, and that it's more ancient and basic to organisms. 

 

She talks about peptides, these chemicals, as being like “keys.” And on the surface of cells, there are “locks” or the cell receptors. She said cells can have up to 70 receptor molecules. And then that receptor transmits a message into the cell, and then a chain reaction of chemical channels that basically change our mood, our physical activity or behavior. 

 

One thing I really liked in the molecules of emotion was Candace Pert’s description of the receptor cells. She said they are “keyholes, but constantly moving in a rhythmic vibration. Swaying, dancing and vibrating, waiting to pick up messages carried by other vibrating little creatures also made out of amino acids that come cruising along. They wiggle, shimmy and even hum as they bend and change from one shape to another, often moving back and forth between two or three favorite shapes or confirmations.” 

 

When the right chemical keys are released from the neurons into the extracellular fluid, they bind, which she calls, “sex on a molecular level”.  This causes the receptors to, “dance and sway.” 

 

I think what I like a lot about her description is how the molecules of emotion involve a lot of vibration and movement. 

 

In the book, “Letting Go” by Dr David Hawkins, he measures the vibrational energy in a person's electromagnetic field when they're feeling an emotion. It's called the “Hawkins Scale of Consciousness Levels.”

 

So he can measure the frequency when we have emotions or even the energy of inanimate objects like books, or art or types of clothing. This emotion scale really helps me understand the physical aspect of my emotions. 

 

He classifies each emotion by the vibration or frequency. So, 200 is the frequency of “courage,” which is where the vibration turns positive or is more creative rather than destructive. 

 

The lower vibration emotions are below 200.  So “pride” is 175, “anger” 150, “desire” 125, “fear” 100, “grief” 75.  The lowest vibration levels are “apathy” 50, “guilt” 30 and “shame” 20 So, the lower the vibration of the emotion, the more the body needs to get energy from somewhere.  Either from other people, or taking your own energy in the form of making yourself more tired or creating disease.  

 

The vibrations under 200 are destructive. Your growth is constricted, or they're considered emotions of “force” rather than emotions of “power.” He talks specifically in the book about how when operating primarily out of guilt, you could actually have frequent accidents or frequent diseases. 

 

I know that I was definitely a person that operated out of guilt. I actually almost thought that guilting myself and shaming myself made me a better person. And I definitely had feelings that I was not worthy enough or not good enough or that I needed to be more perfect. I do think the low vibrational energy that I was feeling over and over is what led to my autoimmune disorder, ulcerative colitis. 

 

So at the vibration of 200, that's the level of “courage.” And that's where the frequency becomes “creative” or “expansive.” It involves giving power to ourselves and others, rather than taking it away.

 

Level 250 is “neutral.” I think that's interesting, that even neutrality is above some of those negative emotions. But the energy here is more positive. And there's the beginning of inner confidence. “Acceptance” is at 350, “love” at 500, and “peace” at 600. 

 

The higher the energy level, the greater your contribution to the world, and the more synchronicity in your life. 

 

So think about the emotions that you feel regularly. Maybe even start taking some notes over the next few days to see what you're feeling over and over and maybe what your top three emotions are. And then because we know that our thoughts create our feelings, we can start to analyze the feelings that we're having over and over what those thoughts might be that are causing them. And we can even think about what feelings we want to have and work backwards, what are the thoughts that we would have to think in order to have the feelings that we want to feel?

 

So it's very important to emphasize that our thoughts are the only thing that creates our feelings. We are not taught this. In fact, we are taught the opposite. We are taught that you are able to “hurt my feelings”, that my child can “make me angry”, or that maybe “we shouldn't do something that would upset someone else.” 

 

In fact, I went to therapy where they told my husband and I to each make a list of things that we would like the other person to do for each of us to be happy. Now ultimately, I'm the only person who could make myself happy, because my happiness is a feeling that comes from my thoughts. Now someone could have hurt you physically. Or you could have a physical sensation which arises from your body that's different than a feeling or an emotion. 

 

So a physical sensation could be something like hunger or fatigue. But again, those could also be emotions that you're feeling you could feel hunger when you're bored or you could feel fatigue because you're thinking a thought about not getting enough sleep, but generally, physical sensations arise from the body, and emotions or feelings come from your thoughts. Now thoughts also can cause pain. So body sensations can cause pain. For example, the nerve endings in your fingertip could react if you got a paper cut, and you do have a lot of nerve endings in your fingertip. 

 

The pain signal goes from the nerve to the spinal cord. At the spinal cord, there's a gate control action, where the nerve signal either could be amplified or dampened or completely blocked. If the pain signal does continue to go up the spinal cord, then one of the places it can go is the thalamus in the brain. 

 

The thalamus is where we process and perceive pain. And it sends signals to several other parts of the brain, including touch, emotion, physical reaction or memory. So the pain we feel can be modified by chemical signals in the spinal cord or brain. 

 

I can remember a distinct example of a pain signal being modified by external circumstances that were going on. I was having some knee pain when I was in high school and playing

Soccer.  And I remember thinking how cool it was that when I was actually playing and I was intense, and I was in the game probably had a lot of adrenaline and endorphins going on, and I did not even feel my knee pain at all. And then as soon as my name got called for me to come on The field and I started walking off the field no longer running and in the game and my mind switched, I immediately felt the pain in my knee return. 

 

Now a lot of times people who have chronic pain will also have anxiety about their pain, they might worry that something will hurt if they do it. They might worry about the future, what it will look like when they will get better?  Or if they will get better? 

 

Anxiety can amplify the pain. So those with higher levels of anxiety are more likely to have chronic pain.  Anxiety about the future can trigger the fight or flight response. 

 

Our brain has a difficult time distinguishing between something that we're just thinking of, and actually doing it as an action. There was a study about this in Cincinnati where they had some people going to the gym to work on increasing their bicep strength, and the other group of people just sat on the couch. Imagine themselves doing bicep curl exercises for the same amount of time. So the people who went to the gym increase their bicep strength by 30%. But the people who just sat and envisioned themselves activating their muscles and didn't actually go to the gym still increase their bicep strength by 15%. 

 

So again, our thoughts are very powerful in creating our reality in a chemical physical way. Thoughts can influence pain levels. dr. John Sarno says in Divided Mind that many of his patients had increased pain levels that they reported after receiving a diagnosis

 

In Letting Go, Dr. David Hawkins talks about schizo phrenic patients of his that had different physical ailments depending on the personality that they were projecting. Sometimes allergies or nearsightedness would be in only one of the personalities Pain is generally considered a dangerous signal to our body. 

 

It may be our brain trying to protect ourselves from a perceived threat, or when something is healing. I also want to teach you how pain can be a signal to check in mentally, and how cleaning up our thinking can start healing our pain. 

 

The last very important fact about thoughts is that ultimately they create our results. 

 

I had this quote written down from Buddha. Hopefully it's really from him, I might have gotten the quote from the internet. But,”all that we are is a result of what we have thought,”- Buddha. 

 

And I like this quote too, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “We become what we think about all day long.” 

 

So we've talked about how our thoughts create our emotions which are vibrations, and then what these emotions do is cause us to act. I may see a commercial of an icy cold drink and think “I want that” or “I'm thirsty.” And then I take the action of going to get a drink. 

 

When I'm feeling the feeling of shame, I may want to hide from people and not engage. So sometimes it's more of an inaction instead of an action. 

 

And then the actions that we take are what determine our results. 

 

So keep in mind that the brain, the reticular, activating system, always wants to prove itself, right. So let's take the example of being invited to a party where I don't know many people. And my thought is that if I act weird, then people won't like me. And the feeling that that creates with me is worry. 

 

So if I'm going to that party thinking that thought, having the feeling of worry, then the actions that I might take might be more quiet. I might not talk to people as much as I normally would. Or maybe I would even try to draw more attention to myself, or say things that I think people want to hear or not act like myself. 

 

The result is I end up acting weird or not like myself, because I was worried that people wouldn't like me. And then I end up acting in a way that's not really in character with myself anyway. So I've kind of set myself up to fail. If they do like me, it's not even the real version of me that they're liking. And if they don't like this weird acting version of me, then I can validate that belief that if I act weird, people won't like me. 

 

So overall, I hope that this shows to you a little bit more through the research and examples of how powerful our thoughts can be. And what I want to challenge you to do is to stop any kind of the self talk that's negative, whether you're saying it out loud about yourself or whether you're saying it to yourself in your head. There's really no upside to the negative self talk. And all it does is create negative feelings and they create negative actions and results.

Thank you so much for listening.  I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me.  Please be sure and subscribe, and leave a review. And of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.

 

Episode #1- Understanding the Brain

Start understanding the power of your brain and thoughts.  Learn something new to help be more mindful and compassionate.

 

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Transcript: 

 

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind-Episode One, Understanding the Brain. 

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind. 

 

Hello, I want to talk today about the brain. Some things I learned about the brain over the last few years that have really changed my life.  The way I look at myself, my thoughts and the power that I have in my life that I've gained by learning how to upgrade my brain and become more mindful. 

 

So first, I want you to think about your brain as an organ in your body. So just like your heart pumps, blood and your lungs exchange oxygen and breathe. Your brain has a function, one of its functions is to produce thoughts.

 

You do produce 60 to 70,000 thoughts a day. So the brain constantly has this little hum of thoughts going on in the background. Now these thoughts help us with survival. And that's what the brain has evolved to do. And that's why some of our thoughts might be a little extreme, and maybe we think they're even out of character.  We may have judgments about our thoughts. 

 

We may think that we want to go punch someone in the face sometimes if we think they've done something to upset us or they deserve it. We may wish as a parent that we'd never had children, and that can sometimes be a very shameful or horrifying thought for parents. Why am I having this thought, I love my children?  But there could still be the thought that you wish you never had kids, or how much better your life would be without those obligations. 

 

And then we may have judgment about ourselves or about others.  We may constantly be looking around as we go throughout life, with some kind of judgments about what we see and how others could be better, or usually how ourselves could be different or better or more worthy. 

 

It's like we have this constant stream of criticism that goes on in our brain. Again it's developed, if you look at it in a survival context, to help our species advance- to keep us safe within our tribe, maybe not to upset people.  Or to you know, not go punch someone could enhance our survival. 

 

So just because we have all of these thoughts doesn't mean we need to necessarily have judgments about them. It means that our brain is working, it's doing what is supposed to do what it has evolved to do. And it is just like your heart continually pumping and your lungs breathing.  Your brain is thinking. 

 

I've heard the average person speaks to themselves, an average of 300 to 1000 words per minute. So again, that brain chatter that's just constantly going is normal in all of our brains.

 

One thing I want to teach you is how to hack into your brain and upgrade your brain from this default setting of thoughts that just automatically flow, to purposeful conscious thinking.  And how that affects the results in our life and our health. 

 

Our brain wants to be efficient. Joe Dispenza says that by the age of 30, about 90% of our thoughts are thoughts that are repeated from day to day. They are things that we think over and over again, and seem to almost do subconsciously or automatically.  It's like our thoughts are thinking us!

 

 90% of the time, our thoughts are thinking us. 

 

The brain is made up of nerve cells that create electrical impulses when there's a thought. So when you think of a thought occurring in your brain, there are neurons or nerve cells that fire and those nerve cells can connect to other nerve cells.  They can travel to different parts of the body sending signals, and eventually at the result, there are neurotransmitters released. So those might be neuro peptides or hormones. Things like dopamine or cortisol. 

 

And those neurotransmitters create feelings, vibrations in our body. So there are these groups of neurons that are near each other. And when thoughts that we think over and over again, are activated, when these neuronal cells that are close to each other are activated, they have a tendency to also get activated. 

 

They become these neuronal pathways of groups of neurons that wire and fire together. So imagining this average 30 year old that has 90% of their thoughts, that are things that they think continuously and repeat. There are large portions of their brain that are being activated, lots of neurons that have connections with each other, and make this fast connection that's very efficient.  We almost don't have to even think about it. 

 

There might be some beliefs that we have about getting validation from pleasing other people, that the way that we prove our worthiness is by other people accepting us.  And that we might cognitively start to change and understand that maybe that's not true. But there's part of us that just keeps going back to these same patterns or these same experiences.

 

That can be almost like well-worn dirt road that just has grooves that it's very easy for the wheel to slip back into - even if you start to climb out of that groove a little bit. So I'm telling you this because we all have some basic thoughts or beliefs (which are thoughts that we think over and over again).  And some of them might not be serving us. 

 

I know for a long time, I've had a belief that I have too much to do. I'm very busy. I don't have time to do everything. And when I would think that thought over and over, I would get very stressed out, I would want to completely do nothing, I would feel overwhelmed and want to escape. 

 

Often it would lead to less productivity. And then a reaffirmation that I truly could not get everything done that I needed to, as evidenced by the fact that I scrolled Facebook for two hours and didn't get the things done that I needed to. So there was a lot involved in changing that thought for me that “I was too busy” or “I would not have enough time.”

 

I imagine in my brain that there were many, many neurons that had made these connections and I had been thinking this thought for several decades and continually finding evidence to prove that thought.  One of the parts of our brain called the reticular activating system is actually designed just to basically prove our own thoughts true. It's like a filter that helps us see evidence of things that we already believe. 

 

So if I do have the thought that I'm very busy, my reticular activating system does a great job of showing me my to do list and thinking of things, other things that I need to do. Maybe some urgent things that are coming up. All of this validates that thought that I have too much to do. 

 

You may notice people that believe that the world is a horrible place can always find examples on the news or someone they've known that has done horrible things and justify that statement. But if you believe that the world is a beautiful place full of love, there are also examples that you can find that prove that.

 

This can also be called the confirmation bias, where we tend to seek out information that confirms what we already believe. And not only does our brain get very good at thinking the same thoughts over and over.  We also with every thought are producing neurotransmitters in our body that create feelings. So for example, if we're stressed, we may have the neurotransmitter cortisol that's released to our cells that would help us activate fight or flight. In the short term, this hormone can make our senses sharper, and keep our brain very active and laser focused. But what can happen is these cells receiving the cortisol hormone get used to having a certain amount. It's like the homeostasis or resting level of the cell has a certain amount that it's used to and when that depletes, it triggers the brain to look for more things to be stressed about so that the cells can have that hormone release to make it feel more comfortable or in its normal resting state. 

 

So in this way, we can actually become addicted to emotions. We can on the cellular level, become addicted to anger or judgment, or shame. I think you can probably think of someone in your life who is always having one crisis or another, or someone who is always angry about something, feeling unjust, or feeling like a victim. And you can think now that their brain is just working efficiently. The cells are just used to a certain amount of this hormone or neurotransmitter and look at it more on a biological level that everything's working as it's supposed to. 

 

Like I've said before, it’s kind of like a computer and it's default settings before you've done any of the upgrades. 

 

So if you can think of our brain like levels, it has levels almost like a house has a basement, perhaps, and a first floor. And so that basement of the brain, the very first primal layer would be the brainstem. And that area is responsible for some of the very basic functions like breathing, or like your heartbeat, also digestion and reproduction,

things that are basic for survival.  Sometimes this is called the lizard brain or the reptilian brain.

 

Then above that there is the cerebellum, which is an area that is responsible for movement and for what's called procedural memory. So some thing that you've done many, many times, like pouring a glass of water, or driving or riding a bike

might be information that's stored in your cerebellum in addition to some other things. 

 

Of course, this is a very simplistic view, and I'm just describing it as an analogy for you to see, the more primitive parts of the brain are lower. And then the next level would be your emotional center- your limbic system. In the limbic system, in that part of the brain, there is the amygdala, which is kind of like a command center for all of your emotions- for your primary reactions like fear, the fight or flight.  And it is one of the most interconnected parts of the brain because it connects the lower brainstem with the area above it, which is the prefrontal cortex. 

 

The prefrontal cortex is like the top floor of the building. It is the rational part of the brain, the conscious part of the brain. It's the part that also processes some fear. But in a more cognisant kind of way, and can actually kind of process and control fear. It's the part that can essentially time travel, thinking of things in the future, maybe things we should be afraid of, or worry about in the future. Thinking about things in the past that we might regret, or feel guilt or shame about.  Activating this part of the brain can even override some of those signals sent out by the amygdala and the limbic system. 

 

So say, if you have a huge fear of speaking in front of a large number of people, you may with your prefrontal cortex be able to remind yourself that you're not actually in mortal danger, that this has no impact on your survival. You're not being chased by a tiger even though you may feel the same type of fear because those same hormones are being released. And so the more we understand about our prefrontal cortex and how to use our brain, the better we can control ourselves in situations of stress, and the more mindful we can become about getting the results we want in our life. 

 

And of course, we are going to talk a lot about using our brains to help with healing and with achieving health. 

 

So much focus has been placed in our society, on the physical aspect of our bodies and our health, the physiological components, but not really any of the mental or emotional or spiritual components of our bodies and how it relates to our pain and our health. 

 

Now one of the worst things for our health is when we are continually living in survival mode. So these hormones and neurotransmitters that are made to help us outrun a predator or lift a car off of a child are just designed to be for a very short term use. But because of the way our brains have been programmed for survival, and because there really aren't every day type of events that cause us mortal peril, usually we're not being chased by predators. Our brain now perceives things like someone saying that they don't like us as a threat to our survival- we could be eliminated from our tribe, which is very dangerous. 

 

We have a strong need for approval from others in this survival sense. 

 

I know when I always thought that I did not have enough time and I would never get everything done that I needed to, I created a sense of stress for myself that was continual. And I know that affected my health and my sleep at night. 

 

Just like our phones sometimes need to be powered down. We're not meant to go at this fast speed with so much stress for so long.

 

So much of the stress that we have nowadays we place on ourselves, and we worry about what other people think. Or we worry if we are just good enough generally as a person.  Not good enough at playing the piano or good enough at cleaning the toilet, but just that we're not good enough in general.  We may have trauma from our past that is unresolved that leads to thought patterns about needing to feel safe or needing to feel in control. 

 

The last little fact I want you to think about with your brain is that we are born with the genetic material that we inherited from our parents. So half from our mom half from our dad.  Joe Dispenza talks about how even things like anger or judgment or shame

can be inherited, it can be in our DNA that we're born with. 

 

I think in my own family, I have many generations of very religious, devout people, who I think also part of their DNA probably has tendencies towards shame, guilt, worry, and judgment. But as we know, the environment also plays a role. We do not develop purely from our genetics but also from the outside influence that we live in. But think about where we go when we are born, who we live with. It's these same people that we've inherited this genetic makeup from. 

 

So there are patterns that you may have seen as a child Then as an adult, you find yourself doing. Again, it's nothing to be angry about. It's just something to understand. It means your brain is working. 

 

The best news I have for you is that our brain is plastic. So basically, it is always changing. Even as we age, we are still able to make new connections, or get rid of old connections to basically rewire our brain. Even in neuroscience, they're finding out that they're able, we are able as humans to switch on or off different genes in our DNA.

 

So the first thing we need to do in this process is start understanding our brain and looking at our thoughts.  So how do we start to work on our thoughts?

 

I know when I first learned about doing any kind of thought work, I realized what a negative person I was, and I never had thought about myself as a negative person. But one of the main techniques that you can use, look at your own mind is actually through journaling. 

 

So if you're trying to just consciously monitor the thoughts that are going through your head, just remember that what actually makes it up to your consciousness is only a portion of the actual thoughts, a number of thoughts that are created by your brain each day. It's really not efficient to just think about your own thoughts and analyze and work from that place. 

 

Have you ever started to describe something to someone that sounds really good in your head, and when you actually put words to it and say it out loud? It kind of sounds ridiculous. So the same thing can happen with thoughts in your head that are not examined. And the best way that I know is to start journaling.  To start to get those

those real core thoughts and beliefs and things that may even sound a little bit silly when you put them down on paper, or maybe even sound horrifying.  You know, maybe it's something that you don't want to admit to yourself. 

 

But all of these little, dark, repressed, undiscovered spots are things that are very beneficial to explore and examine, and to not fear.  Because a lot of times, like I said, once you put them down on paper, once you say them out loud, you realize that they lose their power. 

 

So for example, when I first started journaling and realizing that one of my main beliefs in life was that I didn't have enough time to get things done. I started to also realize the power that I placed on getting things done, that I had a lot of beliefs about my value as a person being wrapped up in what I got done. Questioning the belief that I had to get certain things done in order to be a valuable person. Because I know that I'm 100% valuable and worthy just by nature of being a person here on the earth, I'm worthy of love, just as everyone else here is. 

 

And when I started to realize that maybe I didn't have to get certain things done, and that I had a choice in what I could get done or not. It took a lot of the pressure off of me thinking that there were just these innumerable amount of things that I would never be able to accomplish. 

 

Another example could be journaling about something that bothers you that someone does, maybe it's arriving late. So if you're thinking that this person is arriving late, and that means that they don't respect you, or that they don't love you enough, or that they don't value you as a person, then that may cause certain feelings. with you because of the thoughts that you're having. But if you had thoughts about that the scenario, the same scenario of someone coming late as more reflection on that person.  Maybe they have some time management issues, or maybe they're struggling with things in their own life, and how that is actually more a reflection of them, not of their love for you, or whether or not you're worthy of love. 

 

Now, I'm the kind of person that I wouldn't say I run late all the time, because that isn't true. But I do run late quite a bit. And it's interesting because that general thought of I don't have enough time to get things done, plays into the fact that I sometimes run late. 

 

I noticed once when I got someplace early, that I felt very uncomfortable. I felt like I should be doing something that this was not a good use of my time to be sitting someplace early. And I also noticed that when I think I need to leave at a certain time, and maybe I have a few minutes before that time comes, I will think, Okay, let me just throw in some laundry, or start a conversation with the kids, or I'm trying to use that last little bit of time to make myself feel more worthy, right. 

 

This is my unexamined mind before I started examining these things. But me arriving late somewhere, really had nothing to do with who I was meeting or where I was going. But it had everything to do with me, trying to fit in something else to make myself feel a little bit better about myself, and more lovable or worthy.

 

Now as you start to watch your thoughts and you start to journal, definitely be compassionate with yourself. I learned this first when I very first started journaling and saw all of the negative things that I had to say about myself. And then I really started feeling worse because I thought what a horrible person I am. And so I just heaped a bunch of shame and guilt on top of this criticism of me that I already had going. 

 

So definitely try to be the most compassionate person that you can. And that was the main reason I wanted to record this first podcast is to teach you a little bit more about your brain about how it works normally, about these default settings that are basically programmed into our brain which help us survive. They're there for a reason. We don't have to be scared of it. We don't have to avoid it. But the more that we understand it, the more that we can change our lives in a positive way and live on purpose. And instead of having our thoughts think us we can think our thoughts, and create our reality.

 

So I want to challenge you to start journaling. Make it a practice, spend 5 to 10 minutes in the morning, or in the evening before you go to bed reviewing your day, but get some thoughts down on paper. start the process, make it a habit. And don't be critical of yourself. Write as if you're uncensored. If you need to afterwards, destroy the paper, tear it up or burn it. But definitely don't filter your writing as if you're worried about someone finding it and reading it. You should try to write things that you would be a little horrified maybe that if people found out.  

 

This is the first step in upgrading your brain, becoming the compassionate watcher of your thoughts, and especially delving into those thoughts through journaling. 

 

Thank you so much. much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And of course be sure and share this podcast with someone you know that wants an Unstoppable Body and Mind.