Latest / How To Love Yourself No Matter What / S2 E2. You Don’t Need to Calm Down. Your Brain Needs a Different Job.

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S2 E2. You Don’t Need to Calm Down. Your Brain Needs a Different Job. · How To Love Yourself No Matter What

• 0:00
  Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.
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  I'm a certified life coach.
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  But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.
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  Let's go.
• 0:16
  Hello, my beautiful friend.
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  How are we today?
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  I have a topic today that I think is going to really help you, and it's something that I work on with my clients often the time, and it's really a concept that I think gets missed by a lot
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  of the mental health community, and it's giving your brain a different job to do.
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  Now, a lot of people might talk about that and think of it from the standpoint of you need to think more positively or we need to change the way you think.
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  And that's not really how I think about this.
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  How I think about this is that there is the way that your brain operates, and that many of the people that come to me, they come to me because they're feeling anxious, because they're overthinking, because the genuine experience
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  inside of their own head is so uncomfortable.
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  And what I will say to you is that there are people in this world that don't have a voice in their head.
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  And I know that if you listen to this podcast, it's probably not you.
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  Okay.
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  But I was even talking to my husband the other day, and he was saying to me, well, first of all, I was telling him that there is a lot of people that are surprised to learn that people don't
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  have an inner narrator.
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  And he just looked at me like I grew three heads.
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  And I was like, yeah, I know you don't have one, because he legitimately doesn't.
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  And he was shocked to find out there's people that have somebody talking inside of their own head.
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  And it's just so fascinating to me how there's two kinds of people in this world, and one has a narrator and one doesn't.
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  And we both exist in the world, and a lot of times we're married to each other.
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  This is the fun part.
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  But I think also what is really fun to think about is how we can approach our brain differently to create a different result.
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  So if you are the kind of person that is experiencing overthinking, if you are the kind of person that is experiencing perpetual anxiety, then this message is really and truly going to be for you.
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  What we sometimes believe is that we have so much going on, we can't put any more on our plate.
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  And I have this a lot with clients where they'll come to me and they'll tell me all the stuff they have going on.
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  And there is a shit ton of stuff going on, there's no doubt.
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  But their brain is also actively problem solving multiple things all the time.
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  So the brain is problem solving what's going on in the relationships, what's going on with the kids, what's going on with finances, what's going on with work, what's going on with extended family, what's going on with the house,
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  what's going on with retirement, what's going on with et cetera, et cetera.
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  Yes.
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  And so our brain just gets really locked into that and it gets very focused on solving problems.
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  And there's something you need to know about your brain, which is that it creates infinite problems.
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  And it's because of how our survival brain works.
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  If you think about it, our survival brain exists and it's really thinking about how to keep you safe, how to conserve energy, how to decrease pain, how to increase pleasure.
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  That is how your survival brain works.
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  But in a lot of ways, it's actually pretty dysfunctional because there isn't actually a lot physically wrong with your life from a survival standpoint, as a rule.
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  So you're living in a home with heat and possibly air conditioning, you have enough food to eat, you are legitimately safe in your environment.
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  And that means that your brain is searching for danger, but it's not finding that kind of danger, because that kind of danger doesn't exist.
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  So instead it starts finding other danger to focus on.
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  So the dirty look that your husband gave you the other day, the fact that your kids didn't respond to your text message, the fact that your boss seemed like he was mad at you at work the other day,
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  it starts to focus on things like that.
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  And it will also start delving into the past, like things that you did last year, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago.
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  It starts to find problems in that, and then it starts thinking about what could go wrong in the future.
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  What if this happens?
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  What if that happens?
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  What if this goes on?
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  And this is just how our brain really operates.
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  So knowing that's the fact, when our brain is operating in that way, it can be really tempting to first of all believe that we need to take everything off our plate.
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  And the reality is we can't.
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  There is no version of taking everything off your plate.
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  I think all of us could agree that as our lives, as we get older, our lives actually get more complex.
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  And that complexity is the richness of our life.
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  It's not like we want to give up a lot of the pieces in our life.
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  We don't want to give up our kids as a rule.
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  We don't want to give up our friends.
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  We want these people to be a part of our life and we want these things to be in our life.
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  And even if you think about planning a really great trip, that's also adding complexity.
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  So we want these things in our life.
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  However, the brain is going to go and try to find problems with it.
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  And it will always find problems.
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  There are always problems.
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  The relationship is never perfect, the job is never perfect, the life is never perfect.
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  This is always true.
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  And yet it can start to become very true for us that the things that we're thinking about are the truth.
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  And I will see this.
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  When people consume media, they'll say things to me like, oh, the world is going to hell and the world has more crime than ever before.
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  Fascinatingly enough, the world actually has less crime than ever before.
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  And if you look at the statistics, it doesn't back up the standpoint of, oh, things are more dangerous now.
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  They're not.
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  The stats don't show that, they show the reverse.
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  But what's been brought to our attention, what's been put in front of us as showing as being important has gone up.
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  Our input has gone up.
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  We have way more access to all the bad things that are going on in the world.
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  And so our brain starts to flag that as something that's problematic, even if it doesn't actually affect our day to day life.
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  And we get into this process and we get into this way of thinking and there's lots of reasons for it, partially because your nervous system is dysregulated, partially because you don't know what to do with your feelings.
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  But the piece that I want to talk about today is this idea of giving your brain a better job to do.
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  Because if we just let our brain do the job that it wants to do, it is going to create results that we don't necessarily want.
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  And so if we are feeling dysregulated and we are having a hard time emotionally, and then we just let our brain go do whatever it wants to do and think about whatever it wants to think about, it's going
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  to be hypervigilant of what it sees as being dangerous or bad, and it will actually start thinking about that more and more and it will get very much out of balance.
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  So then while that's happening, while we have this out of balance, it creates More of it.
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  It starts to create this vortex of thinking that starts you down this path of perpetual overthinking and anxiety.
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  So when I'm talking to you about giving your brain a better job to do, part of the work that I do with my clients is really understanding and establishing that we don't need to solve all of this to
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  be able to be okay, to find peace, to find clarity, to be able to feel relaxed.
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  All of these things don't need to be solved, but we need to have our brain put it down.
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  We need our brain to let go of some of this shit, at least for a little while.
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  We want our brain to be able to rest.
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  So what's counterintuitive is thinking, oh, I need to figure out how to relax and meditate and da, da, da.
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  And what I'm gonna say to you is I have this very counterintuitive approach that is very effective, which is this.
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  Your brain loves to work.
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  You have a working brain, you have a workhorse brain.
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  This brain actually needs to work.
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  So what we need to do is give it better jobs to do in order to give it better jobs to do.
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  It's not that we need to think the right thing or think the right way.
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  What I will say to you is we can just simply give it something hard to do.
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  So sometimes this can be effort based, right?
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  When I go to the gym and I lift heavy weights, that is an effort based job.
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  There will come a point in that workout where I need my brain to focus on not dropping things and really focus on keeping myself in the workout and doing the really hard thing.
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  This is a great thing for your brain.
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  It's a wonderful hard job for your brain to do.
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  When your brain does that hard job, it releases all the other jobs.
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  Because it releases all the other jobs.
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  You get a break, you get a rest from those jobs.
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  So it is a reset of sorts that goes on in your brain.
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  This is a really effective approach.
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  How else can we do it?
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  Well, that's why I figure skate as an adult, because as an adult figure skater, it is giving my brain another job to do.
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  In fact, it's giving my brain a lot of jobs to do.
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  It has to think about staying upright on skates, but also my program and the jumps I want to do and the spins I want to do and hold all of my programs together and compete and go out and
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  do the thing that I want to do in an artistic way.
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  It is busy.
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  So when my brain is busy like that, it lets go of everything else that it wants to think about.
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  We can do this in entrepreneurship, we can do this at our jobs.
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  It doesn't need to be necessarily physical.
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  One thing that I'm going to be doing this fall is learning how to play the guitar.
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  It's always something I've wanted to do.
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  It's hard.
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  But we need to give our brain hard things to do that don't have anything to do with anything.
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  So it needs to be something that doesn't have anything to do with your kids or your husband or your living.
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  We want to be able to give our brain hard jobs to do that are fun, creative, interesting, physical, exciting.
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  These are things that you can add into your day to day life that will allow you to have rest.
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  So if we think about our brain and it being in that overworked, over hustle, painful, constant state, what I want you to take away from this podcast is that the way through that is to give your brain different
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  jobs to do.
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  If we give it those jobs to do, it can release the jobs that it doesn't need to do that actually, instead of creating value, it's creating more problems, it's creating hypervigilance.
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  It's creating a situation where you're thinking about something that thinking about it isn't going to solve it anyways.
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  And so if we can do this work, give your brain a hard job to do, we can then be more regulated, we can have more logic available to us, and we can approach the problem from a different place.
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  Now, this is part of an entire process that I teach.
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  And I, I know that I invited you to it last week, but I want to invite you again because right now I am doing a live class every week called Stop Overthinking.
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  And if you register for this class, I'm going to talk to you about this along with all of the other different components that go into stopping overthinking and stopping that anxious looping.
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  So all you have to do is go to amandahess CA Overthink.
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  You can also go to the Show Notes.
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  I'll put the link there.
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  But go register for this class.
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  I'd love for you to be live.
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  You're going to have the best experience if you come live.
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  But even if you don't, you will get the recording and it is going to give you every piece of this process so that you can use it in a way you understand how to implement it so that you
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  can get through that overthinking part and move into the thriving part of your life, which is what I want for you.
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  And I know you want it for yourself.
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  So for today though, I want you to think about one thing you could get your brain to do.
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  That's hard.
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  That has nothing to do with anything else.
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  And go and prioritize it and get it done and experiment with it and see what happens.
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  All right, my friends, that's it for now.
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  I hope you have the most incredible week and I will see her next time.
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  Bye for now.
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  Thanks so much for listening today.
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  If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.
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  It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.
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  I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.
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  Until then, take care friend.