BSB Ep 63
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bitesize Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host April Darley, and I've got a question for the Gen X listeners out there. Do you remember the word chillax? It was a combination of chill and relax, just chillax. I read an article recently about this mashup that's starting to gain more popularity, and it's called stress laxing.
So stress. And relaxing, the very opposite of chillax. Why do some people have trouble relaxing? Why is that painful for them? Let me know if this is you. When you go to relax, suddenly you get anxious. You get jittery. You start multitasking. Or you'll lay out by a pool, you'll bring a book and you'll try your hardest to relax. You're really having to put in effort for it. But your mind won't stop thinking about the grocery list, the bills, it [00:01:00] won't turn off. Does that sound familiar? Stress laxing happens for, I think, a few different reasons. So because I'm the creator of this bespoke brain system, this is a three brain system.
It shows you how you think, act, feel on three different levels. It's a very intimate way to get a look at yourself and how you view the world. When it comes to relaxation, that's the foundational piece. Your survival brain or your unconscious is your default brain. It's our security system, our foundation, and it wants you to feel safe and comfortable, but it will get reactive if it feels that you're coming up against a threat.
That could be a real threat, like being chased by a tiger, or a thought, an emotion that makes you feel as if you're going to be unsafe in some way. This is called a perceived [00:02:00] threat. So even just a thought or a feeling is enough to activate your sympathetic nervous system to take over and create fight flight or freeze you might be thinking logically, why would I be in a fight for my survival if I'm just laying out by the pool? I see this sometimes with my clients that come to me with insomnia, because if you think about what sleep is, it's the ultimate relaxation. And somehow your brain, your survival brain, generally, has come to view relaxation as a threat.
Now, in some of my clients, I will uncover that that's because of learned behavior at home. Their parents had some sort of saying or belief that if you weren't constantly in motion, you were lazy. So they got conditioned subconsciously to believe that it's bad to be lazy and what is resting laziness when you have this kind of belief.
If that's a [00:03:00] belief that you've created subconsciously, your emotional brain or subconscious will feed that data down below to your security team, the unconscious or survival brain, which has now gotten the memo that says, if we relax, we're lazy. And if we're lazy, then our friends, family, the people in our lives are going to feel some kind of way about us.
And that way is not good. So we need to show everyone that we're not lazy. And we're going to do that by being constantly in motion. It sets you up. To be working, working, working. If you're not doing it physically, you're going to do it mentally. And this is why even when you're laying by the pool, you can't shut your brain off.
Because your subconscious has fed data to the unconscious that says a brain in motion or a body in motion means we don't rest because rest is [00:04:00] bad. Rest is lazy. If rest is bad, then if we do it, we're also bad. So let's just not do it. Do you see the wicked cycle that you can really get churned up in? And this, this is the sort of thing that I help my clients unwind.
Coming back to insomnia, when someone is having trouble sleeping, sometimes it's the subconscious unconscious cycle that's playing the background and your survival brain will get tripped and rewired that rest is also unsafe, not only for the reasons that I just mentioned, but when you are in a resting state.
Unconsciously, in a survival way, you're not aware, so you're vulnerable, and you're exposed. Sometimes, for some people, it's the subconscious being hyper alert to avoid danger. So we have to unwind that. Part of this bespoke brain process is to really uncover why you're doing what you're [00:05:00] doing. There are themes, there are patterns, but you're unique.
The way you have been conditioned, or naturally choose to think, feel, act, or believe, that's totally unique to you. No one else on the planet is going to do things exactly like you do. One of my jobs is to help you figure out the way you're doing things and the why that you're doing things so that you have this data that's now being fed up to the highest level of your consciousness which is the logic and the strategy piece. And this is the master switch to where it takes effort. But you can override your survival team. You can override your subconscious. And bring yourself back to a state of stabilization. Where you can now strategize how you would like to think, act, feel, and believe moving forward.
It's not hard. But sometimes you just need to be shown how to [00:06:00] do it and you need to be shown these little pitfalls that your brain can fall into easily so that you can walk around them and you don't step in the hole and fall down, right? Simple. It's easy. That's why I have this little tagline on my page, Simplify, Stabilize, Strategize, because that's what I want to help you do.
But one of the reasons that we get stuck in this churn of stress laxing is because some of us. feel subconsciously, it doesn't make sense, it's not logic, that if it's too easy, there's a trap. Smart people tend to make things complicated. And you might do it just because you're like, you don't trust it.
It can't be that easy. But there is a part of you that could be hardwired for struggle, especially if you grew up in a family or you came to have the belief that things only matter, if you work hard for them, so that will cause you to work harder, not smarter. And when you have that kind of subconscious belief, again, you're going to feed data down and your survival [00:07:00] brain is going to feel unsafe when things are simple or easy. Together, those two brains are going to sabotage you into making things hard, complicated. You'll reject the easy way of doing things and you may not even see it. It's that insidious. Another thing is that some people, especially when you do have the wiring of good things come only to those who work and you better work really hard,
is that some people make that hard pathway, they get this thrill of overcoming challenges. It's like a dopamine hit. The more challenges you overcome, the better you're going to feel. Until you hit a point of burnout. And you'll eventually hit that point. Where you have wired your nervous system to believe that everything's a struggle and to reject ease.
And that's going to show up in a lot of different ways in your life. It may show up in your money. It may show up in love. And you'll see this [00:08:00] when people say, , I never have enough money. I've got more bills than money, more money, more problems. Or you'll see it in love when people are I can never have a good date.
There's no good partners out there. I have tried everything. When people say these types of phrases, there's typically a subconscious belief of blockage, that there's some story created. Challenges have been created. So if you want to be productive, then what do you do? You overcome those challenges in a creative way.
Some people have trained their brain or wired their brain for hardship. And that hardship is how they achieve creativity. I know it sounds really messed up, but some people are more creative, the more challenged they are. So if that's their primary pathway for creativity, then if things were easy, there's this subconscious belief that they wouldn't be [00:09:00] creative anymore.
And if they weren't creative, then bad things would happen. It's going to feed that data down to your survival brain. That's going to say, well, we can't let that happen. So let's just manufacture more challenge. We're going to keep you as creative as possible. And the way that we do that is maximum hardship. It's so many different things all feeding together, and someone may not have all of these patterns in place, but it's not uncommon that you have a couple of these things. That are codependent on each other and unwinding these things helps expose them so that you can see the truth of what your brain is doing underneath It's like an iceberg, right?
All you see is the tip of the iceberg and there is this entire mountain underneath and when you start unraveling mindset work This is why it's so important to have a guide Because they can show you pathways, show you patterns, show you tendencies that you may not be aware of consciously because you're stuck in the churn. If that sounds like you, And you would like [00:10:00] a guide to take you out of the churn, then I would love to chat with you. I do complimentary phone consultations that are about 20 minutes long. You can do them anywhere in the world. And I would love to talk to you about some of the shenanigans that your brain might be pulling on you right now.
That's making your Life feel harder and how we can simplify, stabilize and strategize a new way of being for you. that is matching where you want to be. So if that sounds great, you can book that over at aprildarley. com. And until next week, I want you to chillax instead of stresslax? Drop a comment for me, and as always, if you could like, share, and subscribe. This podcast with your friends, I would be ever grateful. And if you know anyone who could benefit from a consultation, please send them my way. I love referrals and fast action [00:11:00] takers.
So until next week, my friend, chillax instead of stresslax. Goodbye.
