BSB Ep 73
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite Sized Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I want to start the show off with telling you about this amazing quote I saw on a post about finances. So here was the blurb or quote," Validation is the most expensive form of addiction". I was so fascinated by that because the author went on to talk about the financial ramifications of someone who's addicted to validation. They might overspend on designer clothes and luxury bags or trying to keep up with the Joneses in order to feel like they belong. So my brain took that and spun it in a way to talk about mental/emotional health and validation.
Why do we do that? Why do we have a need for others to externally validate us in order to feel [00:01:00] better about ourselves? Strange. Right? And if you've opened social media at all, then you can see it. Influencer culture exploded in the last 10 years and even elementary school or middle schoolers were recently polled about what jobs they wanted to have when they grew up, and across the board, the most popular answers were influencer, YouTube influencer, YouTube content creator, because the kids are seeing being popular and likes equal validation, and that gives you this dopamine hit and it makes you feel good. So why do we want to be seen, to be heard, to be validated and accepted? It's a basic human need. If you've ever heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, if you haven't give it a quick Google, it's amazing. But it's this pyramid that talks about what we [00:02:00] really need as a human being for ultimate fulfillment, if you will. The first two levels of the triangle are about safety. So the bottom level are things that we need physiologically for safety and survival. We need food, we need water, we need shelter. Then it moves up a level and it's still about survival. But it's more about the emotional needs of survival. We wanna feel safe, we wanna have a safe environment.
We wanna mate, we want a tribe. And then it moves up a level to love and belonging. We have this psychological need to be loved, accepted, belong to that tribe. Because if these two levels feed off of each other, and in the three brain system you learn this, you have the emotional brain and the survival brain, and the emotional brain is like your subconscious.
It's your emotional needs. It's that desire to be [00:03:00] loved, to be heard, to be seen, to feel like you fit in and belong. And then the survival is the most dominant piece because. Its primary job is to keep us alive, and that's a pretty big job. So those two brains end up talking to each other and if the emotional brain says "uhoh, I think someone doesn't like me",
it feeds that information to the survival brain and that survival brain hits the red alert button that says Uhoh. If they don't like you, then you're gonna be outcast from the tribe. And if you're outcast from the tribe, you're gonna be alone. And if you're alone, then you're odds of survival decrease. So you're on the road to certain death.
So how do we fix that? You better make sure you do whatever it takes to stay a part of the tribe. Tricky, right? And this is all going on underneath the surface in your subconscious, your unconscious brains. [00:04:00] Meanwhile, your poor little conscious brain is going, uh, you know, maybe I do need this bag, but you're not quite sure why.
Your subconscious can override your logic. And marketers know this. They know that we purchase first from emotional reasons, and second, we will bring logic into justify our purchase. So the ads, the content creation a lot of people are doing is to push the buttons of that system. But when it comes to validation, it can compromise our own value system and we can be easily swayed to try to fit in.
Recent studies have shown that the pain of rejection, so that emotional pain, the participants ranked it equally as high, if not painful, as actual physical pain. I. In other words, a lot of people think and feel that the [00:05:00] emotional pain of not belonging, not having that validation is akin to physical pain.
And this is why things like heartbreak or not fitting in, or if you're little, the kids at school didn't wanna play with you. It hurts so bad. And when we think about in a neuroscience way, what we need to be happy, it's this chemical cocktail. We have neurotransmitters, hormones, things like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, our bonding chemicals and endorphins that make us happy.
And this little chemical cocktail, depending on our actions and our thoughts, we get little doses of that chemical cocktail. And the thought of not fitting in. You don't get your happy mix. So we wanna try to get that dopamine, that serotonin, that oxytocin, that bonding type stuff in order to feel happy.
And your brain is hardwired to take [00:06:00] you away from pain and towards pleasure. But remember, we're taking the conscious brain out of it. So when you think you have a strategic plan to buy that bag and then everyone will love you. I mean, it sounds maybe kind of sorta logical, but really you're trying to get that happy cocktail.
That Happy chemical cocktail mix. But what ends up happening in the long run is that in order to fit in or what you think you need to do to fit in, you can be easily swayed by others. And studies have also shown if you don't have a strong sense of self, if you don't know your values, if you're not sure of your own personal identity, then there is this mechanism in our brain that we can be easily swayed by a more confident person in the room. So if you are indecisive as part of a survival mechanism, you'll go along with a crowd, but the crowd may not be taking you in places that you really want to [00:07:00] go. So one day you wake up and realize that the things that were supposed to make you happy actually don't make you happy at all.
And you have this void, this unhappy feeling within you, and you keep telling yourself, I'm doing the right things. I have friends. Even though there are low quality, they're still somebody. And you fall into this trap of somebody's better than nobody, right? And if you find yourself in that place, you know that your survival, brain has hijacked your logic because the survival brain will tell you somebody's better than nobody.
It'll tell you that being alone is the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Meanwhile, a lot of people are waking up to the fact that I would rather be happy alone than unhappy because I've got the wrong people around me. And this is what self-empowerment really is. It's about accepting yourself, [00:08:00] being really confident and really sure about your identity, about your values, about your own trajectory in life, and the ability to override the subconscious mechanism that says, if you lose this tribe, there are no other tribes available to you because that, my friends, is a great big fat lie.
Someone out there is going to love who you actually are. Not your curated social media self, not the self that you think expensive bags and designer clothes make you if you're really a jeans and t-shirts kind of person, right? So really the more you tune into your own authenticity, that's where your magic is.
But you have to believe that. And you also have to believe that there are people out there for you, because if you don't, you're gonna be stuck in that [00:09:00] swirl of rejection equals pain, and you're gonna do anything possible to avoid that pain. But then down the line, you create a different kind of pain and you're still unhappy.
You are the only one that is in charge of you. You get to make all the rules about what you're looking for in life, but I just wanna make you aware, that validation is a very expensive form of addiction, and it might be leading you astray from where you want to be. It might be causing you to charge up things, get into debt.
It might be asking you to compromise your own value system to hang out with friends or partners that are super toxic for you. And you know it that every day it just dims your light. But one day I know that you're gonna wake up and you're gonna go, this is not for me. I'm ready to be me and find me.
[00:10:00] And when you find yourself in that place, but you need a little bit of support, then this is where I can jump in to help. Through my program, the Bespoke Brain System, we help you get into the pieces of who you really are, who you want to be, and where you'd like to go. Meanwhile, we get rid of the resistance sabotages and internal conflicts that are keeping you from that path.
And we do that in the course of a 12 week program. So if you'd like to learn more about that or book a complimentary a phone consultation, head over to aprildarley.com. And there's another resource you might be interested in if you are trying to figure out what your actual values are. It may sound strange, but a lot of people know their company's values, but they don't really take the time to slow down and figure out what their own are. But your values are your compass, my friend. They help you make these aligned decisions. They help the world [00:11:00] make sense so that you don't let shiny object syndrome get you off path. So over on the shop tab at aprildarley.com, I do have a resource you can purchase.
It's called the Values Alignment Workbook. So check that out as well. And that'll give you a quick and easy jumpstart to figuring out where you're not aligned with your values, what your values actually are, and how you can course correct to get yourself on the right path in a accordance to your personal values.
. Until next week, my friends, I'll see you.
