BSB Ep 82
===
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I had an interesting week with some of my corporate clients. There are a lot of things for us to be worried about in the world. There's war, there's hunger, there's poverty, AI anxiety, issues with job loss, or you're concerned about your field or industry disappearing in the next couple of years due to AI or just the world changing at large.
And sometimes it feels like a very scary place that we live in. So I found myself telling my clients more than one client this week, actually this quote, _"Worry is a misuse of the imagination." _And to my surprise, none of my clients were familiar with that quote and it's by Dan Zadra. So it really got me thinking.
If you're not aware of this quote [00:01:00] or you're not aware of this possibility, that worry is a misuse of your imagination and awareness is the first step to making any significant change in your life because it's really hard to solve a problem if you're not aware that a problem exists. So let's talk about the neuroscience between worry and imagination because it actually uses the same sorts of networks. It's the same basic machinery in your brain to both worry or imagine. Let's break it down. Have you ever found yourself sitting at your desk or in your room, and you begin this process of fantasizing? You're imagining, maybe you're imagining going on vacation or winning the lottery, or finally finding that perfect partner and it feels [00:02:00] so cozy and dreamy in the moment. But then you sort of snap out of it and go, _"Okay, I need to focus and concentrate and get my work done"._
So what just happened there? Whenever you have stimuli come in, we have two networks that go to work quickly to determine what are we gonna do here. You have something called the Salient Network and the Attention Network, and whenever they get exposed to a stimuli, that could be something you think, smell, read, see, hear something in your environment, et cetera.
Those two networks collectively determine your next steps. They're going to basically have a conversation between themselves and go, _"All right, when we respond, are we going to need higher thinking skills?"_ If the answer is yes, then they turn on something called your central executive [00:03:00] network. Think of it like the CEO of your brain, and what that does is it turns off something called the Default Mode Network, which is your dreamer.
And then you're able to access your higher functioning, your thinking skills, your executive function, and apply yourself to the task. Turning off your daydream, getting back to work, that's the pathway. That would be turning off imagination to prioritize the work at hand. Now what happens when fear comes into play?
We're gonna take us all the way back to the beginning. Some sort of stimuli comes in, and let's use the example of a deadline. So if you were daydreaming, you snapped yourself out of it, you were typing a little bit and you have the sudden thought, _"Ooh, what if I've wasted too _[00:04:00] _much time and I don't make my deadline?"_
Then that thought acts like a stimuli. The Salient Network, the Attention Network will detect that there is a threat involved. Then they will assess, does that threat require higher thinking skills? And if they determine no, because you're, it was just worry. You don't need higher thinking skills to worry.
So what it does, it activates the sympathetic nervous system. And then weirdly enough, the sympathetic nervous system turns back on your Default Mode Network, but instead of a pleasant daydream, it becomes a nightmare. The Default Mode Network then begins to show you fantasies that are all about fear, worry, chaos.
Your worst nightmares made real. [00:05:00] And then you get caught up in that loop. And when you are caught up in that loop, it turns off your Central Executive Network, which is your higher brain functioning. And this is why it can be hard to think yourself out of stress or anxiety, but there is a little window of time.
It's called your window of tolerance. It's these split second moments when these pieces of your brain are deciding what's the most appropriate action and is there a threat and how big is that threat? So through your work with your nervous system building resilience, really building your awareness skills and these coping skills. Learning how to work with these different areas of your brain is what's going to widen this window of tolerance or the window of decision, and it is possible for you to turn the worry [00:06:00] network off and turn back on the critical thinking Central Executive Network. And there are specific skills that I teach my clients on how to do that.
But awareness is a big piece and I usually will tell my clients that worry network, the Default Mode Network when it is in critical state because it becomes your inner critic to you. It really can flip-flop between best daydream ever and worst nightmare ever. So learning how to reengage your critical thinking skills, it does force your brain to switch networks or to switch states of being, to take you out of that threat network.
If you catch it number one, early enough and if you support it with the right kinds of [00:07:00] thoughts. And what we tend to do is let this worry network continue on for far too long. It's like a runaway train. And fortunately, unless you practice that awareness muscle, you're too late stopping the train. The train has picked up speed.
It's plowing along, and you really do spend minutes or hours stuck in this fear loop. And you don't have to do that my friends. I teach my clients the Bespoke Brain System, and in that system we talk about some concrete things that you can do to switch the brain networks over. And one of the things that I tell my clients to do is catch that worry thought as fast as you can and X it out.
If you're more of a visual person, you might see scary images in your mind. . I'm one of those people myself, and what [00:08:00] I will do is to imagine a big red X over that. Here's an example. I am terrified of snakes. I currently live in a rural area and I grew up in a rural area and my dad was always saying, _"watch your feet"_.
Watch where you walk, because there might be snakes hiding in the grass. So as a kid in Florida, that's kind of a survival skills that we got. It was "_Watch your feet"_, and that was such a lingering survival skill that years later when I moved to Alaska and I'm walking in the woods. I would still look at my feet.
But here's the funny thing, there are no snakes in Alaska. I should have been looking for bears. I should have had my eyes forward looking for bears. But my programming, my survival, threat detection programming, that sympathetic nervous system, I got conditioned for the danger is at your [00:09:00] feet, not up ahead when it comes to wildlife and walking in the woods.
So I developed this long story, but I developed this fear of snakes and sometimes my brain likes to remind me I'm afraid of snakes. When I go outside to take a walk in nature, it likes to pop up this vision of me getting bit by a snake. Not helpful in reality, but my survival brain thinks it's being super helpful.
, It wants me to know every piece of me to know that that is a possibility. Even if it's remote, it could still happen. I don't know what the odds are, but it could still happen. Just like getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery. There are some big odds there, but you've heard of people, it's happened to.
So my brain will give me this terrible image and it'll have the thought of, [00:10:00] you get snakebit, then you're X amount of miles from the hospital. It's X amount of dollars for that hospital bill. It's a painful recovery, and this is an example of the worry loop. Where the Salient Network, the Attention Network, have turned on the sympathetic nervous system because there was a threat.
The stimuli they're reacting to is me going outside for a nature walk, and they determined that, hey, there's a threat involved, and walking in nature does not require your higher critical thinking skills. It's a chance for you to kind of turn off and engage that Default Mode Network for good or evil.
And my brain chose evil at that moment. What I started doing is, every time I would get that picture in my brain of this snake, I would draw a red X over it and go, _"No!"_ I would say the words out loud if I'm by myself, it's _"No!"_ And then I immediately replace it [00:11:00] with a non-scary thought and do that several times because we want to extinguish the emotion that thought has also created, which is the fear.
And when you are replacing the thought, when you are replacing the emotion, you are giving this four part network a chance to reboot itself and go back to a more helpful side of being instead of the worry nightmare side of being. And it may sound a little complicated, but it's not, I promise. It's just new, and it's going to take consistency on your part to monitor your brain, and this is where developing that self-awareness muscle is really helpful. Policing your own thoughts, really helpful because your thoughts and emotions act as internal [00:12:00] stressors. They are the things that activate your sympathetic nervous system to fight, flight, or freeze.
Not walking outside or not necessarily something in your environment. A lot of times it's you. It's these five or six inches right between your ears. That's the biggest threat to your nervous system, your sense of safety and your reality. So learning how to control your response and choosing in that window of tolerance, because a lot of times you do have a choice.
The sympathetic nervous system is on automatic pilot, but it's reacting to what's called a perceived threat. And these are usually our thoughts or our emotions or actual threats. It can't tell the difference. So it needs our cognitive help. It needs our higher thinking brain. To help it determine [00:13:00] what's real versus not real.
And you can do that yourself when you learn how and when you practice this routine consistently, and that's what I teach my clients to do in the Bespoke Brain System and through one-to-one coaching programs. I help high achievers learn to balance their leadership and life so that they don't experience things like AI anxiety.They don't experience real fear at society changing or helplessness or powerlessness if things are happening outside of their control because they do have the internal tools to ride that wave of life. If that is something that you would like to learn more about, then over on my website, aprildarley.com, you can book a free phone consultation.
Just chat about what's going on in your life [00:14:00] and how this three part system might be able to help you build more resilience, let go of fear and feel like you are in control of your life again. Reach out to me on aprildarley.com and I will tell you and show you how to get your system returned back to neutral so that you're not highly reactive or squashing your best self.
Until next week, my friends. Goodbye.
