BSB Ep 84
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and today I want to share with you about what happens when you encounter a slipup, a slip back, a pattern that you thought you'd overcome ages ago comes back again and you fall off the wagon, you fall back into a harmful pattern.
You just have a wobble that knocked you off your game. So earlier this week, I shared my own personal story with my email list, and if you're not part of my email community, please jump on board. It's where I share gems that you don't get anywhere else. And you can do that over at aprildarley.com. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage and you can opt in to get a guide about 10 ways to overcome imposter syndrome as my gift to you just for joining that email list. But [00:01:00] I shared a wobble I had around food. Now as a kid, I lived in the area that I live in now. I moved back to Florida a couple of years ago, but as a kid in Florida in the eighties, we did not live near a grocery store, and now it's what you would call a food desert. So we only went to town one to two times a month, and I lived for those moments that we would go to town and I loved grocery stores.
To me, it was the ultimate abundance, all that food that I didn't normally have access to. So my brain created this feel good story between food and abundance and safety. I just loved it. And to this day, I still do love going to the grocery store and I realized that most people cannot say that. Because my brain made that association that food equals abundance, which equals [00:02:00] safety and security and stability.
And those good memories formed that pattern. But the dark side of that pattern is that in my adult life, when I felt overwhelmed, too stressed out, unsafe, my brain said, _"Hey, food's really comforting to you, so why don't you just have it?"_ So at times I became an emotional eater, an over eater, and occasionally even a binge eater.
But that was many years ago. I have stopped self-soothing with food. I understood what patterns, and I've worked out all of that stuff. So I thought that I had really left that in the past until last week. As I mentioned, I'm back in the area that I grew up in. It's still a food desert 30 plus years later.
And so going to the grocery store takes a lot of time and [00:03:00] effort. It's almost an hour away , so it takes several hours to do the whole grocery shopping process where when I lived in this city, there was a store five minutes away. So now when I have cravings, it's too bad, so sad. There is no way to indulge yourself in that craving because there aren't restaurants nearby.
There aren't grocery stores nearby. You're pretty much gonna have to sit with it until it fades or find a substitute, which is fine. But this particular grocery store trip, I guess I just had multiple cravings that week and was just kind of irritated that I didn't live close to a grocery store to indulge some of that.
So on my shopping drip, I loaded up with some junk food. Now, I don't normally keep junk food in the house because it can be a trigger for me. I will overeat it or binge it until it's gone, and that is absolutely what happened. I went on like a three day junk [00:04:00] food binge bender as a wobble. So after all the junk food was done,
I'm like, _"What started this wobble? What was so stressful to my nervous system that I went back to this pattern that I haven't had for a decade or two?"_, And you'll never believe what it was. It's, I started an exercise program. Now exercising. I've always had a love-hate relationship with, and if I trace it back to its origin event, it was in my late twenties, early thirties.
I was working full-time in my career. I was going to school part-time for my biology degree, my undergrad. And how was burning the candle at both ends, plus adding the gym on top of that. So I didn't really get those endorphins and feel good after exercising like you're supposed to get. I got more exhausted because I was in adrenal fatigue. Only I wasn't educated enough to know what [00:05:00] adrenal fatigue was back then because this was pre-med school. But my brain cued into exercise depleted me more, made me more exhausted. Burned up the little energy reserves that I did have, and your brain is very smart. Your brain is very energy efficient, so it does not want you to expend unnecessary energy.
So my brain created this pathway that exercise was an unnecessary energy expense, so I emotionally tagged it with, _"I don't like this. It doesn't make me feel good. Let's not do it"._ So fast forward a decade or two, and I know exercise is very important, not just for heart health or bone health, but for brain health as well.
And I knew what to do to exercise. I even had chat GPT design me an exercise program because I am trying to [00:06:00] do whatever it takes to build a new habit. But when you do that, you're fighting your old programming. And I have talked about exercising for months, if not a year or more. And that week. I finally started doing it.
I finally started taking baby steps to go exercise, and then I have the shopping trip, and then I had this binge wobble. So yes, working towards your goals, making positive steps towards your goals is enough of a danger to your survival brain so that it would hit the red alert button and bring back a pattern that you haven't had for years.
Even though you're trying to better yourself, your brain is gonna step in and go, "no", because it's past pain is trying to predict your future. So when you have a wobble and we all have them, that's the number one thing I want you to know. We all have wobbles. We're human. They are going [00:07:00] to happen. If you make any sort of meaningful change forward toward a goal, you're going to have a wobble, but what you do during the wobble and after the wobble makes all the difference. So here are three things that if you find yourself in a wobble situation that you want to do during and after. So step one is you want to acknowledge that you are in a wobble without judgment because what you tell yourself that wobble means is going to be a difference between your happiness and moving forward, or your falling back into old programming and old patterns. Try to stay as neutral as you can about the wobble and just acknowledge it happened. It was a wobble. We all have them. I'm normal. This is normal. Step two is you want to not let the wobble make you [00:08:00] quit your goal, because that's what it's designed to do. That's what your brain is hoping that you'll do, is you'll have this wobble and go,_ "Ugh. It's a sign that I'm not meant to do this goal. I can't have this thing I want. I'm not good enough"_. So this is why step one matters is you don't want to tell yourself these emotional stories of disempowerment.
Stay neutral about it without judgment, because if you can do step one correctly, then step two, which is don't quit. Don't let the wobble be the reason you stop. Those two things work together and they're really important. And then step three, once you have acknowledged the wobble, you have recommitted to your goal and you're back on track.
Step three is you do want to start digging into what was the pattern behind the wobble? What was the [00:09:00] trigger? What was the why? This awareness, you will often see a story somewhere in your past. And it could be a story that you thought you overcame, but it's a new level, new devil. If you're not familiar with that phrase, the first time I heard about it, it was from the book, the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, and it talks about an upper limit problem.
Basically that's a limiting story, a program or belief that our brain has created to protect us. It's really the ceiling on what our brain thinks we are allowed to have based on past history, experiences, and your own stories or beliefs. And when you get too close to this upper limit, this ceiling, something will happen to knock you back down again.
A wobble, for example. And this is why it's so important to do these three steps, acknowledge the wobble, recommit to your goal, and dig into the pattern [00:10:00] that created the wobble in the first place. And that is that new level, new devil. And what that really means is when you are trying to uplevel your life to change a habit.
I've got a whole podcast episode about this, but when you are trying to change a habit, it also means you will need to simultaneously break a harmful or unhealthy habit. You need to do those two things together, and the brain will panic about that because a new habit, new routines are very energetically costly to the brain, and it doesn't like to expend energy, so it tries to put you back on old programming, old habits, old patterns, because it takes minimal energy and minimal effort to run that programming. But something new like an exercise program for me, you're having to create time, space, energy, effort, and your brain looks at that and goes, "_it's not easy._
_Let's just go _[00:11:00] _back to the old way"_. And when you can understand what the story was that triggered you, it's another way you can choose to be better. You can choose to do something healthy instead of harmful, and you do have that power. It's called self-agency. Your brain also likes to trick you into thinking that you don't have the power to change.
Or self-efficacy means that it tries to trick you into believing that your efforts won't yield the change you're trying to make. Meaning it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're not gonna get it anyway. We want to really be aware of the brain's tricks so that you can succeed and you can come through a wobble even stronger.
I just had to dig into my stories. About the exercise story and what that did to my brain and body at that time. But I'm not in that place in my life. I know [00:12:00] about adrenal support. I know about healthy eating now. I know about my body's own limits. I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago. And you have to remind yourself that, that you're not the same person you were even yesterday.
If you choose not to be. This is why recommitting to your goal, acknowledging the wobble without judgment and digging into the why of things helps you achieve the success that you're trying to achieve. And wobbles are normal, my friend. We all have them. But if you are having trouble moving past these wobbles to get to the success, to reach that goal that you dearly want to live a healthier lifestyle, to balance work and life, then that is something I can definitely help you with. You have the ability right now to choose something better for yourself, even if it feels hard or uncomfortable. Through my [00:13:00] program, the Bespoke Brain System, I offer support and insight to really teach you these brain tricks about what is going on underneath the surface.
And once you become aware of these things, it really does change the whole trajectory of your life. You can book a complimentary consultation with me to talk about how this Bespoke Brain System can help you with your particular wobble. You can do that over at aprildarley.com. Once again, I'd love to have you in my community on my email list and in my world in some way because I do value you and cherish you, which is why I wanted to share my personal story with you today about a big wobble, and I'm happy to say, even though I did binge eat and overeat for three days until all of that junk food was gone.
I didn't stop exercising. I didn't let that wobble be the thing that told me I [00:14:00] wasn't worth it or that I couldn't do it. I still exercise every day and I still am, and I'm very proud of myself for that. And that's where I want you to get to as well, where you can look at a wobble and recognize it for what it was: just your body trying to go back to old programming, but you're not that person anymore and you don't have to do those things anymore, and I can help you navigate a new strategy through that. Until next week, my friends, give yourself some grace if you wobble 'cause we're only human. Bye guys.
