BSB Ep 89
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley. If you've been with me for a while, you may recall that I'm creating my first ever group coaching program. The working title is called _The Neuroscience of Stress_, and I will drop the link where you can join the wait list below. One of the things I'm creating in there is to teach you how to think and feel in ways that are advantageous to you.
What happens when you do, and what happens when you don't? Because these are components to building resilience and happiness in every single area of your life. But so much of your day is on automatic pilot through old programming that was created by thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and actions that you repeated enough times to create an automatic pilot program. [00:01:00] Good or bad, it doesn't really matter. You created the program and your brain is gonna run it in the most efficient way. In the group program Neuroscience of Stress, I'm going to take you behind the scenes about how to undo that programming and create new programs based on the life you want to live, not the one you've been living up until this point.
Join me in the group program. I'll drop the link below to get yourself on the wait list.
One of the main things I wanna talk about today that really corresponds with changing the way you think, feel, and believe is your reaction to both internal stressors and external stressors. When you understand how stress works, then you can understand and choose your reaction to stress.
I've got an entire module on this in my program. It's that important. External stressors, and these are primarily out of your control. [00:02:00] You can do a great job building this presentation only for your coworkers and your boss to rip it apart.
You could leave the house 15 minutes early to get to work, only to run into a car accident. These are external stressors. Your kid gets sick on the day of your big presentation, an external stressor. There are things you didn't plan for. There are things you can't control and you end up just reacting to them.
In a lot of circumstances and the way you react to them is often based on the amount of resilience you have built to internal stressors and the programs that you are running on automatic pilot in your subconscious. Having you handle, recognize, understand your internal stressors, and when you build resilience and change the way you work with internal stressors, the external stress [00:03:00] response automatically gets better. So every area in your life is going to improve if you work on your reaction to internal stressors first. So what do I mean by an internal stressor? Typically, these are your thoughts and your emotions. And a belief is a thought you continue to think over and over and over until you create this entire story around it that it becomes a belief system.
So thoughts, emotions, and beliefs are three of the most powerful internal stressors that you will ever face, and here is a very ugly truth about internal stressors. You do it to yourself. I'm gonna say that again. You do it to yourself. The thoughts you think create joy or pain, the emotions you feel are [00:04:00] directly related to the thoughts that you think. The beliefs that you have are directly related to the thoughts and emotions that you created stories around.
It's that simple, right? And I know some of you're going _"April, it sounds so simple, but so hard to change". _And if you're sitting there right now listening to this or watching this and going,_ "It's so hard to change"_, it's because maybe no one has shown you how to change them. Or here's another hard truth, knowing it's not enough.
You actually have to do the work of change. There is an entire module in my group program about how to prep your brain for change, because that's another reality. Plenty of people can recognize that they need to change, but how many people have been taught the best way to change so that your brain and body accept it, because that is totally different, my [00:05:00] friends.
And when it comes to internal stressors, you have got to change the way you think first. Otherwise you will trap yourself in what's called in an emotional loop. So thoughts and emotions create feedback on each other. When you have a thought, you will automatically have an emotional response that corresponds to that thought, that emotion, the power of it, the feeling of it is very quick unless you back it up with another corresponding thought.
So let me give you an example . I recorded a podcast in the last week or two about rejection, it's called Rejection Proof, and I found out my friends didn't invite me somewhere, I got left off the list somehow some way, so I had a thought of "_Why wasn't I invited?"_
That created an immediate emotional response, which is, _"Aw, _[00:06:00] _you know, dang it, fomo"_. But that's where I left it. I didn't tell myself a story and I didn't back that up with any painful, corresponding thoughts. And this is so incredibly important. You can be the master of your thoughts. It takes effort and it takes training, but that's exactly what I teach my clients to do inside my Bespoke Brain System.
It's my private one-to-one coaching, and we all have thoughts that run away from time to time, and the stories begin before we catch it. But when you catch it, the most important thing you can do is to redirect the thought into something that's going to be helpful and not harmful. And to reinforce it by a series of positive thoughts.
For example, I wasn't invited to the gathering. "Aw" was the emotional response. And then, "_but my friends _[00:07:00] _love me. I'm really glad they had a good time. I can't wait to hear all about it. I wanna let them know when they go out again, please make sure to tag me in. I wanna go to this place too"_. Positive thoughts, positive thoughts.
Positive thoughts. Create positive emotions, excitement. I'm excited for my friends. I'm excited to hear their experience. I'm excited to imagine myself joining them one day. Dopamine hit excitement. Serotonin. So you can also create a positive cascade for yourself just by linking thought, emotion, belief story.
Or I could have taken it the exact opposite way. "_ I wasn't invited. I feel sad."._ And then the next thought will be tainted with sadness. Okay? "_ I wonder if I did something wrong. Do they not like me? Did they exclude me on purpose? Is everybody mad at me?"_ Those thoughts will create corresponding emotions of anxiety, of fear, of sadness, [00:08:00] of feeling alone, rejected, left out, and that cycle will continue for as long as you allow it to continue.
You are in control of the duration of that cycle by the power of your thought alone. I wanna really make sure you understand that because so many people feel powerless when it comes to their thoughts and emotions, and part of the reason is maybe they aren't aware that they have the power to step in.
This is called self-agency. You have the power to believe in yourself, you have the power to step in and alter your behavior at any time. This includes your thoughts or your emotions. You also have something called self-efficacy, meaning the actions you take can get you where you want to go, and if you have low self-esteem or you have these programs of disempowering thoughts and emotions that you've run for [00:09:00] a really long time, your brain is tricky.
It wants to make you feel helpless or maybe somebody in your life created a condition of learned helplessness for you and you just went along with it because that was a familiar programming. And familiar equal, safe to the nervous system doesn't always mean desirable, but it means something that you're used to. And when you want to create change, y ou're going to be uncomfortable because you're asking the brain and the body to do something new. The brain will immediately categorize that as a threat, even if it's something you want to do. This is where you have to be a grownup. You got to pull your big person pants up and go. _"I have the power to affect my life through conquering internal stressors"._
Now again, we can't control the external stressors, but if you stop being the one that activates your nervous [00:10:00] system, you stop creating conditions where your body's not running at its optimal efficiency. And when you stop creating less than optimal situation and environment for your body, your body responds better to external stuff.
So you need to clean up your internal stuff first before your external stuff starts to see an improvement. Tell yourself, _"I am causing myself pain. I am causing myself to suffer by the thought, emotion loop I'm getting stuck in right now"._
"_ I have the power to step out of that loop at any given time, and I have the power to take actions to do that". _So how do you break the loop if you find yourself in one of these thought emotion loops? There are techniques that you can do, but you have to do them consistently, and [00:11:00] you have to remember them because what will happen is this thought, emotion loop will activate your sympathetic nervous system for a threat cascade, and you have a fast response and a slow response.
The fast response is to, shut down your higher brain functions. Because you don't really need to think about things if you're in a threat. So one of the things I teach my clients to do is how to reactivate that and assess in the moment, because this is called your _window of tolerance_. You can widen that with practice.
And what you do have to realize is that running the shutdown of your higher brain function is automatic pilot, but you can create a new program for yourself where you widen that window of response and you bring your logical thinking back online. And this is what I call the_ reality check_. Whenever you realize that you're caught in a loop and your body is going to be giving you some kind of physical symptom, [00:12:00] that will be an increased heart rate, an increased feeling of stress or worry, your muscles will be tightening, your jaw may clench. You may feel some pressure in your head. You're going to feel this stress somewhere in your body. That is enough to clue you into, _"okay, I am stressed"_. Next step, am I in a life-threatening situation right now? Most likely your answer will be no. So number one, acknowledge the stress.
Number two, reality check_ "Is this threatening my life?" _Most likely the answer's gonna be no. So when you get that no answer, this is where you're going to purposefully engage, thought redirection. This can happen in a number of ways. You just need a pattern disruptor. This can be EFT tapping. This can be snapping a rubber band at your [00:13:00] wrist.
This can be jogging in place. This can be turning on some music. This can be deep breathing, but we want to disrupt the physical stress cascade. But one of the fastest ways to do this is by disrupting the thought cascade. Even if you are going, _"I am actually safe right now. I am feeling the chair under my butt, and I'm not in a jungle with actual threats._
_I am safe. And I'm acknowledging my safety. I'm backing off my threat detection protocol, and I am allowing myself to calm down because I am worthy. I am safe. I am amazing. I am super lucky. I am really blessed. I have this coming up. I'm gonna be having steak for dinner"_, whatever it takes, but we [00:14:00] want to start creating a positive neurotransmitter cascade of things like dopamine, serotonin. If you were to jog in place, there's your endorphins to replace the negative neurotransmitter cascade of adrenaline, cortisol that you've got going on from a stress reaction. Getting yourself out of the loop and redirecting your thoughts is one of the most powerful things you can do.
And it really comes down to don't feed the fear, don't feed the monster of what if terrible things happen? What if wonderful things happen and you are the only one that gets to decide how the direction of your thoughts go. No one is responsible for programming your self agency except for you. Eleanor Roosevelt has this quote, it's _"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."_
This includes yourself. No one can inform your [00:15:00] thoughts to be inferior thoughts except for you. You are the only one to get yourself out of that jam. You just have to believe in yourself enough to do it. Pick a couple of tools out of a nervous system, somatic, top down mindset toolbox, and to actually use them.
And no one can make you do that. No amount of money you spend, no amount of coaches you see, no amount of podcasts you listen to, books you read can ever make you help yourself. You have to want to do it, and you have to be really clear that you can do it. That change is possible. That your brain is going to fight back, that's absolutely normal, that you are going to have waves of success and waves where it wasn't as successful.
That is also normal. Your [00:16:00] consistency, adaptability, and desire to change will get you through so much when it comes to internal and external stressors because you have the ability to react c onsciously for a lot of things, and many people will tell you that you're going to react unconsciously, and that is true.
But when it comes to desired change, achieving goals, manifesting it all starts with a thought, emotion loop. To change your life, you've got to change this loop. There's no other way to do it, but to do it. There are so many different ways you could do it, but unless you learn to change your thoughts and emotions consciously and on purpose in a more desirable direction, everything else you are doing is trying to put out [00:17:00] fires with a cup of water.
It's just symptom management instead of cure. I was not trained to do that as a physician, right? We wanna get to the root of things and not just put a bandaid on it and pat yourself and go take a deep breath when you're feeling stressed. I was trained to look for why you're being stressed in the first place.
So this is not about symptom management because that's just dealing with external stressors. The root of why a lot of stuff stresses you out is because of your internal stressors, and those are created by your thoughts and your emotions, and you are 100% in control of that if you believe yourself to be.
And that's the thing, how many of us out there are running programs of disempowerment where we don't feel good about ourselves, and because we don't feel good about ourselves, we've created [00:18:00] entire stories about what is possible for you. Limiting beliefs. We all do it.
We all limit ourselves by our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and actions. But what if you didn't have to? And that's the truth. You don't have to, but maybe no one showed you a different way to think, do or be. And this is the point of this podcast. This is the point of my private one-to-one coaching. This is the point of the Neuroscience of Stress group program that is coming, is to show you to peel back the curtain and really show you how each step of what you do matters and makes a difference.
You make a difference, your thoughts make a difference. That is the most powerful place to start. If you're looking for change in your life right now, is to upgrade the quality of your thinking, and that takes practice. If you have a very strong inner critic, you have a very low [00:19:00] self-esteem, thoughts of worthiness and empowerment will be uncomfortable.
That's natural. That's what's supposed to happen because remember, your "safe" was inner critic. Your "safe" was low worth, but that's not where you want to be anymore. So the unfamiliar, the thing that will actually upgrade your life and your nervous system. You're gonna have to freak the nervous system out to do something unfamiliar, but it's something you want to do, and the nervous system will freak out for as long as it takes for you to normalize the new level.
When you normalize the new level, normalize the new thoughts, the new emotions, the new lifestyle, the new identity, you have retrained your nervous system to accept the "safe" that you want, not the safe you created from a disempowered place. This is how you reprogram the nervous [00:20:00] system through discomfort sucks, but this is what it takes for true transformation.
So if you are willing to be uncomfortable to get the kind of life you want, if you are willing to be uncomfortable to calm down, then do thought work, do emotion work. Still do body work, breath work, because let's face it, you do need symptom management because the external stressors don't stop coming.
But until you work on the internal stressors and the internal stories, you're gonna be chasing fires. And that's not what I want for you, my friend. I want for you to reach a place of safety in your nervous system, of high self-agency, high self-efficacy, and stories that tell you how great you are, because those exist in there too with practice, and it all starts with that thought emotion loop. So if you need some help working on that loop, [00:21:00] if that loop is powerful in a very negative way for you. Then you are going to need some strategies to help you practice a new way of being.
But I wanna prepare you. It's gonna be unfamiliar, not because it's hard or you can't do it, it's because it's new and it needs to be practiced often enough until it becomes a habit. That's it. So there are a lot of tools and techniques out there. None of them are wrong. You just need to pick a couple that you are willing to commit to and do consistently, but I'm here to guide you.
If you need some help on that, go to aprildarley.com, make a free consultation appointment, and we'll talk about what is going on in your life, how this thought emotion cycle can be disruptive for you, and what stories are you telling yourself that are making things harder for you and actually causing internal stress, which is showing up in your external world.
So if you wanna get rid of all that [00:22:00] by going to the root of things, that's where I can help. So aprildarley.com to schedule a consultation and also jump on my group waiting list for the Neuroscience of Stress group coaching program. I'll drop the link for that below, and I am wishing you a week of empowerment through better thoughts and better feelings.
And that is 100% in your control. Until next week, my friends, goodbye.
