BSB 94
===
April: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and today we're gonna talk about celebrity weddings. I know that sounds a little bit strange from a coaching or neuroscience based podcast, but hang with me.
Recently, Selena Gomez married Benny Blanco and she did, a magazine spread like they do with all the photos and all the interviews, and when I read one of her quotes from one of her interviews, she said something that really struck me, and this is what I want to talk to you about today. I am going to read that quote, so gimme just a moment here.
Here's what she said. " _This is how I work personally, but when something great happens in my life, I expect something bad to happen. I got married and then I was sobbing because I was like, I'm gonna die the next day. I just think that's a _[00:01:00] _little life thing." _Well, no disrespect to Selena because it's amazing to be that vulnerable on the world stage and let everyone know what was going on inside your mind and your process.
But when she said, _"oh, it's just a little life thing"_, this is where I'm going to disagree a bit, because what she was doing there is something called catastrophizing. It's a cognitive distortion or trick of the brain that makes us think the worst case scenario was imminent. We all have a survival piece of our brain that likes to hijack our logic and creates these stories that says danger is around the corner.
A phrase that's really common for what she described was _"waiting for the other shoe to drop."_ So when I see this among clients, and let's be honest, we have all done that in some way, shape, or form, but it sounds like Selena really was kind of [00:02:00] consumed with that on what should have been the happiest day of her life.
She couldn't stop thinking that something bad was going to happen because she was so happy. I wanna break that down a little bit. Number one, there was catastrophizing in there expecting something to go wrong. And when it comes to the way our brain works, we don't necessarily get what we want. We get what we expect because we train our brain to look for things that we have conditioned it to be important.
If Selena has created this s tory in her mind that _"I can't sustain happiness_._ If I'm happy, something bad is going to happen_." And I don't know this to be true. I don't know Selena personally. So if you do, hook her up with me and we'll get to the bottom of this. This is just my opinion or theory based on what I have seen with other clients.
Some people create the story of it's difficult [00:03:00] for them to sustain happiness or to hold that happiness, and that story or that feeling gets created by what we tell ourselves, by our thoughts, by our feelings. Depending on your independent life experiences or childhood, we can miswire cues of safety.
For some people, being happy like a wedding where it should be the happiest day of your life, i mmediately throws their nervous system into overdrive, and the nervous system is now looking for threats because happiness isn't the base state. And it's a miswired cue of safety that can be rewired my friends with training, so don't despair.
That catastrophizing is a very common cognitive distortion that can also be reversed with brain training. I do this with my clients in the Bespoke Brain Program. We talk about how to wire [00:04:00] your brain differently to expect success and to help you spot and let go of these stories, these tragic stories or these stories in your brain, these programs, these subconscious automatic programs you don't even know you have that expect pain for you.
Now, the reality is life is gonna keep life-ing. Life is like the ocean. Waves come in, they go out. That is a natural process of life, that we have highs and that we have lows. No one stays happy all the time. Just like I hope that you don't feel low all the time. These variations are absolutely normal within our day.
Building balance in learning true resilience with your nervous system is about how to hold these highs and hold these lows and change what you expect out of life. A portion of that is also about trust. When I read that quote from [00:05:00] Selena, I also cued into, "_oh, she may not trust herself to hold this happiness."_
She may not trust others to contribute to that happiness, and she may not trust in her own ability to ride those waves of life to tackle those challenges without being overwhelmed by them. This is again, where nervous system training, brain training and resilience training is very important because you do want to trust in your ability to handle challenges.
And again, based on your own life experiences, hyper independence is a trauma reaction. If you feel subconsciously that I can't really trust anyone else except myself. Then you're training your brain to expect more of that. We don't want that either. We don't want you to act from a place of hyper independence.
And it's easy to see how we fall [00:06:00] into that because everyone has been disappointed by someone else in their life. And if that has happened over and over, then it's kind of natural that you may want to step up and have a little bit of control and to make sure things are done in a particular way, but that's not always best for you.
That can lead you into overgiving, that hyper independence, and you can end up pushing well-meaning people away because you don't necessarily trust them. Or unfortunately, you strip your own power away or give your power away to others if you don't trust yourself to handle the challenges of life. And I see this a lot too.
I wanted to talk about these things with Selena. There was catastrophe, that cognitive distortion, there was a lack of trust in maybe her ability to handle challenges, and there was most likely a safety cue miswired, and an inability to hold [00:07:00] happiness without feeling that it was going to be ripped away.
If that resonates with you and you have had more of those thoughts than you consider normal or realistic, or if you feel kind of tortured by those thoughts, and if you're like Selena and going, it's just one of the things that happens in life, I'm here to tell you, no, my friend. That is something you don't have to accept.
That is something you don't have to be overwhelmed by. With a few simple tweaks and exercises to train your brain, you get to widen your window of tolerance where your nervous system isn't looking for problems and your brain and body aren't expecting terrible things to happen to you all the time.
That's also called hypervigilance. It's easy to get rid of those things when you have the right interventions, and this is what I do inside [00:08:00] my Bespoke Brain Program. You can learn more about that program and how it can help you in your particular situation so that you are not sobbing and worrying about death on your wedding day over at aprildarley.com. You can sign up for a complimentary consultation and we'll chat about the program, what your life is like and h ow brain training can make a world of difference to your nervous system, your brain, your body, and the quality of your life. Okay, my friends, I'll see you next week. Bye.
