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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley. Today I wanna walk you through a hypothetical, everyday scenario that I am certain that you have been through at least once in your life. We're going to talk about how innocent thoughts create an anxiety cascade within your mind and your body.
We're going to talk about how it starts, why it happens, and what you can do when you catch this happening in your own mind. All right, let's dive in. The hypothetical scenario I'm gonna present to you today is about getting stuck in traffic.
When we get up in the morning, if you don't work from home, you will at some point need to leave your house and travel from your house to your workplace. And I am sure you can relate to unexpected traffic events happening. The one day you need to be at work or you even leave your house early is the day [00:01:00] where there is bumper to bumper traffic.
Now, I don't know anyone who loves traffic. I don't know anybody who just gets up and goes, man, I cannot wait to hit traffic today. I do know people who make the best of traffic by listening to podcasts or doing personal development work, but what happens most often is when you're sitting in traffic and suddenly you start to feel anxiety out of nowhere.
Let's talk about how it started and why it happens. Now, if you are sitting in traffic and you don't love traffic, you may have had the fleeting thought, totally innocent thought about, _I hate getting stuck in traffic._ You may not have used the word hate, but you have some emotion about it. Maybe it's irritation, frustration, anger.
It might even just be something mild. You were just having a complaining thought. _I hate being stuck in traffic. I'm gonna be late for work._ I could imagine you would also not enjoy being late [00:02:00] for work, but if you had that innocent thought, _I hate being stuck in traffic. I'm going to be late for work. _Then this creates a cascade underneath.
I teach my client something called the *Rapid Regulation Method TM,* and in that regulation method I teach you about the three brain system. So instead of having one brain like you think, I want you to imagine as if you had three different sections of your brain and they each had their own motivations and their personality. They each have jobs that they're responsible for doing for you.
So for example, when you had that thought,_ I hate being in stuck in traffic. I'm going to be late for work._ That sent a signal to your emotional brain or your subconscious that said, _I don't like to be identified as someone who's late for work because that's going to impact my reputation. I pride myself on being responsible, showing up on time, being someone that you can count on, and this _[00:03:00] _unexpected delay is making me feel anger, resentment, bitterness, frustration. _You have some emotion that we could call negative. Now because you had that thought of, _I hate being stuck in traffic. I'm going to be late for work._ You actually tagged that thought with an emotion, hate or frustration or anger, and because that emotion is on a lower vibratory scale, your survival brain will tag that emotion in a process called _*value tagging.*_ Your survival brain. Think about it as the police station of your brain. It is your protector. Its job is to keep you safe from threats. When you had the thought,_ I hate being stuck in traffic, I'm going to be late for work._
Not only did it impact your identity at the subconscious or emotional level, it actually filtered down a little bit further. When you used a negative [00:04:00] emotion in a thought that said, hate. Survival brain will value tag it, and it's value tagged as a threat. Anything that gets tagged as a threat or a danger gets priority access, and it activates your nervous system to prepare to face the threat, fight, flight, freeze.
Now, because you are stuck in traffic, you might think that's a freeze state and you're somewhat correct. But when you have the anxiety, it's about wanting to move, but you can't. So that creates this emotion of feeling stuck. You wanna get to work, you want to do your job, you can't do that. Your momentum is being impacted. You're being slowed down artificially, and when your brain feels stuck, and we know that it is an external thing that you cannot control.
Your brain starts to see that in a way that makes you powerless. There's things happening that are out of [00:05:00] your control. And then you start to feel maybe the wall is closing in on you. You start to notice how close the traffic is getting and how bumper to bumper it is with all of these people. And suddenly you feel your anxiety start to spike a little bit.
And then you start thinking about what it's going to mean if you're late for work, because this is what's happening underneath, between your emotional brain and your survival brain. So your subconscious and your unconscious. If your identity is being threatened as someone who's responsible and someone that others can count on and work is how you get money, this information is being filtered down to the survival brain who has already been activated by the threat of being stuck in traffic. And when that brain interprets the signal from your subconscious that says, my identity is being threatened, my livelihood is being threatened, so then what happens? Your survival brain takes that information and [00:06:00] runs with it. It starts to go, you know what? Job is how we get money.
Money is how we pay for food and shelter, and if you lose your job, we won't have money. We can't feed ourselves or our family, we can't stay in our house. We're gonna lose our house, and then we'll be homeless and no one will help us and then we'll die. That may sound ridiculous, and it certainly is to your logical brain.
You are just stuck in traffic. But the logical brain is not in charge of your emotional response or your threat response. So what is happening is your survival and emotional brain. They control 97% of your responses and your decisions. The survival brain is actually considered your default brain. It will hijack the other pieces and take over if it feels that you're being threatened.
And it cannot tell the difference between a real threat or a perceived threat. So what [00:07:00] this example is meant to show you is that your innocent little thought of, _I hate being stuck in traffic, I'm going to be late for work_, is a perceived threat. The other two levels of your brain will receive that information as loss of status, loss of reputation, loss of income, and disaster is imminent, and it will create your nervous system to have a sympathetic response.
This is why it will dial up your anxiety. It's dumping epinephrine, adrenaline into your nervous system. And because you can't actually get out of your car and run around to discharge that adrenaline. You're left there sitting in it. And so it's like a forced freeze state because you are unable to move.
The traffic is in your way. You can't carry on with your plan, so your plans are being disrupted. That's about failure. Your identity is being challenged [00:08:00] because it's going to make you late for work. And that survival brain knows that if you are late for work, you might get written up and if you get written up, you could lose your job.
If you lose your job, you lose money. You can't feed yourself, you lose your house, and it tricks you into believing that there's no way out for you. That there's no one that can help you. That there's not even another job out there. It takes you straight from zero to death. Very quickly in seconds, and this is playing out in a level that is far deeper than your conscious awareness.
Your conscious or logical brain is not the brain in charge, and this is why you're sitting in that traffic and you don't understand why you are getting anxiety. A piece if you can understand it because you're frustrated, you don't love traffic, and you're gonna be late for work, which you don't love either.
But it goes far deeper than that. There are programs running without your conscious permission, without your logical input that are affecting [00:09:00] you in a system wide way. It is affecting your thoughts, your emotions, your nervous system. Everything about you is being affected. You accidentally can do it to yourself.
When I teach rapid regulation, not only am I really teaching you in depth about what this three brain system means for you and how you're operating inside that framework, but I'm also going to show you how you unconsciously write these programs that your brain will just take, snowball, and run with it.
And that if you want to see positive changes in your life, it is about learning to see the program, edit the program, and launch a different version in a way that's helpful to you instead of harmful. If this sounds something like you are ready to jump into and you are all in, then I'm going to invite you to head over to aprildarley.com.
When you're there, you're going to have the option, you can do a single session. It's called a breakthrough session, or you can [00:10:00] dive into one of my programs, and those are called *Decode* and *Amplify.*
If you are ready for much deeper resolution in your entire life and work, then *Decode* and *Amplify *are better choices for you. *Decode* really shows you how to look at these programs that your subconscious and unconscious brains are running, and where you can optimize and refine. *Amplify* is going to take that to the next level.
So *Amplify* is the right program for you. If you are already doing high level things and you need real time, one-to-one, high touch support. *Amplify* is where you wanna log in at. All right, my friends, I hope this real example helped you see that things are much murkier than what you may have thought about. That these innocent little thoughts that you don't think anything of have big consequences underneath the surface, and I want [00:11:00] you to think better quality thoughts, but also to become the master of your thought system. You have that potential and that power at your fingertips right now, and you can get me on board as your guide to make this process so easy at aprildarley.com.
All right, my friends. I'll see you next week. Goodbye.
