BSB 112
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I have a question for you. When you're in the shower, are you super creative? Is there some sort of divine inspiration that the shower gods bring you, or is it just me? This morning I'm in the shower and I do not have a topic in mind yet for the podcast this week, so I just gently threw that out to the shower gods and asked, what am I gonna talk about with the podcast today?
And I got an answer. This phrase popped into my mind. Last week in a client session, I had given my client this quote. " _Worry is a misuse of i magination."_ She was unfamiliar with that quote, and maybe you are too. But it sums up neuroscience so beautifully that we have architecture in our brain that is responsible for [00:01:00] that stress, fear, worry, cascade that we all go through.
And if you want a real world example of what that's like, listen to the last episode 111, and you're gonna learn about how quickly your brain creates this entire imaginary scenario. It makes perfect sense to your emotional and survival brain, and makes no sense at all to your higher brain or the logical brain.
And I wanna piggyback on that episode slightly to give you a little bit more insight, because I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if I talked about where fear lives in the body? Now, you may not like the word fear, so you can substitute it out with worry, anxiety, a core disruptor, a system disruption, whatever you like, but really it's fear.
Let's call the spade a spade on that one. But when we're talking about fear, what popped into my mind [00:02:00] to keep this a little more relatable and not so science-based, is to think about it like a gated neighborhood. I do wanna give you a little quick primer in that I teach my clients something that I call the *Three Brain system*.
So instead of one brain, like you think. Imagine if there were three different decision makers in your brain. You had a logical brain, which is what we like to think and believe our brain is. It's math, logic, language, reasoning, planning, and organization. And you had an emotional brain. The emotional brain doesn't have logic in it, but it is where we store our intuition, our creativity, our desire to be loved, to belong, and where we create our identity.
And then we have a survival brain, which is our protector and it is almost like a caveman in that [00:03:00] it's really concerned about resources, food, shelter, a mate, a tribe, and these three brains work together to make up the sum total of you. But let's split them apart in this podcast just to speak about what happens every day, unbeknownst to your logical brain, because your subconscious or emotional brain and your unconscious, your survival brain together make up to 97% of every decision you make, not logic.
Now, since we make over 30,000 decisions per day, we're not consciously aware of most of them. Most of them are on autopilot, and you may not have conscious buy-in about what you're doing, and that is the way the brain is designed to work. So imagine this scenario. That you are in a gated community, and we're gonna call this the gated community [00:04:00] that represents your limbic system, which if you're watching this on video, it's right around your temple.
That piece of the brain is responsible for our emotions, consolidating our memories, and looking at that as a system like a gated community. Your subconscious also has no concept of time or actual reality. This piece of your brain makes up something we call emotional reality. So if you think it or believe it to be true, this brain doesn't know any different.
It's highly programmable, and this is why it's really important to focus on what you want, not what you don't want, because that brain can't tell the actual difference. So if this was a gated community, let's look at them as if they're delusional. Every person in this community is absolutely delusional. Some of them are in the best way, [00:05:00] delusional, others are in a harmful way, delusional.
Now, in this community, you have creators, artists, intuitives , and a lot of community-based members because those are things the subconscious or emotional brain really do care about. Now imagine you have a police station in this brain, and this is what we actually have kind of in our subconscious, is we have something called the amygdala. The amygdala is your brain's threat detector. It's almost like the police force. It's here to protect and serve you, and it has two jobs to protect you or keep you safe and to be energy efficient. So inside this imaginary community, you have the police station. Now the police station is designed to react to any threat and just like a real life police station, if somebody calls in a report or a tip, then they're obligated to [00:06:00] investigate What tends to happen if you put this police station in a delusional community like your subconscious, you are going to have someone calling in false tips.
And the police station, if they're obligated to react, will send out the equivalent of the SWAT team every single time. Because your brain is designed to keep you safe, and it doesn't do it in a gentle way. It assumes that every threat is a threat to your very life and existence. So SWAT team gets sent out every single call. Cat in a tree, SWAT team.
Someone breaking into a store. SWAT team, there's no difference. This brain cannot tell the difference between a real threat or what's called a perceived threat. In the last episode, we talked all about perceived threats. Now, imagine a new person moves into this community.
They've lived in the outside world, the [00:07:00] real world, and we're gonna call them our logical brain. The logical brain is not delusional. So suddenly we have this person in our delusional community who is able to go, oh, something weird is happening here. And imagine this scenario. Someone called in a tip to the police station that said there is a tiger rampaging down Main Street.
Now again, your police station will send the SWAT team out to investigate because it doesn't know if it's real or not. So it sends massive force every single time. Now when you do not have logic on board, the SWAT team is gonna stick around. It's gonna look in every alley, it's gonna go door to door, and it's going to be looking for the threat.
It's not going to stop looking until you give it some sort of logical stand down alert message. So we're going to assign our brand new [00:08:00] person in this community, the logical person that job. Let's pretend it's head of the HOA. And this person gets a text alert Tiger Rampaging through downtown.
Stay away from Main Street. So, because this is a logical person who knows, this is a gated community. No one in this community has a tiger. And I'm gonna go check this out for myself. So they walk down to Main Street, see no actual tiger other than a stuffed animal on the sidewalk. It is shaped like a tiger.
So theoretically it's not wrong. There's a tiger on Main Street, but it's a stuffed animal, not an actual real life tiger mauling people on Main Street. This logical brain has the ability to send out a text, call the police and say, stand down, this is not real. Go back, call off the SWAT team. Everything is fine.
And you have about two minutes to do this, and I'm speaking in real life terms here. You cannot [00:09:00] control the SWAT team that gets sent out. This is unconscious. The amygdala will send signals to your brainstem to begin to prepare you to fight or flight. It thinks everything is real. And so you will have a physiological response.
You will get more blood that's sent to your muscles and your extremities. Your eyes will dilate to see threats better. Your breathing will speed up to increase the oxygen flow to your muscles in case you have to run or fight. This is real. This is out of your conscious control, except within the first two minutes.
Your brain sends a fast response signal to the brainstem to get this going immediately within microseconds, but it also sends a separate signal to your logical brain and says, Hey, can you assess this to make sure this threat is a real tiger? Or is it a stuffed animal? And you have a two minute window to call this whole thing [00:10:00] off if you do it.
Here's the catch, and , if you go back and listen to the last episode of this podcast, you're going to see that it is your thoughts that kick this cascade up and make it last longer than two minutes. When you do not engage your logical brain, you're letting the monkeys run the show. You are letting delusional people call in false tips to your police station.
And you keep activating your internal SWAT team over and over and over. You did that by contributing to the delusion in the neighborhood. You don't have to do that, my friends. There is a system that I teach my clients, it's called *Rapid Regulation.* It is a form of thought mastery. It teaches you how to reengage your logical brain so that you stop this cascade in two minutes or less.
Now, I recently saw someone who does nervous system [00:11:00] regulation that said, you can't think your way out of anxiety. I 100% disagree with this. Maybe that person hasn't taught their people or they don't believe it's true to think your way out of anxiety.
But I'm here to tell you, you absolutely can, and one of the ways that you can do it is not let it create a cascade over two minutes and it's very simple. Catch it. Stop it. Redirect. Move forward. You're going to bring your logical brain on board to stop the delusional threat cascade that you yourself have created in some section of your brain.
It was well intentioned, but it's not real. And when you do this system that I teach my clients, you're quickly able to separate real from not real, stop the cascade and you stop the worry. Worry is a misuse of imagination. And if you did not stop this threat [00:12:00] cascade, you are imagining a tiger rampaging down main street, breaking into shops, chasing people up trees.
Your brain will take things to the worst case scenario always because that's what it's designed to do unless you stop it. And this is what I can teach you to do, my friend. All right. If this sounds amazing and you want to bring some of this goodness into your life, then I'm going to invite you to go over to aprildarley.com and schedule a free consultation where we can talk about where you are letting this cascade run the show in your life, and it can show up absolutely anywhere. About your romantic relationships, your work, and your very identity, what you think about yourself, every piece of your life can benefit from knowing how to control your thoughts and to creating mastery with them instead of being reactive and beholden to [00:13:00] them. That is the difference. All right, my friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode and I would love to hear from you. Please share it with your friends, drop a comment below or leave a review. All of those are very important to me and very appreciated. Until next week, my friends. Goodbye.
