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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and earlier this week, I sent out an email to my list about how an untrained brain is a lot like an untrained dog. Imagine this scenario. You have two friends, and one friend has an absolute nightmare of a dog.
It's constantly jumping on you, trying to knock you down, doesn't understand the word no, and is chewing on your ankles or biting you or scratching you, and it is really difficult to enjoy time with your friend. What a nightmare, right? And then you have your other friend's dog. Now, your other friend has a dog that's so calm, it's chill, it knows fun tricks and commands, and it settles down pretty easily. So you have [00:01:00] no problem chatting with your friend.
Knowing this, which friend are you going to want to spend more time with and hang out at their house? Obviously, the one with the well-behaved dog. When dogs or brains are not trained, it just makes everyone's life more difficult. Not just for you who are living with an untrained brain, but for the people you interact with or care for in your life.
What do I mean by an untrained brain? It feels like worst-case scenarios. There's a lot of fear. You get stuck in these doom loops that you find it very difficult to get out of, and it pushes you into a reactive state. You might lash out at your boss, coworkers, or loved ones, or you feel a sense of anxiety that is so strong it almost [00:02:00] shuts you down.
And for some people, it absolutely can put them in a freeze state where they do shut down and they have to withdraw from the world just to recover. These are some examples of an untrained brain. So how do we train your brain? Well, this is something that I do for my clients very easily, and I'm going to give you an example because it's a lot like learning to drive for the first time.
I want you to remember back. Now, I am Gen X, and so that is a lot of decades back for me to when I was first learning how to drive. But until you are about fifteen or sixteen, you watched your parents drive. You were in the passenger seat, so you knew that there was a gear shift. And again, back for Gen X, it was on the steering column.
It was in the way. It wasn't in the center console all nice and polite off to the side like it is. No, it was right [00:03:00] there. You knew logically there were a few pedals, depending on if you had an automatic or a stick shift, and you saw your parents drive with relative ease. So there's a piece of you that thought, _"This is going to be a piece of cake, no problem."_
And if you're like me, you had driver's ed in school, where the first several weeks you learn about the rules of the road, you maybe see pictures of the inside of a car, and you learn about what the different parts and pieces of the car are, and you think, _"No problem, I have got this."_ Because we have that cockiness of youth that thinks,_ "No big deal."_
But when you finally get into the driver's seat, you turn the ignition, reality hits you because then you realize, _"Oh, I'm supposed to be paying attention to all of these other things. I have to keep my car in between the lines in the road, _[00:04:00] _stay in my lane."_ And the first time another car approaches you from the opposite direction, you are convinced that you are gonna have a head-on collision and die.
You remember that feeling? Maybe you don't because it was so long ago. But it probably took you at least a year or two of successful driving before you created this muscle memory or this automatic pilot that you stopped worrying about all the rules of the road. And yes, you still have to pay attention and check your speed, but it's not a nightmare or anxiety producing for most people like it was back then.
And training your brain is just like that. When you first begin, it's going to feel like a really hard thing to do, and there's a few reasons for that. There are some people that you already know, [00:05:00] you might have friends or family members that are in these occupations, but military forces, soldiers or elite squads, first responders, paramedics, emergency room doctors and nurses, firefighters, all these people have professions where they run toward danger.
And you might be going, _"Yeah, but I'm not like that. There's something that makes them very special."_ And there might be a predisposition to do that, but all of us, as a human, we are naturally and instinctually hardwired to shy away from danger if we can, and we will prioritize paying attention to danger, but it is not our reflex to just charge right into it.
Otherwise, from an evolutionary perspective, none of us would be here because that dinosaur would've smashed us. Okay? We have to train our brain to run [00:06:00] head-on to danger or to be courageous and stand our ground when it's coming right at us. And those professions that I've mentioned had to go through training to deal with that.
Now, there is an action step toward that, which is facing the danger that's coming at you or the situation that's important right now, but the other phase is a recovery phase. So training your brain doesn't mean shoving things down and never dealing with it, but it is about gear shifting a little bit.
It's not compartmentalizing, because that isn't quite the right word, although it may feel like that, is you shift a gear, you shift the fear into a different gear so that you're able to deal with the situation head-on. And when that situation is complete, then you shift back into a [00:07:00] recovery method. You get into trouble if you stay action-oriented or you do compartmentalize with the intention of suppressing, and you don't allow yourself to de-stress or recover.
This is where you can see burnout or PTSD. So it is not noble to stay on action mode all the time, and our ego would like to tell us that's more resilient. But the truth is, our brains, our bodies, our nervous system, they need the recovery and the rest phase equally as much as they need the courage in the action phase.
The good news is your brain only has three gears. That's it. First, second, and third gear. And if you are someone who drives for many decades, and even if you've got an automatic car like me and you don't have a stick shift, you can still [00:08:00] understand that your car will shift gears when you reach a certain speed.
And if you try to go 70 miles an hour in first gear, it's just not going to work because it's the wrong gear for what you're trying to do. Your brain works the very same way. Think about it this way. First gear is your survival brain. So when you are in a fear-based state, you feel that adrenaline pumping, you get triggered toward threat or action, that's your gear. If you get trapped in this gear, it means your brain cannot move past that state easily.
You get sucked in. You can easily fall into victim mode. You can be shut down by anxiety, pretty much paralyzed with fear. That's first gear. Second gear, it's like relaxing with your favorite people, having a good meal, watching a movie. You're pretty calm. You're [00:09:00] really balanced. You're enjoying life. And the third gear is when you're in boss babe mode.
You can organize. You can plan. It's all about strategy and achievements. These gears are available to you at all times, and what I teach my clients to do with the Rapid Regulation Method is to look and observe which gear you're in, first, second, or third. Then which gear do you need to be in to get stuff done or to stabilize?
It's gonna be second or third gear, okay? It will never be stay in first gear unless you are actually in a life or death situation. You need to change gears, and I will show you how to change gears. There are steps that you want to do consistently to build up this muscle memory. Just like these elite special forces [00:10:00] or these trauma responders, you can do this too, and it doesn't require you to be a special type of person with extra courage.
You just haven't been shown how to do it. Just like that unruly dog hasn't been trained what manners are. It hasn't been trained on what is appropriate and desirable behavior versus scared and reactionary behavior. This is what we do inside of my *Decode* and *Amplify* private one-on-one coaching programs If you see the benefit of this in your life, and right now your brain is like an unruly dog that is making your life and the lives of the people around you a little bit miserable and unhappy, you don't have to stay stuck with an unruly brain or reactionary behavior.
It really is as easy as switching gears or flipping a [00:11:00] switch when you're shown how to do it. Now, there is accountability on your part, is you do have to practice it consistently. It's not something that you can just learn and stick in a drawer somewhere. It's like a first aid kit. This is why people do fire drills, is because they need to create this muscle memory so that when emergencies happen, you know exactly what to do because you've trained your brain so many times to do it.
That is what elite brain training is like. That is mental mastery, and it is absolutely possible for you. So if your life is this weird mix of anxiety and reactionary behavior, I'm here to offer you a little bit of hope. It doesn't have to stay that way, but you do have to take the first steps, which is give me a call.
Book a consultation call, or [00:12:00] go right into your appointment if you are ready to get started, and I will show you this method of how to make your brain work for you instead of you being held hostage by this unruly dog that is your brain. All right, my friend, I'm wishing you so much calm and chill and success this week, and I will see you next week.
