How to Stop Worrying: Talk to Your Brain Instead of Listening – Episode #728

Show Notes

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Dr. Paul Jenkins explains that your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Fear and anxiety come from the brain anticipating threats, even imagined ones. Avoidance and procrastination are the brain trying to reduce discomfort. Negative thinking and rumination are attempts to solve problems. These protective functions can be helpful, but they can also get in the way when the brain treats a perceived threat like immediate danger.

 

Dr. Paul asks a question that can change how you understand your reactions: How old does your brain think you are? Many emotional patterns develop when we're young, at a time when we didn't have the resources and life experience we have now. An old protective response might activate before you consciously evaluate your present situation. Your brain may be responding to today's circumstances with yesterday's programming.

 

Dr. Paul offers a three-step practice for talking to your brain instead of just listening to it. First, notice what your brain is doing. Second, acknowledge your brain's protective intention. Third, offer a new direction. Understanding creates an opportunity for change, and repetition helps establish new patterns. The episode discusses how daily practice on the Positives platform can support this transformational learning.

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Hello my friend. This is episode 728. Your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Hey, what if your brain is actually on your side? Have you ever been frustrated with your own brain, uh, asking questions like, why do I keep worrying about things I can't control? Why do I procrastinate when I know what I need to get done? Why do I keep thinking about something that happened years ago? We sometimes become our own harshest critics because of the way our brains operate. And so surprise, your brain is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's trying to take care of you. By the end of this episode, you'll have a different way to understand your brain, a fascinating question to ask about your automatic reactions, and I'm going to give you a practical strategy for taking greater control of your thinking. Are you ready for this? So first, let's dive into this. Your brain is trying to take care of you.

It is designed to anticipate threats and that includes managing discomfort, helping us to survive. You may have even heard me say this before that our brain has two main jobs. It's to keep you safe and to prove you right. And both of those can get in our way or get us into trouble all the time. But this job to keep you safe is the most important thing your brain can do because if you're not safe, your brain's not going to survive either. So fear and anxiety are the feelings that we have when we anticipate danger. And your brain is really good at trying to predict. Now notice I said it's really good at trying to predict because accurate prediction, not so much. I remember a little joke that my friends and I used to share growing up in the mountains of Utah, and there was... There were days when we'd say, yeah, I had a foot and a half of partly cloudy on my doorstep today because the weatherman would get it wrong. It's partly cloudy and then we get a foot and a half of snow. Your brain predicts things that might go wrong and it doesn't mean that it's accurate. It just means that it's really good at trying to predict And it will activate a protective response, we call it the fight or flight response, before a threat necessarily occurs and even if there's not a real threat on the horizon.

So sometimes your brain is going to treat imagined possibilities like an immediate danger. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. If you go to a and it's one of those intense movies, you know, that, um, it it really engages you and you find your heart rate starting to increase and and your breathing gets kind of fast and jello, You're not in danger. You're in a theater. It's light on a screen and sound from the Dolby. Well, does your brain know See, part of your brain cannot discern between a threat that is real and a threat that is perceived. And this is exactly by design because that part of your brain is like the emergency response system. It's it's job is not to think things through and analyze and carefully dissect and audit everything that's going on. No. It just reacts. And so it will treat those imagined or perceived threats exactly like it would in immediate imminent danger. So I gave you the example of the theater, but what if you're about to have a difficult conversation with a loved one? Are you in danger? Now, there's a part of your brain that's going to think, yeah, yeah, that really is risky. Really? Is it? Or you've got a pending deadline at work. Still looks like a threat to your brain. You're not in danger, but your system has been activated.

So fear and anxiety is one way that our brain tries to take care of us. Here's another one. Avoidance and procrastination. This is your brain trying to reduce discomfort. Avoidance can give you some immediate emotional relief from whatever it is that you're worried about. Our brains learn which kind of behaviors are going to temporarily reduce unpleasant feelings. And to your brain, now pain is always greater than later pain because we tell ourselves this story that maybe we can avoid the later pain. When we really think about it, we know that it's But still our brain is going to try to help us avoid the now pain. Uh, so an example of this is scrolling on your phone. You know, the death scroll. Uh, scrolling on your phone instead of addressing an uncomfortable task. And that short term relief sometimes comes at the expense of long term progress, but it's our brain trying to take care of us. Here's another example: negative thinking and rumination. And this is your brain trying to solve problems, but a lot of times it comes up with problems, it imagines problems, and then gives itself the task to try to solve that. So your brain will sometimes revisit painful experiences in an attempt to understand or prevent them from happening again. Or it may repeatedly rehearse conversations or mistakes. You know those loops that you get into? I coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Mentally replaying a critical comment that someone made long after the interaction happened. Um, and this repetition can continue even when it no longer produces any useful insight. It's just your brain trying to get in the reps on problem solving. It's doing what it's designed to do. Here's another one: habits and automatic thinking.

This is your brain trying to conserve effort. Your brain is the biggest energy hog of your entire system. Every other system in your body uses less energy than your And so our brain learns patterns so that we don't have to consciously reconsider every single response.

Familiar thoughts become easier to access. So we do this, um, and I call this neural pathways too. When we actually create through repetition, we we create kind of a cruise control or autopilot in our brain. Um, and this can extend into how we think about ourselves or our emotional health or how we relate to other people. An example is automatically assuming someone is upset when they don't respond to a message that you sent them. Okay. That's a habit. That's an automatic thought. It's not necessarily true. But your brain is going to try to conserve energy and just give you the default response. Learned patterns can be updated though through new experience and practice and this is good news. It's the whole reason that we built daily positives into our new platform over at positives.life. These functions that our brain is doing to take care of us can be really helpful and protective and they can get in our way. Because like I said earlier, the brain does not discern typically, at least that part of the brain, doesn't discern between a real threat and a perceived threat.

So your brain is working hard to protect even when its methods are a little clumsy or not completely relevant to every situation. Sometimes your brain's best effort to protect you creates the very discomfort that you're trying to escape. And here's a question that I've asked many of my clients that can change the way they understand their own reactions. How old does your brain think you are?

The protective programming of our early can continue operating in adulthood. So how old does your brain think you are? Now just pause and let that land for a minute. Many of our emotional patterns develop when we're young, at a time when we didn't have the kind of resources and life experience that we have now. And these childhood experiences teach us what feels threatening or embarrassing or unsafe or uncomfortable. And the brain learns protective responses based on the resources available at the time.

So those patterns can persist and even continue into adulthood after we've developed more maturity and strength and skills and options. So a child might learn, for example, that mistakes lead to harsh criticisms from the big people. So years later, that same child as an adult becomes unusually anxious about disappointing a supervisor they don't say something or speak up because they're afraid of the backlash. The old protective response might activate before, as an adult, you even have consciously evaluated your circumstance, your present situation, and what you can do with the new set of skills and maturity and strength that you've worked so hard to Um, on avoiding conflict, a child might discover that staying quiet helps to avoid some of the unpleasant confrontations. And then as an adult, that person struggles to have necessary conversations. Their brain is still operating from an earlier understanding of what keeps them safe. Or the fear of rejection, early experiences of exclusion or embarrassment or being left out. And then later difficulty taking social risks or asking for what we need or want or expressing our opinions. An old learned response can be understandable without being the most useful response today.

Things have changed. You have changed. Not every adult reaction comes from childhood. I'm not saying But recognizing that there's some possible early that's contributing to this pattern can help us to respond more thoughtfully and more intentionally. Your brain may be responding to today's circumstances with yesterday's programming.

Now you've grown Your brain may still be using some of the protective strategies it learned when you were and awareness precedes choice. So I just invite you to take a look at Let's just see if that holds some water somewhere. You have resources today that you didn't have when that pattern was first established.

So how do we help our brains recognize that things have changed? And this is where one of my favorite strategies come Talk to your brain instead of just listening to it. Metacognition is something that I love to teach in my keynotes and in the trainings that I do where we stop to think about our own thinking. Metacognition, break that down. The When you when you look at cognition, that means thinking. Metacognition is a higher It's thinking about our thinking. We have the remarkable ability to notice and think about our own thoughts. And this gets a little loopy so stay with But we can observe a thought, right, without automatically accepting it as accurate or acting on This is really important. It creates an opportunity to respond intentionally.

The tone of our response matters. So compassion and curiosity, for example, can make it easier to examine difficult patterns without adding another layer of self criticism and beating ourselves up for we should be thinking differently. Let's have a lot of compassion So here's a simple three step practice that you can try. Step one. Notice what your brain is doing. Just become aware of it. Oh, oh, my brain thinks I'm going to be rejected. Or, My brain wants me to avoid this conversation. Oh, I see my brain doing that again, replaying that same mistake. Just notice it. Maybe give some words to it because that separates you from it just a little. And then step two, acknowledge your brain's protective intention. Thank you. I I like to talk to my brain this way. Thank you for trying to protect me. Oh, there we go again. I can see you're concerned about what might happen. Or I appreciate that you're looking out for me And then offer a new direction. So this is step three. I've got this. I'm capable of handling this conversation. We can take the next step even with some uncertainty. We're not sure what's gonna happen. That's okay. So you're offering your brain a whole new direction. And this is part of what I meant by talk to your brain. Don't just listen to it. As your brain's freaking out, you can say, Oh, I see. You're anticipating rejection. Thank you for trying to protect me. It's cool. I've got this. I'm capable of handling this.

This might sound a little crazy. In fact, be careful that other people maybe don't under... Overhear you talking to your brain. But getting in the habit of giving your brain more instruction is probably more useful than just letting your thoughts run you. And I really believe that either we run our thoughts or our thoughts run So I know what my preference Imagine, um, someone who needs to have a difficult conversation with a colleague or spouse or a teenager, their brain anticipates rejection or conflict. Right? This is the shortcut that your brain has already set up. And then they feel anxious and want to avoid the conversation. So if they recognize the protective response, oh, there's my brain. Doing what brains do again. There I go, being human again. My brain is trying to protect me. And then acknowledge the brain's intention, I know you're trying to just take care of me here, and then deliberately choose a constructive next step. Okay? I've got this. Thank you for trying to protect me. I've got this. This sounds a little crazy, but I think as you start talking to your brain instead of just listening to it, you can appreciate what your brain is trying to do for you, what which it was designed to do, and then teaching it a better way. A thought is something that your brain produces. You get to decide what to do with it.

Now, if you've ever tried to change a long established habit, you probably already know that understanding it is only the beginning. That's where it starts. There's two kinds of learning. There's breakthrough, that's the moment, and there's transformational learning, which is more like learning a language or an instrument. Understanding this creates an opportunity for It's repetition that helps establish a new pattern. Our brains learn through experience and repetition. So these automatic responses that have already been reinforced a lot of times in the past, we can practice noticing those responses and then choosing some alternatives that may serve us better. These new thinking patterns become more accessible with constant practice.

Constant, right? All the time? No. But it needs to be consistent enough that there's a rhythm and a pattern that actually helps to establish the new neural pathways. And the progress can be pretty gradual, especially when there's deeply established emotional habits. So be very patient with yourself. Have a lot of grace for your brain that's doing exactly what it's designed to do.

Your brain learned to protect you through all of your experiences and it can learn new ways to support you through your experience. This is good news. I would encourage you to try those three steps. Um, just once again, it's notice what your brain is doing, that's step one. Number two, acknowledge and thank your brain for its protective intention. And then three, offer a new direction. And really anything along the lines of, I've got this, I can handle this, I'm capable of taking this on, That's all you really need to tell your brain at that point.

Talk to your brain instead of just listening to Practice the new repetitions that that will create those neural pathways. I would encourage you to continue to move forward with daily practice. And I've talked about this in some of the previous episodes. If you haven't yet checked out our Positives platform, we're giving you the daily, weekly, monthly repetition and rhythm that really helps to establish those transitional moments for you. The the transformational learning that can't happen on a Saturday. It happens over time with consistent practice. The daily positives are designed to give people a few minutes each day to step out of that automatic thinking process and practice a more intentional response. I think this is something that will really help you to reprogram your brain. So come take a look at it, if you would. Check out the platform. Give the daily positives a try. Your brain is trying to take care of you. Some of its strategies might have developed a long time ago, they became habitual. You can become aware of those strategies and awareness precedes choice. Then you can respond with kindness and gratitude and offer a new direction to that brain that is so willing to do whatever it can to support you. With practice, you can build a more helpful with your own brain and your own thinking. Your brain's on your team. K? And the more you understand how it works, the better you can work together.