Finally and Forever Breaking The Cycle

This is a special episode today because we’ve got Easter Sunday coming up in just a couple of days, and this is a really cool time of year, and as we go through this, please share this out with at least three people because this is hopefully going to shift the course in your life today and this weekend, and hopefully for everybody that you share this with it very well could. This time of year, whether you’re involved in religion, whether you’re involved in any kind of belief in a higher power, let’s just focus on what this season is today. Because Easter is always used as this framing of new beginnings and moving forward with things and almost like killing the past and letting the past die, and it’s even better than a New Year’s resolution to me. Yeah, you know how I feel about resolutions, and I’m not even going to get into that because they suck. They’re stupid, you know, it’s like New Year fresh, whatever. But Easter’s always like around springtime, right? Because especially if you’re in the Midwest, where I met Chicago, or anywhere, right, where there’s this huge seasonal shift, it’s when the warmth starts to come out again, I mean, I would even have my pool open towards the beginning of April every year.

So around that Easter time, and it’s just all these new things, right, you get the smell of spring, as the trees start to bloom and all the foliage starts to come back, the grass starts to turn green. Again, it’s all these things, these visual cues around you, in your environment, that there’s something new and good that’s happening, and it just helps us feel good. It helps us realize that maybe there is something that is shifting right now around me, and we’ll talk about that today about this fresh start, because we’re going to dive into the brain, and some things about anxiety. There’s things I’ve been reading about from psychologists, and also been speaking with psychologists about this, and just some general conceptions around these things and how you really can legitimately, and for real once and for all, you could make that shift this weekend and start this path. This isn’t going to be I want to give you a heads up, this isn’t going to be like immediate, okay, everything is cool now. But this could be the start of everything new and fresh for you.

So let’s talk about our brains. Our brains are, obviously, they run a lot of functions that our body but when it comes to emotions, it’s really tied back to the brain, same function as it is for our body, and you know what that is, it’s to keep us frickin alive, right, because if you look at when the body dies, right at the end of someone’s life, their heart stops pumping, there’s still brain activity that’s measurable after the heart stops pumping, and if somebody is on monitors and all that, you know, they’re really sick, and in an ICU or something, the time of death is actually recorded when the brain stops. Even if the brain is, you know, like in the situation of a stroke or something because my mother’s husband had one. I remember seeing this with him when a stroke cuts off oxygen to the brain, right. And when this happens, your body actually increases the blood pressure and your heart beats faster, because it’s trying to push more oxygen to your brain. It’s trying to do other things, and like when people get hypothermia or something like that, you know, because they’re in cold water for too long. Your brain starts to tell your body to remove the blood from your limbs and keep it more towards the center of your core. This is all the functionality of your brain.

So I’ll ask you a question if this is really what your brain is supposed to do, to keep you alive. How could this be any different with emotions? This is how your brain’s functions. Your brain is there to keep you alive, not to keep you happy. Now there’s certain stimuli and everything of course that we’re going to talk about because I want to ask you some questions today. But we’ll start out with this big one right. Close your eyes just for a moment. as you’re listening to me, just close your eyes for a quick moment, and just put yourself in this nothingness, right, you can start to let everything else fade from being around, you start to think of nothing else. Just like you’re in this void, right? There’s all these things swirling everything that’s in your life right now all the good, all the bad is just kind of swirling around you, and you can see it from where you’re at. You see everything just kind of like the past before you that’s going on in your life right now, and here’s the question: How often do you worry about the future? How often do you worry about the future, and someone called that anxiety? Psychologist, the one that I was talking to called that anxiety. But what anxiety really is, is like a super sensitive threat scanner. ‘

Now, I’m not a psychologist, I’ve talked to many. I’ve read a lot about this. I’m not one. But what I can see is that anxiety really is like a super sensitive threat scanner. It’s interesting, right? Because you look at when you ask this question, like how often do you worry about the future? You know, it’s like, what could go wrong? What if x happens? How do I really know, and you become anxious about something that hasn’t even happened yet. Something that may not even happen, something that likely would not happen. But you start to get wrapped up in this because you start to just put yourself in that moment in the future, and this starts to really tear you down. Because then you look at the future, but you’re trying to pull from your past. You’re trying to pull from things that have happened already. It actually becomes like a moment of introspection, you’re looking inward, and instead of saying, “Oh, all these things happen to be what most of us will tend to do is all the shooters, could us, and would us, I should have done this. Man, I could have done that. If I would have only gone this route, instead, I’d be in a different spot right now, and then I wouldn’t have to ask this question about what’s going to happen tomorrow, or next year, or three years from now.”

It becomes a swirl of actually beating yourself up because of bad choices that you made, or choices that you didn’t even make, which by the way, when you don’t make a choice, that’s actually making a choice, I’m just going to call it out for what it is. But this is where anxiety comes into play. Because you’re looking at all these should have could have What does and then it’s you worry about the future, and what could go wrong? What if x happens and then you start to get really down on yourself about all these things, and this is why anxiety and depression are linked. Is because all the worry happens, and it starts to feel like there’s no way out. It starts to feel like everything is closing in around you. Remember that vision that I just said close your eyes? How many of you started to see all those things in your life as you’re trying to push them away?

When you did that, just now you started to see them getting closer and closer and closer to you because it’s hard to push them away. It’s hard to see anything else but the bad. When all you focus on is the bad. This is when anxiety and depression get linked together. Why do they do that? See, there’s actually physical things that happen with your brain trying to keep you alive, because when it does it’s like “Oh, I don’t want to go through this bad stuff again. So I’m going to try to avoid all the possible scenarios where this bad thing could happen to me again.” Then what happens it’s this vicious cycle, because then you choose not to go after these things, it could be somebody really amazing that you might want to spend the rest of your life with it could be a new job, that might change the course of your career, it might be an investment, that would make you Uber wealthy. But because somebody treated you poorly before, or you got fired from a job, or you lost a lot of money. Now I’m not going to do that. I’m going to avoid all the scenarios that could potentially make me happy just because there’s a possibility that something could go bad. Then this cycle returns and you retrospect on those new opportunities, those new people and it becomes again, I should have done that. I could have done that, and this vicious cycle just goes round and round and round and round and round because the brain will always return to negative thoughts.

The brain will always return to negative thoughts because we wear those into our, into our neural pathways like a, like a well trodden trail in a forest. Trails aren’t made all at once trails in a forest are made because people continuously walk down that same path over and over again, to where that becomes something as you look at a ginormous forest of possibilities in which way to go like, Oh, I see 1000 People went over here before because I see this path. That’s where I’m going to head your brain does the same thing with all the negativity? How do you break out of this? That gets to be the really interesting part. Because it’s hard, especially when you’re in the cycle, it’s hard to see outside of it. When you had your eyes closed. Could you see past all that swirling crap of life around you right now? Probably not. This is why you have to imagine what’s beyond that. And you start to ask yourself questions like, what would be the worst that would happen if I did this? What good thing could happen if I did this? How could I choose a different path this time, so that something good really happens? Rather than avoiding just the bad? See the difference in that, and this is the trick is creating these new trails, because a path has to start somewhere, and this sucks. This is hard. This is really freaking hard.

Because there’s these amazing cells, and I read about this in a Harvard Medical Journal if they’re called Glial cells. They’re like the janitors of your brain, and what happens with your neural pathways, these trails that you make there like think of them as like tiny strands. Every time you think that thought again, and think that thought again, and think that thought, again, it’s just like building muscle in your body, you have these things that continuously compound on top of each other, and they become so strong, and so wide, to where it’s super easy for thought patterns to flow down these paths, these trails that you’ve created for yourself, because of the situations, it might not have been your fault to begin with, that something happened to you or maybe not even a bad choice, or it could have been a shoulda, coulda, woulda, but then you return to those, and it keeps reinforcing this path of negativity that you’ve created in your mind, and what happens, these Glial cells at their janitor cells that go in your brain, and they actually see like, the glimpse of an old thought that was a good thing, an amazing thing, things when your way you caught a break here, you smiled, and those become a distant memory. And those gender cells are saying, well, he’s not thinking this way anymore. She’s not thinking that way anymore.

We don’t need that. Let’s go cut that tree down, let’s kill that pathway. Because there’s more room that we need for all these new ways that this person that is that this brain is thinking. But when you can ask some of these questions and start to form new paths. And there’s two big ways and I’m going to give you to do this, like what would happen if or what’s the what’s the worst that would happen? Should I go down this path? Should I make this new decision? The way do you forge these new paths? Even, and it becomes easier to ask these questions. First, remember at the beginning when I was talking about spring, and everything around you and all of the green grass coming up, and then the trees starting to have their leaves and the smell of freshness in the air. That’s the environment here. There’s reasons why people in the Midwest go down to Florida, or so are some other tropical environments in the wintertime because it changes their environment or reinvigorates them.

You literally get reinvigorated from the vitamin D in the sun from the Sun that you don’t get past like September 15. Up until March 15 Yes, six months out of the year. In Chicago where I live, you don’t even get vitamin D from the sun during those times, which is something that that stimulates all the serotonin and the good feelings and the dopamine and everything else in your brain to changing your environments is the fastest way to pattern interrupt this super strong negative trail that you’ve created in your head and then once you change your environment you can start to become clear about things, you can start to actually see things besides that swirl of negativity around you. Then the next step is to take action, to actually choose to actually make a choice to jump into something that would be incredible for you, and you know what, there will be risk there, there will be the possibility that you might get burned again. But what if it becomes the best thing that you ever did, and you just completely killed the shoulda, coulda, woulda as because you took a chance on the good. Now when you do this, you keep continuously doing this over and over and over again, because it’s an environment, then it’s taking action, and then the last one repeats.

That’s right, you keep circling back to the environment, taking action, repeat environment, taking action repeats. And then that new, amazing path just continuously builds up in your brain, it’s like it becomes a strong muscle, a strong neural connection, that now your brains like Well, this looks pretty cool. And now you’ve got the benefits of all the, the emotional in the, the, the dopamine and the serotonin, and all of those amazing things that feel good in those moments too, when you go back to those new anchor points, because you keep thinking down these new paths, and what happens then, is those glial cells that we were talking about a little bit ago, now that you’re best friends, because they’re going back and they’re seeing, Oh, this negative side over here, you know what? He’s not really thinking that way anymore. She’s not really thinking that way anymore, and then they start to sweep those up. Almost as if they never even existed. You’ve heard the phrase ‘Time heals all wounds,’ right. That applies here because you continuously build the strong, build that new positive connection by environments, action repeats, and then your brain, which is designed to keep you alive, sweeps away all the back. Isn’t that awesome? This weekend is time for your fresh start. This weekend is the time for you to shift. This weekend is the time to change your environment to take action to repeat and ask yourself the question. What’s the worst that would happen?

Episode References: 

Easter

Glial cells

Harvard Medical Journal

Serotonin

Dopamine

Episode Topics:

• Midwest Spring
• The bad cycles we put ourselves through