Sometimes Your Brain Lies to You

Have you ever sat at a stop light and the car next to you starts to inch forward but you don't see it that way? You actually feel like you are rolling backwards. It's because sometimes our brain lies to us. Not to be malicious but to keep us safe. The problem is that we believe the lies and they tend to not serve us very well. Listen as I talk about ways your brain may be lying to you and what to do about it. 

https://jamelynstephan.com

https://jamelynstephan.com/meet-with-me/

https://www.instagram.com/jamelyn_stephan_coaching/

jamelyn@jamelynstpehan.com

Transcript

Yeti Stereo Microphone-4 0:00

I'm Jamila and Stefan, and this is want to wanted episode number 84. Sometimes your brain lies to you.

0:06

Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan. I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well

Yeti Stereo Microphone-4 0:32

Hello everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. I am actually really glad for this opportunity to sit down and just take a minute to record. We have a big wedding coming up this weekend. My second daughter is getting married. It's very exciting. We love, love the boy that she's marrying. We've, I feel like we've, like, really done well. We're two for two. Really great in laws in our family and, such a blessing. But, you know, I... have lots of thoughts about me as a wedding planner. The last wedding I did was a COVID wedding and I didn't feel like I did that very great. It's just a thought, but definitely high learning curve for me right now. So it's been really, really fascinating to watch myself plan this wedding, but it's very exciting. By the time this comes out, actually, the wedding will be over, so I will be in a different place in my brain, that's for sure. So, given that this wedding is breathing down my neck, today I just want to share a short podcast with you, just to give you something to think about. And it's about the idea that sometimes our brain lies to us. Now, it isn't, Meaning to be deceptive, it's most often just trying to keep us safe, or trying to make sense of the input going in, and most often it does that using past experience. So here's a few examples of what I mean about your brain lying to you. When I was a little girl, maybe two or three years old, I remember taking a bath and my mom would reach in and pull the plug out of the tub before I'd gotten out of the bathtub and this terrified me. I would leap out of the tub like a bear was on my tail because I believed so completely that I was going to get sucked down the drain. Now of course it was completely physically impossible, but my brain, my hardworking, keep me safe brain told me that I was going to get sucked down the drain and die. And I hated it when my mom would do that to me. Like she'd pull the plug as I'm sitting in the tub and honestly I was like, don't you care about my life? And even though she told me that I was okay, my brain told me I was definitely not okay to be in the tub when the water was draining out of it. Now, I don't remember exactly when, but probably not too many years after this, I realized that this was all a lie. That I could never possibly be sucked down the drain, and now I shower and bathe with complete peace and confidence. Along this same line, I have had little kids who are terrified of the vacuum cleaner. Their brain tells them that they are going to get run over and sucked into the machine. Now, it's completely irrational from my perspective, but they believe it with all their soul, and they would run for their lives. Literally run for their lives when I would start up the vacuum cleaner. Now, I'm imagining that if we'd had like a Roomba, just marching around our house, I could have started that baby up, and I probably would have had 30 good minutes all to myself just reading a book and hanging out. Have you ever stopped and At a stoplight and the car next to you inches forward and you can kind of see it out of the side of your eye and your brain tells you that your car is rolling back.

Yeti Stereo Microphone-5 3:39

I have, and I instinctively just like push super hard on my brakes. This phenomenon is called vection. I'd never known what it was called, but I looked it up today. Vection is defined as a feeling that you're moving. Even though you're immobile and it's brought on by seeing something else that is moving now Even though we're holding still our brain lies to us and says we are moving again It's not being malicious or trying to tease us. It's just trying to make sense of the input It's receiving and then working to keep us safe What about those things you see on social media where people will ask you What colors do you think are on this dress or on these shoes? I don't know. Have your kids ever shown you these things? Do you see white and gold or do you see blue and black? It's the craziest thing because I will see it totally different than someone else. Like sometimes if I try really hard I can start to kind of see what they're seeing, but most of the time I'm like, what are you talking about? It is clearly not that color. Who's seeing it right? Is my brain lying to me or is theirs? Are we both right? Are neither of us right? It's the craziest thing. Over the last year or so, I have started to have really vivid dreams. Now, I've always dreamed that these are different, these are dreams where I feel like I'm awake and I see someone in my room. Or, I think I'm actually sleeping somewhere else and I can't figure out where that is. A few weeks ago, I was nightly having dreams that my camping trailer was being crushed around me and I was trapped in it. And I would wake up, pushing on the walls and the cupboards around me, trying to, keep myself from being trapped. None of it was real, but my brain was telling me it was all very real. I remember since I was a little kid. All the way up to being, I am mom. I really hated to be home alone, especially at night, which is not an awesome fear to have when your husband has to be on call a lot, but my brain would lie to me all night long. Like, did you hear that? I think someone's in the house. I remember so many nights just being pinned to my bedsheets in terror because of all that my brain was telling me that I was seeing and hearing. I recently wondered if someone was upset with me because I'd reached out and had heard nothing from them. And it turns out they were just super busy and under a lot of stress and didn't have time to say hi but so fascinating how my brain was like, she's mad at you. You've done something to offend her. And even though I honestly could not think of what I could have done that was offensive, because I hadn't really even seen her, it seemed completely logical once my brain offered me this thought that you've offended her. I was like, oh, I must have offended her. Did you ever see the Disney short called Inner Workings? It's about this man whose head is very practical, very pragmatic, but his heart is fun and spontaneous and always wanting to try new things. So every time his heart comes up with a great idea of something inspiring or new to do, his brain creates a scenario where he tries that thing and ends up dead. So at the end of every contradiction that the brain offers the heart is death. if you eat that, you're going to end up unhealthy and you'll die. If you talk to that girl, she's going to reject you and you will die. And so this man never gets to have any fun because his brain is always telling him death awaits him if he tries anything new. And I remember the first time I saw this because I'd finished my coach training and I had not only seen this so much in my own brain, but in the brains of my clients. Our brain wants to keep us safe and new things are not safe. So it lies to us and tells us that we're going to die. Now again, it's not lying to us because it's bad. It thinks it's telling us the truth. But just like the man from Inner Workings, this lie that we will die holds us back so much because we believe our brain. When I signed up for coach training, I thought I was going to die. When I started my business, I was sure I would die. Starting this podcast was terrifying. Even now, once in a while, my brain is like, if you put that podcast out, you will die. Now, maybe it doesn't quite say those words, but it's like, if you put that podcast out, no one is gonna like it, no one is gonna like you, you are gonna be out of the tribe, you will be a lone wanderer in the world, and you will die. So, what is there to do about a brain that lies to us sometimes? Because, it doesn't lie to us all the time necessarily, so how are we gonna know if it's lying to us? I don't know, maybe I shouldn't have even named this episode Sometimes Your Brain Lies To You. I guess it kind of seemed catchy? But it does sound like you should never trust your brain, and I don't really believe that, but I do believe that we have to be onto our brains and go back to the idea of the motivational triad. Left to its own devices, our brains will seek ease, Seek pleasure and avoid pain, or avoid things that could be dangerous. And so in an effort to keep us safe, it will sometimes tell us an untruth. So the first thing I would suggest when your brain offers you something is just question it. I would start with even, is this a fact or is this a thought? Because remember, facts have to be something that everyone in the world would agree is true. Like, this is water. You have 3, 000 in your bank account. There is snow on the ground, okay? Like, Undeniable, undebatable. So, first decide if it is a fact or a thought. Because if it's not a true fact, then it definitely could be a lie, or something you were just choosing to believe. Once you've decided that it is a thought, which was going to happen 99 percent of the time, then ask yourself if you could be wrong about it. Like, I lived from age about probably 13 to age 40, believing that I was super busy and had no time. And my brain offered a lot of evidence for this. It wasn't until someone told me that that was a thought and not a fact that I even called it into question. And so I started to say, what if I'm not actually busy? What if I have lots of time? Or how is it true that I have lots of time? These questions Changed my life. Honestly, I don't even allow myself to say I'm busy because I feel so much better and life feels so much more doable when I don't and sometimes I may say to my kids like we don't have time to go to that store tonight, but mostly I'll say I can't do that tonight and when my brain tells me you don't have enough time to do all of that, I tell it that I always have time for the things that need to get done and that God always creates a way for things to get taken care of and this is exactly how my life goes now. I didn't realize my brain had been lying to me for years about time and about being busy. I just thought it was the truth, and I'm so glad I know something different now. I've got a lot of things I want to do this week in preparation for my daughter's wedding. But I believe to my core that it can and will all get done because I decided to drop the lie about no time a long time ago. Now, I hear some of you, right? You're saying, Aren't you just buying into a different delusion now? How do you know that your brain's not lying to you now? And here's my answer. It doesn't actually matter whether it's a lie or not. I have to look at how it impacts my life. When I believed that I was too busy and that I didn't have time, I always felt overwhelmed, rushed, anxious. I would neglect my children and other responsibilities, like I was not loving my life. I found it really hard to serve others or to put others needs ahead of my to do list. So that lie was really not giving me the life I wanted. So now that I believe that I have time and that I'm not busy, Life feels more spacious. I can sit with my kids and have a heart to heart even with a wedding looming. I can write a podcast and put it out to all of you amazing people who come and listen. I am way less anxious. I am more open to serving others. I will sit and watch a movie with my kids or play a game or do a puzzle way more often than I would before. I still work hard, and I still aim to be efficient, but it all feels so different. I'm not trying to outrun the overwhelm. So if it is a lie that I'm not busy and I have time, it's a lie that serves me and I will keep it. So first, determine if it's a thought or a fact, and then once you determine if it's a thought, question it. Is it true? Even better, ask yourself whether it's true or not. Is it giving me the results I want in my life? Because remember, we create what we focus on. So if you don't want to keep creating the same results, you need to change your focus, change your story, change your thoughts to get you the results you really want. You can also start to test out your thoughts. I have So many amazing sister in laws and one of them shared this story with me that I just loved. She has always been incredibly in shape. She works out and pushes her body way harder than I could dream of pushing mine. I don't have the mental stamina she has. So I had no idea that she'd always seen herself as bigger than she actually is. So, she was telling me that one day back in university, her and her roommates were getting ready for this super fun night out, some big young adult dance or activity, and one of the girls had these really cute pair of pants, and she said to my sister in law, you really should wear these. These would look so great on you. But my sister in law looked at her roommate and looked at the pants and was like, um, those will never fit me. You are way skinnier than me. And she was absolutely not going to go through the humiliation I'm trying them on when she knew that there was no way she was going to be able to fit them. But her roommates were all so confused and just kept pushing her. Come on, just try them on, try them on. They're so cute. So she finally gave in to the peer pressure and decided to prove them all wrong. Except she didn't prove them wrong. The pants proved my sister in law wrong. They fit her perfectly. And she was so confused because factually the pants fit her, but her brain had told her such a completely different story. It threw her off. And I just loved when she shared the story with me because it literally took her so off guard to realize that she had been so wrong about herself for so long. So put your thoughts to the test if you want. What if you are wrong? I've met women who believed that they could never peak a mountain and I have stood on the peak of a mountain with them. I run a business, for goodness sakes, and I spent my whole life with my brain telling me that, you are not an entrepreneur. I put it to the test, and guess what? I am apparently an entrepreneur because I have my own business. I want you to pay attention to what your brain is telling you that is keeping you stuck, frustrated, small, in the shadows, on the back burner, self conscious, full of shame, judgmental, or any other number of negative outcomes that you may be experiencing in your life. I would guess that you are believing a lie that your brain wants you to think is true. If you are experiencing these types of feelings, what if you actually have time? What if you would love to be a runner? What if you could ski? What if you could start a business? What if you could get it all done? What if you are actually a great mom? What if you're beautiful? What if you could lose the weight? What if you could afford it? What if you actually know the right answer and you actually know what to do? What if you've been wrong all along? Have a great week everyone. Bye

15:27

Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamilin Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at Jamileh. step in coaching.