152 Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess: Direct Your Brain For Change

We unpack six neuroplasticity practices from Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and show how to move from reacting to responding. We share tools for self-regulation, visualization, and the 3:1 positivity shift to build peaceful control that lasts beyond 21 days.

• difference between mind management and brain change
• active versus dynamic self-regulation
• discomfort zones and warning signals
• respond not react using the 30–90 second window
• Quantum Zeno Effect and 3:1 positivity
• Multiple Perspective Advantage for objectivity
• visualization tools: box, window, rewind, armor
• zooming out to regain big-picture clarity
• why 63 days matters for integration

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Transcript

Setting The Stage: Part Two

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Welcome to What's on Your Bookshelf, a life and leadership podcast where we live out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. With your host, Denise Russo and Sam Powell.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

Hello again, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf. This is our Life and Leadership podcast where we're living out loud the pages of the books that are on our bookshelves. My name's Denise Russo. I'm here with my friend Sam Powell. Together, we took a book off of our shelf that we've been exploring. We're in part two of it now. This is the book called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess by Dr. Caroline Leaf. Sam, as always, it's great to be here with you today.

Directing Your Brain For Change

SPEAKER_01 1:57

So great to be here. I um uh the last week's discussion was was great. And I, it's one of those things though, that like there's so much in that chapter that like I hope people are reading along with us because we talked about a lot, but we just I feel like skimmed the surface and and you know talked about things that are impactful to us. But like to really, I think make the changes and you know, use these five simple scientifically proven steps, you have to. This is one you gotta, I think you really do have to read. And um, today we're in chapter nine, which is directing your brain for change. And this is like again, this is the practical application of the neurocycle section of the book. And so she gives us in this section six directed neuroplasticity practices, and they help, she says, activate the alpha bridge connecting our conscious mind with our non-conscious mind, which is the key in the in mind management. And so we'll talk about these different um practices that we can do. But uh this one was this chapter is good because it really turns the corner into very practical, practical things that that we can do. And I think some of these I have seen and done and experienced before in my life, and some of them not so much. And so I I was excited to find some new strategies and new ways of thinking.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

What I like about this chapter is you have to come outside of yourself to sort of look at yourself like a movie, because you're diagnosing and directing the way you want your brain to change. And if we remember back a few chapters ago, she says your mind is not your brain. It is complementary to one another, but it's not the same thing. So if we want to change your brain, then you have to look, and if you want to change your physical body, then you have to look at the things that your mind is doing to your brain. And so uh in the second half of this part of the chapter, we often hear about things like get outside your comfort zone, but we never talk about the discomfort. And she calls them discomfort zones, but that the discomfort zones are the things that cause warning signals in our body. So it might be like you have this traumatic thought we talked about last week. We wanted you to think about the stressful thing that you're dealing with. And whatever that thing is, it's a thought, but thoughts we learned also manifest in your body physically in different ways, whether it's through your heartbeat or your heart rate variability or your sensitivity to different things. And so she says that you may have a physical, emotional, or informational warning signal because of your thinking, and you just have to do something about it, which is the middle parts of the neurocycle. Once you become aware, embrace that thing, what are you gonna do?

Discomfort Zones And Warning Signals

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, the discomfort, like this is not a comfortable process to go through. And I think it's why so many of us avoid it, right? Because we like to we are wired to avoid pain. That's what we learned in atomic habits, right? Like we are wired to shy away from those things. And um, this is uncomfortable, it's uncomfortable to look at your pain, at your stress, you know, in the eye and really face it for what it is, and then work through why it is happening, and then work through, you know, how do you really um, you know, change that and and change your relationship with it at the end of the day. But these are things that can help you do that. And the first one she starts with was is self-regulation and like uh raising a young boy, like we are in the self-regulation, like zone of, you know, that's it's a learned skill. And you know, and I think some people, I think as we turn into adults, we think that people either are or aren't certain things. And this whole book is like, no, nah bro, you are. It's all learnable, it's all skills. And you know, it's one of the skills that you know we work on as we're raising our son and realizing in ourselves, and my husband, like, what are the things that maybe we're not as quite as self-regulated on as we need to be, to teach him the path forward, to you know, set the example of the things for him. And um, you know, it's and she said that's the overarching goal of the neuro of neurocycling for mind management is to develop self-regulation. And she talks about two levels of it on the conscious level, it's called active self-regulation. I think this is what we think of when we think of self-regulation. Like I recognize something, and so I'm gonna take 10 deep breaths and bring myself back down. But I never I didn't know this was a thing. But on the non-conscious level, right? So this is your deepest level. This is the thing that's processing faster than the speed of light that we had talked about. Um, this is called dynamic self-regulation. This is your body's uh like automatic self-regulation that's going on. And I don't think I ever thought about that before, or I don't know, spent no time ever considering this. That like your self-regulation isn't necessarily conscious and probably isn't primarily conscious. It's primarily on this non-conscious level. I don't know. Like, is that something that you had ever uh uh to me, it was like a new, a new idea. I don't know about you.

Self‑Regulation: Active And Dynamic

SPEAKER_02 7:19

Well, I'm gonna give a sneak peek to a future chapter that we'll get through that I didn't realize in this non-conscious way that when you were doing things like reading, daydreaming, thinking deeply, doing nothing, that even though that may be in a relaxed state of your body, your mind is still processing stuff. That's the dynamic self-regulation. And so she goes into some detail of this later. So you have to keep coming back every week to get to that point, right? And it talks about how you need to put into your day this time of like nothingness in order to get your body regulated for balance. And so that part I didn't grasp in this chapter, but I got it later. And I'm glad that I've already read ahead to get it, to be able to now look backwards. It's sort of like looking back on your life and saying, oh man, if I had only known that then, how might I have thought about things differently or acted differently? And so she says the exciting thing is if you can train yourselves to be increasingly self-aware and self-regulated to the point that you can tune into your thinking, which happens every few seconds. She says 10 seconds or six times a minute, you can train yourself that that when you're awake, that active part of your thinking can become even more illuminated. And the stuff that you didn't know that was in your non-conscious mind, you can almost push up to the conscious level. And so it's challenging, but it's something you could train yourself to do. It's sort of like we went to SeaWorld a couple of weeks ago, and uh they still have a couple of shows where you can see different um uh animal shows where the animals jump out of the water and stuff. And what makes it exciting is that you know there's something under the surface. And even though the water is clear to your eye from the stadium, you can't see what's swimming underneath. And then it's almost like magically everybody in the audience starts clapping as soon as the whale or the dolphin or the seal jumps out of the water, but it has to break through. Something has to have inertia and energy for that dolphin to jump up and spin around and then splash back down again. This is about the fact that, yeah, that stuff that's underneath the water, we have to have that inertia and energy to raise it up. It doesn't mean it stays up forever, but it becomes in our active thinking. And that then we have to be more vigilant, which is the second part to get in control over anxiousness and stress.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the vigilance part was, you know, is is interesting, right? Like when we like there's this fine line she really talks about in like self-regulation is that you know, you're bringing a lot of awareness here. But what you have to be careful of is not slipping into hyper or hypo vigilance because those like the like with anything, the extremes of anything are bad for you, right? When you're you're living in the space of like I'm always watching for threats and things like that. Like at times those are good. You need those spaces, but they can also be, you know, bad. And what she leads us to is that you really want to get to peaceful control. And she said that we have within us the ability to tap into a state of self-awareness that allows us to develop a sense of peaceful control despite whatever is going on around this. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I've experienced this zone in my life, and like it is the place I want to live 90% of the time because it is, it's wonderful. It's like, it's almost as if, and I think like I think back to like the time we spent on like the obstacles of the way, and especially in like stoic thinking. I think stoic thinking is really about getting into this peaceful control zone of like I am aware, but like it doesn't pierce the inner citadel that I have. It it reminds me of that, of like I can see, I can observe, I can appreciate, I can understand, but I it never gets to the heart of me, to the soul of me, um, you know, that that really, you know, hurts, hurts me in a, you know, in a different type of way. I was just having a conversation on LinkedIn about this, even I'm talking about LinkedIn earlier today, um, and uh some of the experimenting I've been doing there. Um, but I was having this conversation about um the job search process and rejection, especially, like when you're getting rejected, like like when you're job searching, you're getting rejected a lot more than you're getting accepted. You're getting accepted like once, maybe a couple of times if you're turning something down, but like you find one match and then you know move forward. But you're getting rejected a lot in a lot of different ways. And it's one of the hardest parts to kind of build that inner citadel. And it reminded me of this um interview question and answer that I had years ago when I managed a premium support team and like uh support is a stressful place to work, right? You're dealing with all the problems and people coming to you in their stressed out state of all the problems. And so I always asked people like how they personally dealt with stress because I needed people on the team. I learned the lesson the hard way, that I needed people who had, and I didn't have the words for it, had an inner citadel, right, could face something and get to the space of peaceful control in self-regulation to where whatever was going on around them didn't affect them at the deepest levels. Because if it does, and if you don't have that armor, you burn out, you would burn out too fast in the world that we that we lived in. And the people who were successful with people do that. And one of the answers, I remember a few of the answers. I think I remember two of them. I interviewed hundreds of people for this job over the years. And I remember two of the answers, and one of them was just fun and quirky and absolutely is the person that I love to this day. Um, but the second one was that somebody said, you know, they paused and I said, you know, how do you personally handle stress? And they paused and said, I take my job very seriously, but I never take it personally. And they went on to explain that, you know, when things happened, they looked at it, they evaluated it, they, you know, they took it serious for whatever was happening. You know, do I need to make changes? Do I need to make adjustments? But they never let it pierce their soul. They never let it get to who they are, their identity, their piece of it, right? And they were talking about this like space of peaceful control, this inner citadel. And like to me, I think that that's that's really what this is, right? Like we have a feeling of peace, even if things are unresolved or hectic or crazy. And like that's the level of self-regulation you really have to get to to be able to, I think, handle this cycle.

Peaceful Control Versus Vigilance

SPEAKER_02 14:14

It's sort of like you know, untethering yourself from the emotion of the thing. The thing is real, the thing is happening, but the emotion is what's driving your energy either lower up to the thing. And the second thing she then pivots to is to say, all right, you might have a lot of emotion around this stuff, but she calls it the 30 to 90 second rule or a regret zone, which is you have you can either react to something in your life or you can respond to something that's happening in your life, and they're not the same thing. And so she talks around in this part that yeah, you can do things like deep breathing or go to a different room and yell at the top of your lungs a couple years ago. My kids went to this, um, oh, it's some sort of like a room that you pay money to throw stuff and break things in.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Oh, a rage room.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Yeah, and they had so much fun and they laughed and they and they came home and said it was the most fun, but it's it's meant for you also to get some of that aggression out in a way that maybe you never would in real life.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yeah, a bit cathartic.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah, some people run like I don't, uh, but some people like to go running long distance or riding bikes a long way or doing something. For me, I like to go to the ocean and just stand there and look at the water and help my body and mind to be able to just decompress from the thing. And but if you can't even do any of those different things, which you could you could do belly breathing and deeper, anybody can do that, but let's say you can't do the other things, you can just imagine that situation or the person you're upset with or the scenario shrinking. And so that might be like a coaching technique or it might be even a therapy technique to imagine the thing that is bothering you, but looking at the thing from outside of it and watching it shrink down, and that should lower your heart rate, increase your resilience, maybe strengthen other things that are going on physically in your body before we get to this other really complex thing that she gets into next.

Respond Don’t React: 30–90 Seconds

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Yeah, and I like that, you know, and she uses a little bit of the science, right? Um, on this 30 second, 30 to 90 second rule. But I I it's that key concept of what you said. It's the not reacting because the first 30 to 90 seconds are your reaction, and it's taking that moment and using those things that you said to respond. And I think that that's really key. And like, don't we all feel better when we respond rather than react? Like I know I do, especially in raising children. There's a lot of times I want to react, and uh I regret every single one of them, right? I I want to respond to whatever big feelings, things, struggles that we're having. But yeah, but this next one, the quantum Xeno effect or QZE, and she says essentially it's based on the principle that deliberate, intentional, conscious, and repeated effort allows learning to take place. And it's the idea that whatever you think about the most will grow. And like this is something where you can watch people do this. I can I can see this in my own life and people I know in their life, of whatever you focus on repeatedly is sort of where you're doing it almost you and I were talking about this earlier. It reminds me of um the algorithms of all of our social media. Whatever you comment on like the most, it puts you in the spiral of those things, right? And so, like you end up thinking that that's that's the perception, that's your reality because it's what you're seeing the most and it's what's being fed to you the most. When in reality, there's this alternate world out there that is just as true, perhaps, right has nothing to do with the thing that you're thinking. And so it's this this QZE is you putting like purposefully focusing on positive rather than negative. And she talks about like a three to one ratio, like for every negative thought that you have, you should counteract it with three positive thoughts. So if you're trying to get out of a like a habit you have of really negative cycle of thinking or a negative thought on something particular, then anytime it triggers, you need to immediately jump to three things. And maybe that's gratitude, maybe that's just things that you're happy about, things that you're thankful for in your life, but that that negative thought becomes the trigger for you to then sort of move into this QZE space to uh get yourself into a more positive cycle. And the more positive cycle you're in, the more positivity you have, right? And I think that's why we think that people are either R positive or R negative. And it's not, it's it's that the positive people are in a positive cycle and the negative people are in a negative cycle. And you can take control, right? You're gonna, if you want to switch yourself from positive to negative, you go for it. I don't recommend it, but you go for it. But you can also switch yourself from negative to positive through, you know, just some strategies.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Years ago, I learned from this lady, Dr. Barbara Frederickson. I didn't learn from her personally, I just read some of her stuff, and then I went to a positive intelligence certification program for coaching. And at the time, my kids were younger, and she taught this three to one ratio thing. And I tried it out, experimented on Vincent. Sorry, son, if you're listening, but you're gonna get the gist of this. Every time he would say something negative, he would tell you right now, he'd say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Now say three positive things.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

I've heard you say that before, actually. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

Yeah, yeah. And so that's where I learned that. And so what it basically is, is to say if you're thinking something negative, saying something negative, feeling something negative, you you change that by saying three, thinking three, or feeling three positive things. And the idea is that scientifically, anyway, is that you've got these neural pathways, or imagine these like roads that are going into your feelings and your brain and all of that. And the more that the road is tread upon, the stronger the road is, or it's like the more lanes of the highway there are, and that the construction of that means that the less you travel on a certain part of the road, then the less traffic that there is on that road. It's sort of like how have you ever noticed when you're driving on the highway, you might be like on a six-lane highway, but maybe off to the right is sort of the back road, but you could see it out the out of the corner of the highway. And there's not many cars there. And you wonder, like, hmm, why aren't more people driving on that road? It's right parallel to the road that I'm on. But there's a choice that people make to be on the highway. And so this idea is you have a choice, you can sit in the negative thing, like Vincent would say, something like, Oh, this this person's an idiot, or this situation is bad, or this is this is gonna ruin my life. And I would say, say three nice things about yourself or about the situation. And it got to the point that he just didn't like this game. And so he would say things like, uh, the day is nice and I I love you, and uh uh the person is still this or that. I'm like, No, you don't, you're not getting it. You're not getting it. So we'd have to go back and do it. But I will tell you that he this has been years, at least a decade, that we've done this, and he's now 21. He will tell you with rote precision that if he's thinking something negative, and now if I even just look at him, he'll say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, three things okay, and he'll spit them out. And they're usually not three really nice things, but he gets the gist of why.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Stop of refocusing and refocus, say something.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

And I think that that's the point of all this is rewire yourself. You've got 63 days to do this, and it won't happen instantly, it won't happen in 21 days. This takes time, and even learning positive intelligence doesn't mean that it's easy. Look at Solve for Happy. How did Mo find happiness in the midst of tragic grief of losing his older son?

Quantum Zeno Effect And 3:1 Positivity

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Yeah, and I think that like as you're saying this, you know, I think this is one of those tools that we should use a lot more in our relationships with people, right? Relationships with people are complicated. Nobody's ever perfect. People are gonna annoy you, mess you up, especially like familial relationships, like the people you see the most, like your spouse, your kids, you know, that kind of thing is is it's so easy to get caught up in the negative thing. Like, oh gosh, I just wish they would, you know, empty the dishwasher. I just wish they would do, you know, whatever the common, especially like spousal complaints are. And like, I think you could really change your relationship with somebody if every time you thought that, you turned around and refocused on three positive things about them. Like, I really think it could solve a lot of marital issues, right? Like it could really give you, and like it wouldn't maybe necessarily solve them, but give you the space. To work through something, to solve something, because then you're not coming in, like you're not building like long-term resentment about something. You're not spiraling into the level of like resenting someone. You're you're staying out of that zone. And that zone's the danger zone in a relationship, right? Like you've got to get out of that. And I think like it's sort of that instead of like spiral, spiral, spiral, spiral to where you're live in resentment against somebody, it's I dip, I dip, I, you know, I dip, I dip, I come back out, I move back out. And I like, I don't know. I think I think I do this in spaces with relationships. But I think I might like try to be a little more conscious with this. That's maybe one of my experiments of the week of trying this for myself and maybe see if I can convince my 11-year-old son to, you know, get on board. He probably will hate it, just like Vincent did in spaces. But I, you know, I think it's a good, it's just it's it's one of like uh think about the best exercises that people really should test out and try.

SPEAKER_02 24:02

I love the next one with the one we just did, which is multiple perspective advantage MPA. So what this one is saying is what if you stepped outside of yourself? And I'm not good at this, by the way. So I didn't I can love it and not be good at it.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

And so it's funny because I've heard you walk people through this in coaching exercises, like especially we did that retreat a couple of years ago. And like we did this with them in like and you had mentioned it, was it this week or last week, the movie um thing, right? Where it's like looking at your life through the movie, like you're a kind of an outside observer. So it's funny that you say you're not good at this because I've watched you lead people through this a million times.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Not good at it for myself. It's probably like uh being a nurse who smokes.

unknown 24:46

Yeah. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

So this is about coming outside of your own thinking and getting joy in your moments. So, okay, for so there's at least a hundred socks in my house that don't have matches. I'm not over.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

One day you'll find those matches.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

What is worse about it is I have multiple times very calculatedly laid all of them out across every piece of furniture in my house so that no one has room to sit on purpose, so that somebody will match the socks. Nobody ever matches the socks. And so then I get really annoyed and upset about well, where's the other hundred socks that go with these that are laying out? Right. And everybody else besides me is like, just throw them away. Why do you keep multiple times laying these socks all over all the furniture so that we can't sit? And I'm setting it out on the furniture so that they can't sit so that the socks get mashed up and they deal, and it's not working. And so basically, this is about standing back, observing your own thinking about it, and sometimes letting go of something that you want to have just be right, and it doesn't preserve your peace and joy to just maybe look at, well, why doesn't anybody else want to help me put their socks away?

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah. And and she says, like, you need to train yourself to analyze the information as objective as a way as possible before you choose what to believe, what to reject, and what decisions to make. And it's like stepping outside of yourself, stepping outside of the situation and kind of asking, like, is it true? Is that really what's going on? Right? Like that, that is super powerful and helps you, I think, break some of the cycle, the sock cycle. Like, let me see how many times it's gonna take. So I do this with um stuff on the stairs. I think I've every mom ever does this, right? Of like, this doesn't belong on this floor, it belongs upstairs. So let me put it on the stairs and then like my son will walk past it 100 million times and I'm like, Yes, are you serious? I put it in the dead center. You had to move this to get past it. Why didn't you deal with it? Why didn't you focus on it? But this is that like, you gotta step outside the situation and go, okay, what do I need to do to really think about this? Is, you know, is is this, you know, what decisions need made here? What do I need to think? What do I need to reject? What do I need to really believe? And this is super, super powerful, I think. And this is one of those things that you you have to work up towards. I don't think we're wecome, we come into this world naturally good at this. I think this is a very much learned skill. And it's easy to tell who's good at this and who's not good at this and how they walk through this world. Um, but it's it's one of, I think, the most powerful things. And I think it's something we all constantly struggle with because we're so stuck in our own perceptions and our own way of thinking, because we only we only are ourselves that it's hard to step outside. It's hard to look at it through somebody else's lens, through an objective lens, and calm yourself down enough in your emotions to really be able to do that that well.

Relationships, Resentment, And Rewiring

SPEAKER_02 28:00

So the next part, maybe it's something that we can do with the listeners right now, because this one's faster. I don't want to say easier, but it's simpler because it's about visualization. So if you imagine that these are neuroplasticity practices or exercises that you could do throughout the day, it's sort of like daydreaming. So the first one is imagine that you are upset with somebody, could be personally, could be professionally, maybe it's even in yourself. So imagine that if if somebody's upsetting you or they're not respecting your boundaries, that you can imagine you have a box. And if you can right now imagine whatever that whoever that person is, and you put them inside of the box. And when they're in the box, you can't see them or hear them, even though you can look at them. And what this does is it gives you mental space to disconnect from their toxicity. Because remember, you're the one that's listening to the show. You're the one maybe that's reading this book with us, you're the one that's living out loud the pages of this book that we took off of our bookshelf. And maybe they're not. And so people aren't growing at the same pace you are. Their thinking isn't being elevated, their learning hasn't stretched the way yours has. And so the emotional demands of that other person, sometimes you just have to cut it off from your own self while you're trying to heal your own self. So this idea is there's a box, you put the person in the box, and you can see them in the box, and then you just breathe a little bit and try to just let that go while you're visualizing it.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah, and this is actual visualization. Like imagine putting someone in a box to where like to you at all. And you know, and you're and you're giving that space. And the the next one's similar, it's the window technique. So that's the box technique. This is the window technique, but this is building a big building with lots of windows that are mostly sealed up, and you put the toxic thought you're working on into one of the windows. And that way you're on the outside looking at it, like you can't climb into the window because it's not accessible, but you have the power to, but you have power whatever whatever is over it, right? Like you're safely outside. Um, but you can embrace process and reconceptualize whenever you're ready. So it's one of those things where like it's not a box where you're completely sealed off. This is a box that you can see it totally, but you have the space and can observe sort of objectively from the outside.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Yep. The next one is like we've talked about many times before, it's one of my more favorite coaching techniques, which is you looking at yourself like you're watching a movie and that you have control over that movie. You can rewind, you can edit, you can reframe, you can change the characters. And that's best done with a coach, I believe, because it's easier for you to then become untethered from your own emotion around the movie you're watching about yourself. So that's called the rewinding technique. It's definitely one of my favorites. If you ever want to try one out, contact us because I think it would be fun for you to go through a coaching session and do the rewinding technique. And I'm sure that we can come up with some sort of a promotion to help you experience that. It's absolutely of all the years that I've been coaching, one of my more favorite exercises.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

It's really powerful, I think, to have people do this. And then the last one is the suit of armor technique. And this is the visualization of like just blocking toxic words. So this is like when you're in a situation where somebody's just coming at you with like negative negativity, toxicity, and you're like, ugh, I know like I can't deal with this. You visualize putting armor on. I think this is that inner citadel of the stoics, right? Like you visualize that there is an actual physical blockade and they just can't pierce your armor, right? Or they can't pierce your inner citadel. And it's like, it just gives you the space to then deal with it and removes you from there. Like you can say whatever you want, spout your hate, spout your toxic, you know, thinking, whatever, but like you're not getting past my suit of armor. And that visualization, I like I've used that in the past, and it's it's really helpful, I think, in some some spaces where you're like, no, thank you.

Multiple Perspective Advantage

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Yeah, yeah. The last uh part of this is to close your eyes and focus on the big picture first. And I did this last week with uh with Dennis. He's one of my coaches, our mutual friend, who also is on one of Zach's podcast shows of the books that we're doing with Zach. And so in this one, you basically are just looking at the bigger picture outside of what's right in front of you and spanning out to see if it takes a little bit of a sting out of a situation. So, for example, let's say that you're panicking because you just lost your job and now you're afraid that you're not gonna have enough money, or you you're afraid because how are you gonna come up with a way to pay for your mortgage or your car insurance or whatever it might be? But but you can get really stuck and being frantic in that moment and not be able to see that is it possible that you will be okay, that you'll get another job, or that there's resources that can help you while you're looking for that job, or what's the impact of what that negative thinking is doing? Is it helping you get any closer to paying your mortgage, or is it actually still not paying your mortgage and it's actually physically making you sick, also?

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think they're like I always talk about like zooming in or zooming out, like when you're stressed out. But this is like again, this is visualization. So this is physically closing your eyes because it gives you that distance from life. Like it cuts off a sense. And I think like the same thing, like you could even like cover your ears, right? Like, same thing of I just I need to like really come inside myself and sort of zoom out and like look at the big picture. And there's science behind like what closing your eyes, what blocking off an actual sense does, and um, you know, and helps you move through that. But I these strategies are great. I like I've used bits and pieces of them, all of them, you know, alternatives to them. And um, I do think that they give you that space that you need to work through this and and you know, get into the neurocycle really itself. And and she rounds this chapter out with the discomfort zones that you had talked about, like at the beginning, um discomfort zones and emotional warning signs. Um and uh the she gives like an interesting little visual of like mind management and warning signals and emotional versus physical and like a cool breakdown. So, again, if you're reading the book, like it's a nice sort of visual to do that. But the discomfort zones that she talks about are you know, just aware, stress reaction, emotional attitudes of the thought zone and the about to choose zone. So, like when you're like know that when you're doing these things, there is discomfort, and there's different levels to that discomfort and the intensity of the feelings that you're having and things like that. And just having awareness of where you're at and knowing that like you can get to the other side, you can bring the emotion down. Like those are all those are all things within your control. And and these things that we just talked about can kind of help you get into that space. But you have to accept that there's discomfort in this. And there's probably a lot of discomfort depending on what you're working on. This is something that's been hurting you for a long time. And so it's not some magic fix like we had talked about. It's it's real work and but it's worthwhile work.

Visualization Tools: Box And Window

SPEAKER_02 35:21

And since we're out of time for today, we're missing about five pages of this section. So I really want to encourage you to get this book and or have a discussion with us, right? They can do that on Substack so we can go deeper into the discomfort zones. So next week we're gonna talk about why it takes 63 days. Talked about it a couple of episodes ago, about how that's what actually attracted me to this speaker, this author, this scientist, was that she said that most people think it takes 21 days to create a habit. And it may be that it takes that many days to create the habit, but it takes 63 to sustain and integrate it into your life. So we're gonna talk next week about why it takes 63 days of neurocycling to form the habit that makes sense, that sticks, and is sustainable. Yeah, can't wait. Awesome. Well, friends, if you're listening and this you think could be helpful to someone else, would you be willing to share our episodes with others? We'd also love for you to share your thoughts with us. So again, you can find us on LinkedIn. You can communicate with us on Substack W-O-Y-B for what's on your bookshelf. We'd love to hear from you. And for those of you who already are communicating with us, thank you. It's so rewarding for us each week to know that there's others that are listening, following along, but also changing with us as well. But for this week, my name is Denise Russo. On behalf of my friend Sam Powell, thank you to everyone that's out there listening. This has been another episode of What's on Your Bookshelf?