Law Of Allowance

In this episode of Just Call Jenna, Jenna Williams explores the Law of Allowance through the lens of neuroscience, mindset, and emotional regulation. Rather than forcing outcomes or trying to control every aspect of life, she explains how reducing mental, emotional, and physiological resistance allows the brain to move out of survival mode and into a state where clarity, creativity, resilience, and opportunity become more accessible. Jenna emphasizes that allowance isn't about giving up or pretending everything is fine—it's about taking intentional action while releasing the need to control every outcome, creating the internal safety the nervous system needs to function at its best. 

Jenna also breaks down the science behind why this approach works, explaining how chronic stress narrows perception while emotional regulation restores higher-level thinking and problem-solving. She shares practical strategies for applying the Law of Allowance in everyday life, including regulating your body before reframing your thoughts, replacing the need for certainty with curiosity, avoiding mental rehearsal of worst-case scenarios, and processing emotions without becoming attached to outcomes. The result is a calmer, more adaptable mind that is better equipped to recognize opportunities, make clear decisions, and experience life from a place of flow rather than fear.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome back. Today I'm diving into something that sits at the intersection of the neuroscience mindset and emotional regulation. Universally, the law of allowance. We're going to talk about some neuroscience of it, some spirituality of it, and really kind of how to practice it to gain your peace. I think of it like the law of allowance. It doesn't mean necessarily I have to let go and give myself pressure on that, but just letting it be what it is. Sort of it is what it is, accepting the way it is, whether I like it or not, just allowing it to be. So the law of allowance is really the idea that instead of forcing, controlling, obsessing, or gripping on too tightly, you just create space to let something be what it is. Like, for example, you may prefer strawberry ice cream, but you got vanilla. Okay, you still got ice cream, but many of us just obsess over the fact that I wanted strawberry. I thought I was gonna get strawberry. I'm diving into that. That's kind of the law of allowance, is just letting it be. It's not positive thinking and pretending that things are perfect. I think that's fake. It's not bypassing your real emotions. I feel upset that I didn't get the strawberry ice cream. That's what I wanted. Law of allowance is just accepting. I have this emotion about it. I feel disappointment, anger, whatever it is that you feel about that. You allow that emotion to exist by giving it the space to exist. It's really the practice of reducing resistance mentally. It's so your brain can move in a state of where clarity, opportunity, healing they become easier to access. The law of allowance is not giving up. It's releasing your survival mode grip that tells your nervous system, I don't need to control everything. That's the neuroscience. For me, I'm I'm a recovering control freak. Still fight that one often. I obsess over control. Like I want things to be my way, my way or no way. When I was learning to walk and talk again, that was, you know, letting things be as they were that day, understanding that I felt a certain emotion and resistance, but that I knew I could go farther. You know, some of that was breaking it down into baby steps and all the other things I've talked about. Accepting that I was where I was at that day allowed me to create the space for room to improve. You know, if you were asking me to walk around the block and I could barely get across the room, around the block was too far, but across the room was manageable. You have to allow yourself to be where you're at, have in mind where you want to go, but make some little goals along the way. Maybe, for example, walking across around the block, which I can do now, but at that time seemed impossible. And the law of allowance is letting myself be where I'm at and allowing that I still have in mind I want to get to that future goal, but I'm gonna win my little success of getting that little two on the scale today. Very often the thing that's blocking your clarity and peace and abundance is your resistance itself. I have all these barriers that are not getting me there. So what can I do? What do I have control of that I can allow? I can allow myself to walk across the room and get a little success. You know, it might motivate you to get started. Let's go, let's jump, let's do this big thing. But it doesn't really become sustainable. When your nervous system softens, perception expands. How much you can see expands. Your intuition actually sharpens and gets more acute. Your opportunities become visible, your resilience increases, your life will feel less like survival and stress, and you'll feel more like you're in a flow. When you allow things to be how they are, you just get the peace to be you and expand better to listen to yourself, to honor life. For example, I'm driving here to my studio today and I'm already running late, and then there is a huge accident that stops all this traffic. I old me would have freaked out. Oh my God, this is in my way. Every one of us I think has been there. You're on your way and there's all these blocks. And just allowing that to be. Now, the benefit for me in that situation was about two freeway exits up, all the traffic had dissipated because the accident was actually on the other side of the freeway. I didn't stress out, I didn't worry, I didn't freak out. I'm like, okay, it is what it is. It's a radical acceptance of things the way they are, whether you like them or not. Allowing that to be is one of the key factors to allowing your nervous system to just process, expand, let the flow happen. I think of it like acting with intention, but releasing the need to control or trust without becoming passive. I think you can trust without doing nothing. It's less about making the universe give you things and more about reducing your internal resistance to what is. Like it's not a good or bad, it's just an experience. The law of allowance will kind of step in and your mind and your body will actually stay regulated and you actually surprisingly end up with more control of your life by releasing control. It seems backwards, but that's actually how the law of allowance works. You're just allowing yourself to be who you are, but you also have to allow other people to be who they are, whether you like it or not. You're allowing them to be who they are, you're allowing experiences to be what they are. Really, again, it's the idea of not gripping on too tightly, not trying to control the outcome, not trying to fight and resist. It's just, okay, this is how it is. I don't like it, but this is how it is. That's really the law of allowance. It's where neuroscience and emotional regulation exist. But your brain is actually wired for control. Its primary job is survival, not peace, abundance, happiness. It's survival. Your brain is wired for control. Biologically, your brain does not like the law of allowance. Your brain is constantly scanning, it's looking for what can go wrong, what's uncertain, what can I control, what threats are out there. It's designed to keep you safe. It doesn't care if you're happy, but you can use the law of allowance to actually work with your brain. Your amygdala that acts like an alarm system. In your prefrontal cortex, your rational mind goes completely offline. Stress chemistry, cortisol, and adrenaline, those are all activated by your nervous system. Allowance actually shifts your nervous system. That's sort of the upside down or what you wouldn't think would happen by giving up control. You actually get control. Your brain probably can't process a lot of that, but when you practice allowance, something happens physiologically in your body. You move from survival mode to rest and recovery. It's critical for your prefrontal cortex, that logic mind, to come back online and for you to start making rational decisions. Every one of us has had a moment was like, did I go completely crazy? Well, you might have just been in survival mode, emotional reactivity, your higher self, your rational mind, your intuition, all the things that help you, as your mom would say, make good choices. They come from allowing things to be. So one of my favorite things, if you've watched me talk before, is the RAS or the reticular activating system. So, how can it actually help you receive? It determines what reaches your conscious awareness. Allowance actually widens your perception. Fear narrows your thinking and your vision. Part of the physiological things in the body is when you're fearful, your eyes kind of squint, your vision narrows, you become more laser focused. Focus is important, but if you get stuck in focus, that's like survival mode. Your brain becomes highly efficient at finding evidence of what you believe. Your RAS filter is about your awareness. Your brain is a prediction machine. It is highly efficient at finding what you're aware of. If you're aware of trying to control and fight and obsess, overthink, your brain is gonna provide more evidence of that. That's how the RAS filter works. You get more of what you focus on. It's not magic, it's actually neuroscience. When you're done listening to this episode, just go outside and say, I want to see some classic 70s cars. And amazingly enough, as you drive down the road, you will be surprised at how many there are. As you allow the law of allowance to letting things be as they are, whether you like them or not, it helps me to think there's no good and bad, only the experience. When your nervous system is calm and your rational mind is turned on, you will find more evidence to keep allowing that to happen. You will find yourself being allowed to be more of who you are just because that filtering happens. So I had a client that was trying to force career opportunities. She felt behind. She should be further in her career. She had an MBA, she had the experience, she had the connections. On paper, she was everything, but she couldn't stop obsessively refreshing her emails every time she communicated with somebody about a job, replaying conversations, assuming they would reject her and she would be stuck. She was literally overthinking every detail. When we shifted her to say, I'm allowing myself to be fully prepared. I'm allowing myself to take aligned action. I'm releasing the obsessive attachment of where I think I should be and allowing myself to be where I am. An unexpected offer came in maybe two or three months after we started this process. And she turned out to be in a job that she loves, in probably the best place for her. And if you ask her, she would tell you it's a miracle it happened. But the miracle was her allowing things to be. She actually understands that by allowing herself to be and allowing those conversations to be, it's almost like you let go of the desperation and the control. So it's not about inactivity. It's not about doing nothing. You kind of have to take aligned action, but it's about taking action without panicking about what happens. It's allowing it to be it is what it is. That's the law of allowance. Or I hear the Beatles song in my head a lot. Let it be. One of the biggest misconceptions that happens with the law of allowance is that letting go means not caring. Neuroscience actually suggests the opposite. When attachment becomes extreme, the brain becomes what's called cognitively rigid. Stress reduces and you become less flexible. In that scientific way, it's just the harder you hold on, the worse it's gonna get from a stress perspective. Letting go is not really I don't care. It's accepting I don't like this, but it sort of is what it is. And that's why I kind of think of it from that perspective or let it be. Just it is what it is. I have a lot of things I don't like in my life. I'm a human being, I'm an adult, I have responsibilities, I have a lot of the same problems that other people do, but letting it be and not trying to hold on to the outcome really make things different. I learned this lesson the hard way when recovering from a stroke. I was destined to walk again. They told me I'd never golf again. I go golfing whenever I can. If I had have held on so tightly to how I was going to do that, I don't know that I would have gotten there. I just kind of said, I want to be someone who golfs again. Just as simple as it was holding a golf club and twisting in front of the TV a couple of times, putting in my backyard. But if I had have held on to I'm gonna golf again, I don't know that I would have got there. I'm going to get there even if I'm not there today. And I think that's really hard for us to do, especially given our consume and productive society. You're praised for doing more. It's not normal to be on all the time. It took me a long time to learn that. But you're you actually need some rest. Emotional regulation. You absolutely need that because it increases your adaptability and your creativity. It increases your openness. It increases your resilience. So, how do you regulate your emotions? You name them and accept that you feel that way. You don't judge, I'm I'm angry about this. Okay, you're angry about that. I'm I'm sad about this. Okay, you're sad about that. I'm joyful about this. Great, you're joyful about that. It helps to understand there is no good and bad. There is only the experience. And allow yourself to have that experience exactly how you're having it. You are the unique you. Only you know how you feel. Just allowing yourself to be who you are, experiencing what you're experiencing. Don't grip on too tightly because the tighter you grip, the more you're gonna lose control. When you stop gripping so tight, your brain will actually become better at problem solving. Stop thinking about the problem, the solution often happens because you're allowing it to be what it is. Your creativity and all that can flow, and you will have these breakthrough moments, epiphanies, things that make sense. The brain problem solves much better when it's not hypervigilant. I learned this fact when I was healing. Where my stroke happened, there's a section of my brain where the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere process between themselves. I am damaged in that area. So multitasking is much harder for me than the normal person. But what I learned a lot about the brain is there's all these different centers that control different things. Logic and creativity are completely separate. So when you put logic down, creativity can blossom. When you put creativity down, you get very logical and rigid. Your brain is amazing. It will absolutely provide skills that you have that you didn't know you had to solve whichever thing you're up against. And sometimes letting go is the way to let your brain just do what it naturally knows how to do so that you can show up as the best version of yourself. And to do that, you need to be out of survival mode. So let's talk about some ways you might be able to practice this. You can regulate and reframe. You can't think out of a dysregulated nervous system. So mindset work to breathe deeply, slow your body down, relax your jaw, lengthen your exhale. Your body has to feel safe enough for your brain to shift perception. And if you can't do anything else, just take a longer exhale than inhale. That is the most simplified version of what you can do. You will sort of reset your nervous system naturally with that. You will tell your brain and your body we're safe. So simply that. Take a deep breath and regulate before you reframe. Release control with curiosity. So instead of I need to know exactly how this will work out. So ask yourself with that breath if you can get some clarity and space. What is the lesson I'm supposed to see? What's the gift in this problem? Try curiosity. Just ask what if? What if this happened? What exists that's not there? And I know you've heard me say many times, don't say what if, say so what. That's asking what will happen, but I'm asking you to say, what if there are gifts in this stress that I'm not seeing it? What are those possibilities? What is the gift in this situation? Stop rehearsing the worst case scenarios. I think many of us are taught in corporate cultures or in our society, just accept the worst case scenario and try to do better. But your brain strengthens what it repeatedly practices. So if you're constantly practicing the worst case scenario, that's what your mental rehearsal is going to tell yourself. The worst things always happen. There is science that says about 85% of what we worry about never even happens. So you're practicing all that worst case scenario, and 85% of what you're practicing in your mind is never going to happen. Mental rehearsal actually affects your neural pathways. It's how you rewire. So if you constantly rehearse disaster and worst case scenario, your nervous system is going to memorize fear. Now, if you hadn't met me before the stroke, I was going to take full control of my life because it was, if it was going to be, it was up to me. And that was survival mode. I didn't know. I thought that that's what made me great. Turns out what makes me great is a lot of other things, but my nervous system practicing fear, disaster, worst case scenario. So I was always braced for impact. Use emotional detachment and numbness. Allowance means feeling your emotions, processing them, and then releasing the need to control that outcome. It already happened. It could not have happened any other way than what it did. It happened. I feel a certain way about that. I can just allow that that happened. All the wishing it was some way different isn't gonna help, but that's part of emotional detachment. Is it's not saying I don't have a feeling, it's saying I accept that I have a feeling and I accept that that thing happened just how it did. You are allowed to make all the choices you want in your life. I don't like this person, I don't want to hang out with them again. Really like this person, want to spend a lot of time with them. It's as simple as that. You went, you experienced it, you didn't like the experience. Guess what? You don't have to have it anymore. That's really what emotional detachment is. It's not having no emotions. It's just acknowledging I feel a certain way. And if I don't like the way I feel, I don't have to do any more of that. Less of this, more of this. This feels good. This is exciting. This was a pleasurable experience. I want to experience more of this, do more of that. I didn't like this. Okay, do less of that. But don't be afraid to try. Again, emotional detachment is not having no emotion. It's just understanding that your emotions don't control you. So, again, how do you practice the law of allowance? You regulate before you reframe it. Take a deep breath before you try to reframe that thought. You release the control of the situation by being curious and not controlling. Stop rehearsing the worst case scenarios. Use some emotional attachment, and all of these things will train your safety right into the present. You will be inside yourself. And surprisingly enough, by allowing things to be where they are, you will end up with control of your life and you will feel good about it. Thanks for joining me on the Law of Allowance today. Remember, karma is real, energy is contagious. Check your vibes.