← Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
The Label Limit: Normalization Can Be a Sinister Trap
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Busy Gold
When we normalize something, many of us just stop questioning it. And we accept that it's just the way things are, even if there's potential long term damage and risk. And in the long run, normalization is dangerous because it locks us into these patterns that prevent our true growth and healing. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the patterns can be broken, the code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? This is the label. Limit acceptance is a dangerous game with societal consequences. Everyone think of a time in your life where you've been peer pressured into something and the mere thought of somebody being like, oh come on, everybody does it, it's totally normal. Was like, oh, well, I guess, sure, I'll give it a try. Most of you probably went to middle school, high school, and surely most people didn't make it out of the COVID scenario without falling victim to at least a few of those things. So let's spend some time trying to dissect what it means for something to be normal. What is normalization? Normalization is when a behavior, idea or belief becomes accepted by society as the standard. It's the stuff that we stop questioning because everybody's doing it. And the big problem is that just because something is normal doesn't actually mean that it's healthy or beneficial for us in any way, shape or form. One of the things that I want us to start to think about are things over the course of history, even predating your arrival on planet Earth, that have been normalized that probably shouldn't have been. A few things that I immediately thought of were doctors promoting cigarettes in the 1950s. I've got a couple ads right here, one and I'll put them in the show notes. One has a doctor looking very dapper saying more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. Great. Another one, 20,679 physicians, say Lucky's are the least irritating because they're roasted. So apparently roasting the tobacco, that's really what's going to save your lungs. It's the roast, it's the pre smoke before you smoke that's saving your lungs. Pretty asinine, right? When we think about it, that doctors were actually not only prescribing cigarettes to pregnant women, but I mean, all the time they're just out there promoting cigarettes as part of their duties as a physician. Then we also have porn addiction. Porn addiction is something that has become normalized increasingly so even as I have aged to date myself, I'm now 40. The. The types of porn and things that people were dabbling with when I was in middle school, they are no match for what's happening in today's society with teenagers. We're going to explore that more later on in the episode. But another thing that I want to take a look at are lobotomies. Right, lobotomies. I'm sure you've seen them in movies that are horror, tangential, where they're actually going deeply into your brain. These were actually presented for a time as a miracle cure for mental illness. They were also positioned as a way to salvage your soul from the throes of obsession and fixation. Only one giant problem, they're destroying your brain. If we look back at history, we can see that there is this pattern by which things that now if we look at them, they're like, this is completely ridiculous. I can't believe we ever allowed something like this to unfold. And yet we did. And there were coordinated efforts from things like the media and Big Pharma and all other areas of the peer pressure, societal peer pressure environment, including policy formation, bodies that actually start to oppress upon us these ideas. So I want us to think that when we normalize something, many of us just stop questioning it and we accept that it's just the way things are, even if there's potential long term damage and risk. It's like a mass level peer pressure that typically includes a multi pronged campaign that is typically supported through ads like what I mentioned with the cigarette ads, media influencers, big pharma, big tech, big academia. And that's precisely how we get stuck in this cycle of incredible dysfunction. And in the long run, normalization is dangerous because it locks us into these patterns that prevent our true growth and healing. And even worse, we become very vulnerable to a sinister agenda that may attempt to normalize something that keeps us mentally and physically unwell and therefore much more easily controlled. If you just take a look at what has happened since 2020 to present, have we seen some of this unfold? That most of the narratives that people bought, like the new normal, have unfolded in a way that have slapped some in the face and made them have to move through cognitive dissonance, that they were complicit and puppet mastered by something that very much was antagonistic to not just the health of the human collective, but each of us personally. When we think about normalization, we have to also include a conversation around belief, because for something to become normal, we have to believe it's normal. So there is some sort of transformation process by which we have to start to buy in. And the more buy in that occurs socially, the. The more susceptible some of us are to automatically believing it's normal, even if we haven't gone through that cognitive process ourselves. Some brain pattern types are just more susceptible to external pressure, societal peer pressure, or even just feeling like somebody is going to ostracize you if you don't toe the line. So there are plenty of people who may have personally had questions, but they suppressed that desire and to ask questions or to dig deeper just simply because they want their friends to like them. I have quite a few clients who went from being very, dare I say, liberal minded prior to Covid and even, you know, prior to things like the blm, George Floyd riots, et cetera. And in those moments of having to face personal cognitive dissonance and knowing that something felt often wanting to ask questions, the mere presence of friends being like, you didn't put up your square. Are you really not gonna get vaccinated? Even just the question made them completely shut down and detach from their own personal desire to be curious and to seek answers for themselves. So it's important for us to remember that belief is that threshold or that transition point that gets us from a place where maybe we had questions or we didn't feel resolved to all of a sudden toeing the line for the mob and saying, okay, yeah, you're right, this is normal. So when I say the phrase the new normal, do any of you get chills down your spine? Do any of you immediately go back to 2020 where you're watching everyone walk around with a mask and act like the entire world was over, meanwhile surrounded by certain people that weren't buying the narrative, that were just kind of leading their damn lives as if nothing had changed. I know that certainly was the case for me. I was living in Arizona at the time, and my family, even before we moved to Idaho, we went to Idaho during the summers to get out of the he. And we went from Arizona lockdown to Idaho around probably like June of 2020. And we got into town, we started to walk around and I looked at my husband. I was like, God, this is just. It's so refreshing. I don't think I've seen a mask in hours. Go to the grocery store, no masks. Everyone was just leading their lives. It was like a pocket where you just would not have known that anything was taken different. In fact, people seemed happy. Go lucky. They were just enjoying their summer lives. No biggie. Belief Dictates a whole lot about how we engage with our reality and the actions that we take from that place. We've talked in previous episodes about the neurocognitive funnel. How our perception of reality is that top filter that comes all the way down through how we're defining our world, how we're emoting, how we're behaving. So we cannot have normalization without that process of belief. So media and phrases that are repeated like the new normal and influencers building their social media campaigns, these are all things that both covertly and overtly are meant to capture your perception of reality and start to actually funnel you into thinking in a very specific way. One of the ways this happens is also something called priming. Priming can be a lot more subtle. So everyone close your eyes that's listening to this right now. I want you to think of. Of the color yellow. Are you thinking of the color yellow? Great. Tell me what fruit comes to your mind. Most people will say banana. Very small amount of you will say lemon. But most of you will have thought of a banana. How is that possible? It's priming. There are these subtle little breadcrumbs that are spread out throughout our world. And if it's coordinated like the COVID effort was, it's happening in the mainstream media, it's happening through paid influencer campaigns, and then it's happening at lower levels on the micro, just as it is on the macro. So. So you're surrounded by it at all times. And this is used to, little by little, shape your perception, start to answer maybe questions. Let's say that somebody was curious and things weren't starting to sit right. The powers that be, let's just call them those running this PR campaign for Covid at the time, they are aware of some of those questions, and they're aware of where they have to cover and distract. So if they can anticipate where they're going to have to cover and distract, they already know exactly what sort of little media campaigns or influencer campaigns they're gonna have to splice in. So that as the questions arising in you, you're like, oh, but I saw Julia Roberts post, you know, hashtag goget vaccine. So if she's getting vaccine, then it must be safe, right? And I'm just gonna say, I dearly love Julia Roberts, and when I saw her post that, I was quite shocked, honestly. It's why that visual sticks out in my head. I know her personally, and I was pretty floored at that point. But it just goes to show during that time, there were very strategic campaigns that were run to co opt your belief system. So as questions were arising, you were just immediately met with the information meant to just distract you enough or to just satiate you enough to keep going and to keep grabbing onto a few more of those breadcrumbs given to you by the mainstream media. Doesn't take much. When you think of COVID immediately we start to see pictures in masks. You know, everybody with their mask, holding out their arm. I got my vaccine. Did you get your vaccine? What about the hashtag? Hashtag alonetogether. Trying to somehow make it normal that we are all completely separated from each other, we're not allowed to leave our house, that you can't go to the beach and surf because you know Covid. You can't be more than, or you can't be closer than six feet apart because you know Covid. So I know that you're gonna be isolated and alone. But hashtag alonetogether. None of these things are naturally occurring. This was a planned, highly coordinated attempt to normalize something that really should have been an obvious red flag. It was an obvious red flag to me, but I'm kind of naturally more conspiratorial minded. So when this happened, there was no part of me that was shocked. In fact, if we go back and we roll back tapes, I actually very clearly stated about January 31st that I had awoke to a very clear prophetic dream where I called out this entire thing, and then it happened two weeks later. So I was not surprised. This is something that I saw coming, and those of you that kind of dove into this and dissected pieces of. Was very clear that this had been something that actually was masterminded years before. And we could actually detail each of the breadcrumbs that got us to where we were by the time Covid rolled around. So normalization is something that can take an idea or a situation or even a social norm that previously had been widely accepted, and it can take it and can twist it in such a way that you start to question your own sensory experience, and you may even start to question your own moral convictions, your own intellect. Because for many of you that got pulled into all this Covid drama, you really had to go against your own intuition. You had to go against, for many of you, your own intellectual or academic knowledge base to believe this stuff. And yet here we are now, 2025. Most of the people that I know that were once very against me because they thought that I was a kook. Now have come out to the other side. And I mean, even now, as recently as yesterday, a couple influencers that I know personally, I'd had good friendships with. But when the split happened during COVID and also at the same time, the whole blm, George, Floyd, all that stuff that really started to transpire over 2020, there was just a sharp divide. You know, people definitely seem to choose sides. I've always been somebody who can simultaneously manage a friendship and love and care and respect for a person that I also vehemently disagree with. Some people are not that way. And this is the case for a few of the people that even, like I said, just as recently as yesterday, I saw some things that they posted. I'm like, wow, full circle moment. I feel like at this stage, so many of us are all kind of back on the same team and it's relieving because we shouldn't have ever really been divided in the first place. But it's because of things like normalization and media and political campaigns that are meant to distort us, distort our perception and start to fracture us and get us to fight with each other. So that's what normalization looks like in the concept or idea of COVID right where it's. It's not that Covid's an idea. There's a lot of differing opinions on what Covid actually is, Whether it existed or not, whether it's a virus or not. We will certainly put a pin in that one and leave that for another episode, if maybe never. So with COVID we can see where in order to control and steer us politically, there was a coordinated campaign to put us into a fear state to get us to become compliant. That's something that is obviously a little bit more charged because anytime politics and more moral convictions and beliefs like that, like medical beliefs, are on the line, people get more emotionally charged. Let's shift gears and look at normalization in sports because this is something that shouldn't be a hot topic. It shouldn't be something that really like, irks you emotionally. But this is also still a great example of what can happen when something is normalized. I've got some information on sports, some records for the 100 meter sprint. Couldn't memorize these because it's complicated. But I think it's really interesting that starting back in 1968 with Jim Heinz, who was the first person to break the 10 second barrier for the hundred meter sprint, he came in at 9.95 seconds in 1989, a long time after this, Carl Lewis broke the 9.8 second barrier with a time of 9.86 seconds. So it took that many years to get from 9.95 to 9.86. Okay, so that's many years to really not move the needle that much. If you could imagine if you were a runner in 1989 and you saw that it took nearly 20 years to move it down by about a tenth of a second, you might feel pretty defeated. You might be like, you know what, If I can even just move it down 100th of a second, like, I'm doing great. That's normal. Because it's completely abnormal to go down by three tenths of a second. So then we get to 1991 with Maurice Green, who broke the 9.7 second barrier with a time of 9.79 seconds. So he closed that gap decently. Right? A second or a point, sorry, a tenth of a second between 1989 and 1991. Now let's go forward to 2009. Everyone remembers Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt came in at 9.58 seconds, and this was mind blowing to people because at this point in time, it could take five to 10 to 20 years to even move it down a tenth of a second. And then all of a sudden, we have almost 2/10 of a second by 2009. If you're a runner, whatever you believe the barrier is of human skill set, you will potentially handicap yourself and you'll set yourself short here. So as people are training, if they're trying to move it up by a hundredth of a second, they're going to look at what they're doing to try to beat this record in a more limited capacity. In this way, they're normalizing that it's not possible to move it to 9.58 seconds. So example would be if we were able to go back in time to 1960, and we're like, hey, we know that you just came in at 9.95, but we know it's possible to go 9.58. And that seed was planted in 1968. Do you think that they could have closed that gap sooner than 2009? Probably, because belief determines a whole lot. And if the belief is, it's possible, I'm much more likely to get there faster. We have to remember that belief can be a killer. It can be a way that we self handicap and hold ourselves back. If you believe that something is normal, you typically stop questioning it and you just accept it. Your belief in what's normal is actually part of what creates your reality. And if that reality is broken, your belief is going to be keeping you stuck. You likely stop looking for solutions. You settle into some sort of default mode. And then your brain and your actions and your life are all going to follow a path of least resistance. And everything that happens next may in fact be dysfunctional. But because you've labeled it normal, you've just accept it and you're going to stay there. Let's go into another topic that's again, a little bit emotionally charged. Sorry about it, but we got to do it. This is something that I had personal experience with because my daughter is special needs. My oldest daughter is 15. She was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was 1. And because of this, in her earliest months of life, I watched the infant milestones like a hawk. I had them memorized, I was checking them off. I was determined to make sure my daughter met her milestones. So I was without oxygen for 20 minutes during her birth. She was in the NICU for about a month. We had a feeling that there was going to be some sort of delays. I really didn't believe at the time that they were going to be cognitive, and praise God, they were not cognitive, they were only physical. But leading up until that one year old diagnosis of cerebral palsy, I was on it like a hawk with watching her milestones. And this actually set the groundwork for me to realize that something was very much off with milestones by the time I had my most recent child. So I was born in 2010 and I just had my most recent child in 2021. Been out here making babies for a while, y'. All. And when I looked at the milestones for my son, River, I was like, wait, no, no, no, no, this isn't right. That's not what they were. Back in 2010, I realized very quickly, especially after speaking with nurses and occupational therapists and physical therapists, that little by little, little incremental shifts over time, they have actually pushed back milestones. So they've pushed back the milestone for sitting, for standing, for saying your first word, also for the amount of words they are going to say. So I say to you, what would be the purpose in such a thing? Why would we suddenly change the infant milestones? If it's a milestone, doesn't that mean that it's relatively concrete? Doesn't that mean that it's based on typical human development? Oh, no, no, no. It's based on normal human development at the time in which we find ourselves today. And what I believe has happened and this is my hypothesis. I can't prove this, but I'll leave it to you to decide what other reasons there would be for doing such a thing. For moving some milestones back months. I think it's a sneaky cover up to actually minimize or hide the red flags of vaccine injury and other developmental delays. It's the only way that they could normalize some of these developmental delays is to actually change what you're looking for. So back in 2010, if your child wasn't sitting on their own by six months, you were like, oh my God, they're not sitting. Something's wrong now. I don't even think it's listed till six or seven months. So why would they make you panic and seek help in 2010? And now they're like totally normal. Every child's different. I ask you if you incrementally shift the narrative around something and you do it so subtly that the average person doesn't notice it in the moment, but then when you get 10 or 11 years down the road, you're like, wait, wasn't the sitting milestone at four or five months before? And wasn't the first word here? And wasn't it 10 words instead of 2 words? What would make somebody change something like that? It is a coordinated attempt to make something normalized. Because in 2010, I can guarantee you a lot of the developmental milestones that we're looking at today, they would have been red flags. You would have been going to your doctor being like, excuse me, I think something might be wrong with my child. And now nothing. People are like, oh, see, it checks the box. It's totally normal. I don't have to ask questions. So let's now look at the normalization of porn. We have normalized porn as a part of everyday life. And what used to be very taboo in the mainstream is now wrecking relationships. It's distorting sexual expectations and romanticism and intimacy, and it's absolutely destroying your brain. There are plenty of studies that prove that. And it's really easy to get sucked into this idea that everybody's doing it or the damage isn't physical. It's messing with how you connect emotionally, how you're viewing intimacy, and how you're even relating to your own sense of self worth. Porn is a spiral of normalized addiction that keeps pulling you deeper. And unfortunately, because we've normalized it, it's openly fueling sex trafficking and toxic relationships, and I believe, complete and utter social decay. And I'm not here coming to you as a Prude or a square, or even as a Christian, which I am to try to tell you that porn is ev. It's the devil. I'm purely coming to you from the position of somebody who works day in and day out with men, women, and teens, helping them with their emotional regulation. And I have seen the damage firsthand that early exposure to porn does to somebody who's maturing into adulthood. I've seen firsthand how porn can completely destroy a beautiful marriage, a beautiful family, even put somebody into an escalating state of seeking the next pleasure in the next thing, all the way into making a poor choice that lands them in prison. When we think about normalizing something like porn, we can't discount the damage, even if it can be sneaky or subtle or even masked, and just simply wash it away because we're like, oh, everybody does it. Every. Every boy jerks off and looks at porn. Like, don't make a big deal about it. I think we are at a place in time where we have to start pushing back against some of these things. Just because it's been normal doesn't mean that it's benefiting humanity. Just because it's common doesn't mean that it's something that has a place in your marital life. And just because your kid's going to get exposed to it doesn't mean that as a parent, you should take a laissez faire attitude, like, oh, they're gonna see it at some point, so it might as well be now. This episode is brought to you by Healing Sauna, the most advanced portable infrared sauna on the market. And it's trusted by people like Dave Asprey and Peter Diamandis. 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I use it about four to six times a week. And six times a week, even for only 20 minutes, has been proven to extend your lifespan. Listeners of this podcast get a hundred dollars off by using my personal code bgheal@healingingsana.com every purchase supports my work too, and I would appreciate it deeply if you'd go check it out. By far and away the best sauna I have ever owned. If you are serious about your health, recovery and longevity, go head over to Healing Saunas. Use my code BG Heal for $100 off. I had an experience with my son when we were still living in Arizona. I think he was in like third, third grade probably, and he maybe even second grade, honestly horrified about this. It's like the first sleepover I let him go to. So for any parents listening, we were like, damn, the first sleepover. This kid seemed great. The family seemed great. It was. He went to Montessori, and in Montessori, they've got mixed grades, so he was slightly older than Zev. But still, nonetheless, it seriously was like second or third grade. So he goes to the sleepover, the next morning he comes home and I can just tell something's off with my son's behavior. He's just acting a little. A little bit off. He's being a little bit weird around devices. He's like, fidgeting more. I was just like, hey, bud, you good? And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm good. I'm like, what'd you guys do at your sleepover? And he kind of scurried through his answer, and I could just tell he was hiding something. I tried to push a little bit, but he wasn't forthcoming with information, so I just let it go. Later that day, I go to Jiu Jitsu with my kid, and I bump into one of the moms, and her daughter is good friends with Sev. And she's like, hey, can I talk to you for a second? And I was like, yeah. And at this point, I'm like, oh, crap, I already know where this is going. I already felt like my son had been exposed to something. But now, game on. Something's definitely happening here. So she comes up to me, and I won't say what she said, but basically she couldn't stop laughing because it was so obscene and ridiculous that I was like, we Both couldn't stop laughing. And this is not funny. It was a life changing parenting moment for me, but nonetheless, it was so ridiculous and absurd that we even had to have this conversation that we were both laughing. Thankfully, at the time, I picked friends that had a similar sense of humor to me and they weren't fuming. So I go home. I have to tell my husband, like, hey, honey, Zev definitely got exposed to porn when he was at that sleepover. We have to sit down and talk to him about it. I explained what he had then regurgitated to this poor little girl, bless her. Thankfully, he didn't show her anything. But he was like. He did kind of like the, like, hey, do you know how babies are made? And we were like, no, I'll just say because it's funny. It was something like so, like so and so came home and told me that, like, babies get made from, like, putting something in your butt. And I was like, oh, no, Lord, why? So have to go home and pick up these pieces. Go to my husband explained what's going on. And my husband works out at the same gym as this kid's dad. And I immediately am overcome with regret. I'm like, please don't start a fight at the gym. There's gotta be another way to take care of this. I'm pretty sure Gordon goes up to this poor guy while he's on the treadmill and he's like, hey, man, your son showed my son porn. Why aren't you watching your kids when they're over to sleepover? Anyways, as you can imagine, it's spiraled out of control. This is also not a life lesson on how to handle if your kid is exposed to porn. But nonetheless, the parents do what parents do, and they try to take their son's side at first, and they're like, no, this couldn't possibly be. My son wouldn't do that. Right? They go into denial. Eventually I get involved and try to kind of make the situation more peaceful and just say like, hey, I totally get it. No one is judging or blaming you, but I think this is worth maybe inquiring, maybe going into his devices, seeing if something's up. I totally understand that you don't ever want to believe that your kid's doing this, but it's probably worth another look. Eventually they uncover like, yes, of course it is the son, but the son has an older brother. It always is that way, right? But again, this kind of goes back to at the end of all this, they basically were like, boys will be boys. Like it was gonna happen at some point. And I'm grateful that I've progressed in my personal parenting journey enough that I wasn't so quick to just brush it off and be like, oh, well, sleep it under the rug. Boys will be bo. And I really took the time to work through this with my son, to go through every single uncomfortable detail and to help him understand how to protect himself in the future. But also, more than that, why protecting himself in the future was of value to him, why it is of high value to stand up for what you believe is right and to have some personal integrity instead of just immediately crumbling to peer pressure. Because, of course, peer pressure is going to come my son's way and surely has in the years in between. So I've watched, because of this moment, I've watched my son's personal conviction and backbone get stronger rather than weaker. So this is one example of how I could have just swept it under the rug and be like, well, boys will be boys. It's perfectly normal. Everybody does it. But instead, I chose to draw a line in the sand and say, I'm not going to guilt or shame or attack people here, and I'm not going to go on the offensive, but I am going to take this moment as an opportunity to change my son's future. Because if I don't draw a line in the sand now and I don't show him that this, in fact, shouldn't be normal and poses a risk to his future adulthood, I wouldn't be doing my job as a parent. And because of that, because I wasn't just willing to just stand there and say, oh, well, it's normal. I do believe that now my son is turning 12, I do think that that moment forever changed his life. When we stamp something as normal, we're often either overtly or covertly giving it our approval. And that is certainly the case for kids. Had I handled that situation differently, my son might have been like, oh, mom doesn't care about this. And maybe that's his invitation to keep dabbling or to keep exploring. But because I took the time without anger and without aggression to explain my conviction, I think it really planted a seed in him that I've seen seen grow over the years. Let's transfer this now into the sector of mental health and the medical system, because we're talking about normalization. But that is something that comes inherently with labels. And as you know, this episode is called the label limit. In the medical and mental health system, once a label has been given, there are always A set of symptoms or outcomes that are then normalized with that label. And these symptoms are normalized for things like an ADHD diagnosis or things that you can expect once you get a bipolar diagnosis. And over the last few weeks, I've been meeting with a variety of different doctors that I'm collaborating with. And one of them reminded me of something that, honestly, I'd never considered before. I didn't think it was my place. Obviously, I work both inside of and outside of the mental health sector, but not as a therapist or psychiatrist. So I kind of get to straddle these two worlds of being a disruptor and being more focused on the tech and behavior sciences side, while also not having my hands tied by some of the ethical standards and just different lines that some of these doctors have to tow. And he reminded me that the DSM is actually a billing code book. So you have to label something in order to have it be billable to insurance. So if you're going to bill and make money, you have to be able to categorize it accordingly. And I never really thought about the DSM in that way. And whether that is common knowledge or it's just something that doctors say behind closed doors, I don't know, because, again, I'm not inside of that community. I'm an outsider. But when this doctor said this to me, he laughed and kind of gave the impression like, yeah, many of us know this that are actually trying to take a stand against this part of the system. Let's think about labels, for example, because if you go to a doctor's office, when you go and have an appointment, they've got a sheet that's all billing codes, right? So there's all these different checkboxes. They're going to check this when they order your labs, right? They have to categorize. They've got to put you into a box so that they know how to charge for you. And unfortunately, once something receives a label, for most people, it actually starts to feel more real. And your brain likely starts to associate specific outcomes or experiences or even hardships with that label. So I want to play a little game of word association. Okay, Ready? Calm yourself. Clear your mind. If I say divorce, you think. If I say cancer, you think. And if I say schizophrenia, you think. Most people, as soon as I say those words, your brain's going to give you either a cluster of visuals or an emotional sensation. Maybe you put yourself immediately into the shoes of whatever word I just said, and you feel the intense pain of what that would feel like. But Ultimately, if you don't have those things or you haven't been in those things, you don't really know what those feel like. You just know what you've been socially programmed or primed to believe associates with that word. So the point here is once something is labeled, the next step for most people is acceptance. And over time, especially if there's societal peer pressure around it, you're likely to adopt this label as a part of your identity. And in today's world, people actually are starting to feel comforted by labels because then they start to feel seen, their pain or their struggle is acknowledged, and then they often find themselves part of an in group. These people are just like me. These people understand me. But what if you're accepting a label that might actually be either holding you back or subtly getting you to justify many of the habits or behaviors that actually perpetuate why you've received the label in the first place? I know I have certainly seen this in my practice with break method where people come very much living out a self fulfilling prophecy. I was labeled as X and I was told I will always have X. So now I just try to cope and accept my symptoms. Well, what if you don't have to accept those symptoms? What if you're actually able to draw a line in the sand and say I understand that where I am currently associates me with this label, but I don't accept all of those symptoms. I don't accept that those are outcome. Those outcomes are how I'm going to lead the rest of my life. So in order to draw that line and to separate yourself from the label, it actually requires deviance. Deviance is breaking away from a social norm or an expectation. And this could be both formal or informal. And in a world intently focused on labels. Medication, medical billing, trauma bonding, and even co opting your pain as an identity are honestly one of the single greatest acts you can do is just tell the label to stick it and embrace a little deviance. Deviance changes the world. Deviance also can destroy the world, right? Everything is with a balance. So even the relationship between normalization and deviance, it happens in a spiral. If you think about things like looking over time, there have been prolonged periods where we have moved more and more toward tradition and conservatism. And then eventually there will be kind of this wild pendulum swing and then we slowly work our way back again, right? That's how this transforms is in a spiral. And deviation is one of the catalysts for that. And deviation is when we start to often break away from the norm or the standards, or we start to even just ask more questions, maybe start to more boldly step into those periods of cognitive dissonance and be like, okay, I'm freaked out, but something doesn't feel right here. And when you start to step into a little bit of that deviance, you will stand out, and you often will be rejected or ignored at first, but eventually, you will start to push that trend back toward the mainstream. That is the nature of both deviation and normalization. They feed off of each other. Deviation starts small, and it starts to challenge the status quo until society eventually starts to accept it, and then society pulls it back into that normal range, and suddenly something is mainstream just because it's a hot topic right now. The Sydney Sweeney has Great Genes campaign. There is a 0% chance American Eagle would have been bold enough to make that campaign in 2020 or 2021 or 2022. You see where I'm going with this? But now that there has been this kind of more bold cultural shift, and people that were previously divided and scared are realizing the jig is up, like, we kind of. We understand what was done to us, and we don't want to be divided anymore. Now suddenly, this jeans campaign is able to come on in and fully disrupt everything. And of course, it's still going to piss off wildly the people who are still trying to tow this, you know, circa 2020-2023 agenda. But nonetheless, because there has been a cultural shift, this ad is able to exist where it certainly wouldn't have existed a few years ago. It would have been absolute brand suicide. So we do start to see these things happen in a slow spiral, but eventually it starts to gain speed and momentum, and then suddenly the things that were once deviant are, boom, now mainstream again. The relationship between these two counterparts of normalization and deviation, they're important aspects of our culture. They're important parts of our evolution as a human collective. But we have to be acutely aware of the distinction between organic normalization and deviation. And when it's actually something that is coordinated from the outside in. So something that tries to get us to turn on our own human instincts and turn against what's best for us physically, mentally, and spiritually. That's when we know something is trying to prime us to go against our own best interests. There are both forms. Some forms of deviance are very much done as a form of campaign to try to propel us into that mental state or into that belief, and then other things are happening organically. Example would be and I know that this is, this is controversial in and of itself because I know some of the other information here, but I'm able to look at it from both sides. In the 50s, women didn't have a place in the workforce the way we do now. Back then there really was a glass ceiling. And back then it really was far less common for women to even go to work. Right. It was much more common for a woman to fully embrace her role as a stay at home wife and mother and never ask questions about anything else. The treatment of women was certainly not great back then. It was a lot easier for society to be openly misogynistic and for women to be held back and not only minimized, but hypersexualized and basically treated like second class citizen. I totally agree with all those things. Now, simultaneously, there is a lot of evidence that shows that part of the modern feminism campaign and why it was initially started wasn't necessarily all rooted in organic deviation. It does seem that there's plenty of evidence that they wanted to collect more tax dollars from women actually working. So two things can be true at the same time. We could have needed some organic change and women could have needed to be like, you know what? F this, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to be out in the world and I want to explore. I want to see what I'm personally capable of in the workforce. That can happen simultaneous to there being a controlled effort to try to get us to become a modern feminist that then turns against our old lifestyle so that they can make more money off of us being in the workforce. Both of those things are possible. One is organic based on our own internal frustrations and how we're feeling and our personal experience and our own senses. And then the other is piggybacking on that like, yeah, aren't you mad? Don't you want to do this? F the family life, go to work. They worked in tandem. But we have to get good at knowing when to notice when something is organic versus inorganic. And one of the classic signs is when is an organized campaign and there's propaganda art and there are slogans that are just trickling in, whether it's through the news or magazines or popping up in movies or television shows. That's when we know that there's more of a coordinated effort to shift or shape our perception rather than something that's happening organically. So when we are trying to bring about change through something like deviation being the catalyst, it does require bold confidence steps and it requires an intentional rejection of Whatever the status quo is, it demands that we wake up to the puppet strings that have been pulling us into some sort of slumber. In my area of work, just blatantly accepting mental illness and just being like this is normal. These things are absolutely normal, or even chronic illness and just complete and utter social decay. Change asks us to be brave and to step into that threshold of the unknown. And this is a place where you are likely to get social pushback or even anger thrown at you. But I can tell you, as a mental health innovator who's been constantly willing to put myself on the social chopping block, this moment in time requires that we ask hard questions and that we not be so quick to accept socially programmed attempts to alter to the new normal. We can't just bow down to the new normal. And we have to remind ourselves that eventually, even if it's starting to feel scary or lonely, when we're boldly trying to take those steps into deviance in between, our world requires bravery and boldness. And I do think that that is one of the things that has been lost. We have turned into increasingly a generation who is not emotionally resilient. We aren't willing to question the status quo. We aren't willing to go it alone and act on principle and conviction. Instead, we've been coddled and enabled and we've been made to be weak and just accept whatever the narrative is that's given to us and just toe the line. And the results of that is horrifying. I work with teen clients all the time, and I feel so much deep empathy and sympathy for the teens that I see come into my practice day in, day out. It is harsh out there. Back in 2022, I did an episode called An Open Letter to kids in 2022. And I openly admitted, for this generation, things are harder than they've ever been. The chances that you're going to be able to withstand some of the societal peer pressure, very slim. Although of course they're always going to be those tough, gritty kids that get through it no matter what. But there's a reason that we've been seeing such a rise in things like gender dysphoria. Kids right now are parented to be highly susceptible to peer pressure, group think and societal peer pressure at large. And when we see this push toward labeling and normalizing things that are absolutely under any circumstances, if we had gone back five, 10, 20, 30 years ago, we would have been very quick to say these things are dysregulated or these are unhealthy and they need to be fixed. Now we've just gone into the stage of accepting and normalizing everything because we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. But if we try not to hurt everybody's feelings and just get them to accept their label and we as a human collective stay stuck and unfortunately, our wounds and our pain and our darkness augments. It doesn't just naturally get better, it gets worse. We've seen this in generations where a parent doesn't do the work and they keep passing on the wounds or the sins of their previous family. Things get worse, not better. So somebody, hopefully it's you, is going to take a stand here, draw a line in the sand and say, I'm not gonna accept the label. I'm not going to accept this as normal if it feels bad in my body, if this is a way that I don't want to be. I'm not just gonna sit back and accept my label. I'm going to do everything I can to push back against it, to find alternatives, to go researching outside of just what's being spoon fed to me. Because we do live in a world where there are so many alternatives that you may never have considered before, but because of this social programming and priming. And you might have been programmed to believe that anything that is outside of this spoon fed funnel is quackery or something that is conspiratorial or anti science, but that's not at all what the truth is. And if you actually roll up your sleeves and you go out there boldly and you start to ask some of the hard questions, you're going to find both doctors and laypeople that have made some amazing discoveries that can totally radically change your life, your children's lives and so on. So I do want you to remember that while the path into some of that deviance that's going to change the world could be temporarily lonely and scary, you are going to find your people along that journey. And that is the boldness and confidence that's required to change the world that we live in today. So I want you to ask yourselves, where have you accepted a limit of a label in your life and how has this held you back or kept you stuck? I know for sure. When I was 23, I had been having so many health problems that I know I have talked about at length on this show. And I remember when my doctor first diagnosed me with lupus and he was like, you're gonna be on this and this and this and these steroids for the rest of your life. And I was like, no, no, I'm not. Boop, you're wrong. But of course I'm busy. And I have been stubborn since the day I was born and was like, you can't tell me what's gonna happen to me. Thank God. And that was a turning point in my life where I took my first step out into the world of alternative and complementary medicine and was like, I don't accept this reality for myself. And thank God, because I found a doctor that radically changed my entire paradigm of the medical system and the nutrition system. And I reversed all of my symptoms, really, up until having two back to back babies close to 40, which 10 out of 10 don't recommend. It was not easy on the body. But if you watched the peptide episode last week, you'll understand that I have finally, thankfully found something that is starting to reverse some of those symptoms that have snuck back in. But alas, if I had just accepted my label, I don't think I would have created any of the businesses or had any of the career trajectory or helped hundreds of thousands of people along my career if I had just accepted, yes, I have lupus and I'm going to take all these medications for the rest of my life and poor me. And I'm just going to get worse and worse because there's no cure. Like what? How horrifying to think that I could have almost lost 20 years of my life by just simply accepting a label that a guy in a white lab coat told me I should accept. So that's my personal experience with pushing back against a label. But some of you, and I'm not faulting you for this, did accept a label and I'm sure it has held you back. I've had countless clients who have come to me in break method with being in and out of traditional talk therapy and psychiatry and trying every single treatment under the sun, being on medication for over 20 years, coming to me and being like, hey, this is the last stop. To be honest, I've had clients that have come to me basically like, if this doesn't work, I'm pretty much at the end of my rope. And we have had incredible success with that in break method. You can go on the website and look at the testimonials. There are so many people who have been able to eventually get off of medication, even that they'd been on for 20 years, that they had previously not even been able to titrate down from because they actually got to the root of the issue. But in all their previous Rounds of therapy or psychiatry, they just, they bought into their story, into their trajectory of what their label means about their future. So you have an option to disconnect from that. You have an option to seek alternative answers and to find fire. Back up your curiosity and your belief that healing is possible. I'm gonna give you three relatively simple steps that can help you break away from being limited by some label that you've taken on. But obviously this is a journey that requires some emotional work, some support systems, because for many of you, there is either familial or social peer pressure that has caused you to take on this label and turn it into a part of your identity. So just want to say, I feel for you. I know how challenging this can be to try to step away from that. But think about the information that's been presented here and how profound our belief in something can influence the future outcome that we walk right into. Are you becoming a self fulfilling prophecy or do you want to draw a line in the sand right now and imagine an outcome that could be different, that could give you more freedom, less pain, more connection with the people around you? Because it is possible. So step number one is you have to be honest with yourself. Once you accepted the label, did you stop trying to change the outcome? Did you just start trying to justify your symptoms and maybe even just blame your genetics? This is something that has driven me absolutely nuts over the last couple of years. This shift toward everything being genetic which immediately takes away our agency. Like, oh, it's genetic, oh, I've got the MTHFR gene. That's not how this works. Genetics absolutely do play a role, but they are a loaded gun. But there have to be environmental inputs and even behaviors that you act out and thoughts that you allow to pervade your consciousness that actually set this gun into a full warning shot. We have to remember that we always have agency and we have to be able to be honest with ourselves about the ways that we might have taken our foot off the gas, or we might have started to justify things like, well, I'm tired, so I can't do that, Even though doing that thing would possibly make me less tired. Right. Eventually, when you're wrapped up in either chronic illness or mental illness, eventually you get yourself into this chicken or egg where you feel like crap. So you can't feel like you can't do the thing that really would help your fatigue. These are all things that we very much address in break method. And I've seen people radically change through getting stuck in some of these more depressive or apathetic cycles for a long period of time, or even things like chronic fatigue. But we do have to start by being honest with ourselves. You also have to acknowledge that the system revolves around billing and avoidance of liability. So when we're looking at mental health and medical sectors, you cannot get around that it is the linchpin of the industry and you can't get away from them. And just because you're told what will likely happen to you or what you won't be able to do, or that healing is not even possible, you cannot just take that as absolute truth. Belief can transform the trajectory of your life. And there are alternatives and emerging approaches that aren't mainstream yet that might actually be something that you should be considering or pursuing or at least asking questions, at least doing the research, going out with an open mind and seeing what's out there, hearing other people's testimonies, seeing how other people have taken steps to get them out of the same level that you've just believed you're going to be stuck in for the rest of your life. And number three, you have to take responsibility for some of the lifestyle and emotional habits that are contributing to or exacerbating the issue itself. Most issues do not exist in a silo. And it doesn't matter what label you give me, whether it's bipolar disorder or Hashimoto's, it doesn't matter if it's something that you perceive to be purely physical or chemical, or whether it's something that's purely emotional. There are always holistic approaches to this that involve lifestyle Emotional habits that could at bare minimum, support you in getting to a place where you can start to mitigate certain symptoms. And unfortunately, that requires some commitment and grit. Changing habits, especially if they're deeply ingrained lifestyle habits that have been passed down to you through familial lines, it's really challenging. Changing our habits is one of the hardest things to do. But it can be done. And I know for sure it's something that we work on significantly in Break method. But it is something that again, you have to look at it from that neurocognitive funnel approach, because how you're perceiving reality and then defining your world and all the rule sets that come from your childhood environment are going to subconsciously make you justify your own demise and self destruction through repeating and justifying or minimizing these habits. And we have to take ownership of them. In next week's episode, we're going to be exploring mast cell activation syndrome and the underpinnings of postpartum depression and pmdd. This is something that I run into all the time with clients and I have a doctor coming on in a few weeks that's going to be going even deeper into mast cell activation syndrome and postpartum depression and pmdd. So I want to lay the foundational groundwork so by the time she comes on we are ready to go to level 10 with her instead of preschool kindergarten level. But before we close out today's episode, I do just want to remind you that we do have a free circle community and you can get that link in the show notes on my website busygold.com and this is where we can just continue the conversation. You also will get access to live recordings and you can also attend members only Q&As. And again this is 100% free and you can join it inside of the show notes and it's my free Circle community. If you enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you would go give it a five star rating or share it with somebody who needs it because of your support. We've actually been in the top five of all mental health and health and fitness podcasts in the entire country, which is amazing. It's no small feat and I'm incredibly grateful to each and every one of you for being a part of it. It's been an amazing journey. I love being here with each of you every single week getting to explore these topics in a more open ended format where we can lay the groundwork and then continue to invite on other experts so that they can layer on their expertise over these foundations. So thanks for joining me. I appreciate you all so much and I will see you next week. Your brain isn't broken, it's running. An old code break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring. In 20 weeks or less head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. Patterns can can be broken, the code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen.