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Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
Toxic Positivity Doesn't Heal You ( It Pushes the Problem Deeper)
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You're repeating to yourself, I'm enough. I am beautiful. I am lovable. Or maybe you just crushed a workout on your assault bike and you Woke up at 5am and you wrote everything in your gratitude journal and you really believe that this is beneficial and productive. And because you believe it, surely to some extent it's helping. But deep down, there is a quieter voice whispering back every time you have to affirm to yourself, and it's actually telling you, no, you're not. Your brain is wired for deception. But here's the truth. 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? Welcome back to Decoded. Today we are talking about a trap of override messages, a culture of toxic positivity, the illusion of healing, and why so many people keep putting a band aid on a wound that actually needed ditches. The adoption of override messages can make the rewiring process a very twisty journey of self deception. On some level, you might have said it to yourself so many times that to some extent you've tricked yourself into believing it. Right? That's kind of the whole point. But eventually your brain starts to reach for this language in order to soothe itself. And it's trying to soothe itself because the negative voice actually stepped up to the microphone first. You don't actually reach for an affirmation because you're already thriving. You grab it because part of your nervous system knows that it is in the process of destabilizing. And when you try to keep piling on positivity on top of a very deeply entrenched belief system that's trying to tell you the opposite, you create facets or pivot points that can make the entire rewiring process incredibly complex. Your consciously held beliefs or patterns can become your hubris, leading you to your inevitable demise. When you attempt to override, instead of fundamentally rewire the origin language that your brain uses to generate beliefs, you get locked into a loop and you start to replay this thought over and over again. This is the trap of an override message. This includes affirmations, a lot of journaling, even positive self talk can be designed to mask the symptoms of a deeper problem. And while they might provide a momentary sense of relief, and I'm certainly not saying that they aren't a stepping stone or a mitigating technique, they are never going to address the underlying root cause. And they can also make the process of discovering the real root cause even more challenging. A Client once embarked on an exercise with me. And as I looked through what she had written, I noticed something very obvious. Every section in which a group of her peers was almost exclusively skewed negatively. Hers was positive and cheery, and with each passing line I felt the weight of having to approach her and potentially burst her bubble. After all, she did attend my program for a reason. And I am always more committed to a client's success than getting a client to like me as a person. Thank God, because people often don't end up liking me in the process. If I had to be the bad guy in order to help her pursue truth and healing today, so be it. I was on board. I asked her to pull up the exercise, and with as much love in my voice as I could possibly gather, I spoke her name. I followed up by saying, there's no easy way to tell you this, but everything I just read on this page feels like a lie. And she gasped and looked back at me stunned, and I definitely heard a nervous chuckle. And she said, what do you mean? I took the time to remind her why she told me she originally enrolled in the program and I asked her, was that a lie? And she said, no, of course not. I went on to show her that her writing on the exercise was likely aspirational at best, but full blown toxic positivity most likely. And to this day, I know this moment was pivotal for this client. She boldly acknowledged it. I will absolutely give that to her. And she said, you're right. Oh my God, this is bs, every word of it. I want this to be true so badly. And it was like the clouds parted for the first time. And she smiled a huge smile. And it was a pivotal moment for her. I think she realized in this moment she had spent so much money and time trying to learn how to do, affirm, manifest, journal, proclaim. But the truth was actually sadly simple. The deeply held beliefs and language that's generated in our early childhood years of life actually pervades our psyche and our subconscious directives. Putting a band aid over it doesn't do anything except make us feel confused, conflicted and even worse. Like a fraud override, messages ultimately fail. They don't speak the language of the subconscious. They're surface level fixes that can't penetrate our deeper programming that truly drives our self perception and of course our actions. When we align ourselves with the truth and we prepare ourselves to face the depth to which these sneaky messages have impacted who we are, how we see the world, and what actions we choose to take Then, and only then, can we truly start rewiring. Toxic positivity has created an entire culture of delusion and escapism, and let's call it like it is. It's also emotional gaslighting. It's a culture that insists that you plaster a smile on your face and that you have your aesthetic on point, that you focus on good vibes, and no matter what kind of chaos, pain or grief is unfolding beneath the surface. Hint, you probably only need to go on Instagram here for about 0.2 seconds to witness this. On paper, it might sound like a harmless byproduct of social media, but in practice, it's a delusional escape that sidesteps or masks the uncomfortable truths that we need to confront if we actually want to heal. The obsession with relentless optimism doesn't just encourage avoidance, it enforces it. It trains you to silence any emotion or experience fit the narrative of effortless happiness and ultimately toxic positivity solves nothing. It suppresses, it invalidates, and it bypasses the very emotions and beliefs that are crying out to you to be addressed. And worse, it probably leaves you feeling more broken than before, trapped in a cycle of shame, avoidance and comparison. You end up feeling like a failure for not being able to just be happy. When in reality, I don't think happiness was ever really the problem. Your brain's internal wiring is this culture convinces you that if you aren't feeling better, it must be because you are not trying hard enough, you're not manifesting properly, or you're not just aligning your energy. Right. It's an elaborate sugar coated form of emotional manipulation. And it makes me pretty mad if you can't tell. Positivity in and of itself is not bad, but toxic positivity is a weaponized form of avoidance. It demands that you ignore your reality and you reject your emotions in favor of a curated, polished facade. But you cannot outrun your subconscious. You can lie to yourself. People do it all the time. You can paste a smile on your face and convince yourself that you're choosing to be happy. But your nervous system knows what's really going on. Your subconscious does keep score. And all of that unprocessed emotion that you shove down because you're trying to stay positive will make its way out one way or another, whether it's through an irrational emotional outburst, chronic stress, or even physical symptoms that flow force you to finally confront what you've been trying so hard to ignore. I know for me, that certainly showed up with autoimmune disease eventually this facade is going to have to crumble. Toxic positivity invites you to put on a happy face, practice self care, and just level up your vibes. But in order to do this in our social media driven world, it requires a split to take place, an intentional compartmentalization or dissociation from what you really feel in order to align yourself with good vibes. So what you're doing, in essence, is crafting a facade or a Persona, and you're shoving down the truth or the mess that doesn't quite meet our cultural measuring stick. And this facade comes with consequences. Perhaps these consequences won't sneak attack you for weeks or even months, but they will. And it's inevitable. You can't outrun emotional cycles. Indefinitely suppressed feelings have a very nasty habit of resurfacing, and it often comes disguised as chronic symptoms or physical illness down the road. When you wall up and you put up a facade, you're not actually solving a problem. You're simply delaying the healing process. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of moments when a facade actually does serve as a positive survival tool to prevent emotional upheaval. But it will always come at a cost. Each time you rely on it, you're borrowing from your future self. And from a mathematical perspective, this means that you will always be putting yourself into emotional debt. And that interest compounds. Healing requires that you face the issues head on, even if that means staying right in the midst of a storm long enough so that you can actually do the real work and heal for good. If anyone's ever told you, just be positive, and you have struggled to just flip that switch and be like, you're right, that was all I needed. I feel happy now. Often a new problem starts to emerge, and that is shame. And shame is not just a side effect. It's actually an underlying driver for why you likely are the type that landed in this position in the first place. For people who struggle with shame based wiring, toxic positivity doesn't just tell you to ignore your pain. It actually makes you feel guilty for having it in the first place. And of course, this doesn't help. This compounds your struggle because now you're not just dealing with the original wound, now you're also dealing with the belief that you're defective for feeling it at all. This is a shame spiral disguised as optimism. And this is how you get stuck in internal war that no doubt leads to rumination comparison. FOMO grass is greener, you name it. And you're probably very frustrated with yourself for feeling the way that you do. And I'm sure a part of you wants to just get over it. You probably compare yourself to others who appear to be thriving, and you do this, and then it makes you feel like you're falling behind. And every time someone tells you, just think positive or look on the bright side, the internal war in your mind probably gets louder. Shame doesn't just make you feel small, it makes you hide. And it pushes you into avoidance, shutting down, meaningful self examination. And it probably makes it nearly impossible for you to do the kind of deep work that rewiring actually requires. And the irony is, the more you try to force positivity, the more resentment you build toward the people who are trying to push it onto you. Maybe you start to feel anger toward the people who say, oh, you look tired, you seem a little off today. Why? Because they're calling out the very thing that you are likely trying to conceal. With every cell of your being and the world that we live in right now. It is probably asking you to keep up the illusion. But your subconscious, no matter how many affirmations or podcasts or courses you buy, is probably still whispering what feels like a deeper truth. And if you keep ignoring that voice, it will only get louder. The only way to escape this cycle is to stop treating shame like something to be conquered through positivity and to start addressing it at the rewiring level. Let's take a look at how toxic positivity can negatively influence relationship cycles. When toxic positivity becomes the status quo, your relationship is likely going to start to feel performative. You're no longer being radically honest because, truthfully, when someone asks, how was your night? You don't want to lie and say, fine, but you also don't feel like you have the permission to be real. The curated, sanitized version of reality that fits the script of endless positivity is starting to hold you back, making interactions probably feel hollow or disconnected. And the big problem is, the more you live behind that mask, the less you actually know who you are underneath it. You can actually start to become detached or separated from your real identity. Inauthenticity in relationships isn't just about deception. It's about emotional distance. The more you rely on your false front or facade, the harder it becomes for people to truly connect with you. Over time, this leads to dissociation from yourself, where you might even start to struggle to identify how you really feel or what you actually need. And you become so accustomed to playing the role of happy and easygoing that when someone asks, what's really going on, you might not even know how to answer the question. And that is a dangerous place. And I say this from somebody who as a child learned that compartmentalization and always being fine is my primary survival skill. So I tell you, as someone who's about to turn 41, there are long term consequences of that. And it does seem that there is this bifurcation in social media where you're either in the victim Olympics and you have to lead with all of your trauma and everything needs to be safe and you do nothing, or the alternate is this toxic positivity, affirmation, manifestation. Babe, just choose to be happy when the reality is obviously something very much in the middle. Anytime we end up on either far left or far right sides, we're usually getting ourselves into some pretty severe issues. When you lose touch with your own emotional reality, you will start to lose access to what your needs are. What boundaries should I have? How do I even say that? Boundary. Because you become so disconnected from how you actually feel, can you start to make decisions that actually serve you? Or are you only trying to uphold this facade of positivity? Authenticity is the real foundation of meaningful relationships and more importantly, deep, secure attachment. But authenticity requires that you step into discomfort. It means that you have to be willing to sit in it. You have to navigate through the awkwardness of telling the truth, even when it's ugly. And it means you have to resist the urge to brush things off and default to some sort of prepackaged response. If you want relationships to actually support you, you have to be willing to show up who you really are, not as you think you're supposed to be. And anything else is simply coming from self deception. And I want to remind you, healing actually isn't supposed to look pretty. If you look back at previous episodes, I did a whole episode on how to look at the actual evidence of healing. And it's messy, it's raw, it's uncomfortable. You do have to sit in discomfort. There is no hit a button, circumvent the whole process. There is no real bypass. You have to face your pain head on. And you have to dismantle all the beliefs that keep you stuck. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is irrational. And yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal Development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew youw Mind. This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring, and biblical teaching around the command to renew your mind. Inside this program, I walk through what's actually happening in the brain when patterns form, why your prefrontal cortex shuts down under emotional pressure, and how specific behaviors activate areas like the anterior mid cingulate cortex, which is responsible for resilience, discipline, and the ability to push through discomfort. But the most important thing we talk about is pattern opposition. Because if you want a new life, you can't keep feeding the same neural pathways that created the old one. Scripture says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. But most people were never taught how to actually do that. Renew your mind gives you the framework to begin interrupting destructive patterns, strengthen your ability to regulate emotion and build the emotional resilience that is required to become a new creation. If you've ever felt like your reactions, habits, or emotional patterns are running your life instead of the other way around, this program was built for you. Renew your mind can be accessed at Stan store busygold. If you're expecting that thinking positively is a real form of deep emotional rewiring, you are setting yourself up for severe disappointment. And in fact, as I mentioned with the previous client case, it can make getting to the real core of the issues very challenging. I feel the same way, for example, about emdr. Not that EMDR is not a very powerful practice, because it is. But when you do emdr, you naturally start to sever the connection between the original memory encoding process that is connected to the beliefs or the traumas. And when you sever that connection, it can be harder to map all of the cause and effect relationships. I've had people that have come to break method, for example, working on things where they had done EMDR previously. And it's almost as if they're in a dreamlike amnesia state of trying to connect back to the problems that are very much still real. They are still causing the whole system of behavior and emotion that is causing problems. And while maybe they've severed that connection from the visual stimulus tied to the trauma, they never got to the underlying system. So for that reason, as an example, I typically encourage people to do EMDR after break. Right? We've already uprooted the underlying system. Now you can go separate yourself from those very specific visual stimuli connected to the trauma. So really these toxic positivity override messages function the same way. You start to band aid on top so much that you start to get into this, like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? The negative is still happening. But did I say the positive affirmation? Because the negative one actually came up first and I was trying to swat it away like a fly. Or now do I say the positive? And there's a part of me that's like, are you really sure? Because either way it hasn't gone away. And the same is going to be true for that EMDR sort of component. So you have to remember that there is no other way to the other side without going through the messy, hard, often very challenging part. And you're not going to enjoy the process. But the good news is, if you do it the right way, you probably only have to do it once. Simply reading a motivational book isn't going to do much to help you out of these deep seated childhood trauma patterns. I'm not saying don't do it right. I think reading is great. I think being aspirational and thinking positively, these are all great things. I'm simply trying to show you that those things by themselves do not address the underlying mechanisms that fire from that neurocognitive funnel approach. If you follow this podcast, we talk about the neurocognitive funnel. Often our perception of reality, how we're defining things in our world, will be upstream or cause our emotional response. Once our emotional response is firing, it causes a behavior. So an example would be if I'm looking out at my world, if I label somebody's facial expression as hatred or disgust of me, even if they didn't say anything, it's just how I interpret it. I might immediately go into fear and be like, oh my God, they hate me. And then what might I do? I might back away. I might avoid that person. This is a true story, you guys. Just if you want to get a little peek into what my life is like. One day I went into my DMs and there was this woman that was part of a photo shoot, like literally forever ago. Probably, like no joke, 2014, 2015, something like this, like 12 years ago. And I can barely say this with a straight face. I think I probably said all of two to three words to this woman. I had met her at an event, she had a really cool, like kind of rocker chick look. And I was like, oh, you'd be great for this photo shoot. Come join us. And on the photo shoot set, there's a lot going on. And I know that you guys don't know this about me, but I art direct quite a few photo shoots, so even I'll do that for clients now because I love doing it. But when you're in the process of managing multiple people and a set and you're kind of swapping models in and out, you're kind of in business mode, right? You're not necessarily. I'm sure some people can do this. It's not ever a production quality I've ever seen. It's not something I've been able to do. But when I'm laser focused, I'm not simultaneously trying to tiptoe around everyone's feelings and emotions. I'm directing, right? And I think on a photo shoot set, there's this idea that everyone's on the same page, right? Like, busy's in business mode. None of this is personal. Apparently, this memo did not pass to this person. So again, 12 years later, I got this message that's kind of like. It's a really long. At first, I'm so confused. I'm like, is this one someone okay? Do I know this person? And then in the end, it was like, I offered you my leather jacket, and it was my most prized possession. And the look that you gave me made me feel like you just hated me and thought I was disgusting. And it was like, this was like a hateful dm. And I literally responded to her with, I'm so sorry. I don't remember that moment at all. I know that on a photo shoot, that set, I can be all business. And if I gave you a look that upset you, I am really sorry for it. I don't remember that at all. And I bring this up because, did I hate her? Probably not. You guys, I'm like, very much not a hateful person. Was I in business mode? Was I maybe doing something else? And she was, like, trying to get me to wear her jacket, and I was not in a place where that was a priority for me. In that moment, maybe. But she said it was because of a look I gave her. So just imagine a world where how you interpret a look now becomes synonymous with objective reality. You hate me and think I'm a monster because of a look that you gave me when I tried to hand you my jacket. What if, in my mind, which obviously is the case, I had no idea because I didn't think those things. I didn't feel those things. None of that was true. That doesn't mean that she didn't feel that way and that her feelings weren't hurt, obviously they were very hurt for her to bring it up, up 12 years later, still hurt by it. But I bring this up because these are these deep emotional wounds, like this sort of fear of rejection, shame thing that no doubt this person struggles with that cause you to interpret someone's facial expression and make it obviously very much about yourself, but also this very charged, very irrational experience. And you could live like that for 12 years believing that that was objectively true. Even if we went and interviewed every single person in the room and they're like, I, I don't think that happened, I don't remember that. And going on this journey about this particular person's jacket, even worse that this person went out of their way to say, this was my favorite jacket, it was my most prized possession, right. And I realized there was a part of them was trying to, obviously from the way they told the story, give me access to their most prized possession. So of course if someone's like, no thank you, or I don't feel like wearing that right now, or what, whatever, like thank you so much, but I'm we're doing this other thing, of course it's going to feel like a deep seated rejection again. Does that mean it's objectively true? Of course not. Is this an example of what can go terribly, terribly wrong in our world? Yeah, of course. So I ask you, with that sort of pattern in mind, you can take that and you can put it onto workplace issues, relationship issues. If you don't address those underlying beliefs that cause you to snapshot, label someone's expression or their voice tone in a way, and believe with every cell in your being that that is true, you're going to set yourself up for a very specific life trajectory and it won't be a good one because guess what I get. Guaranteed that was not a one off experience. That particular person has probably done that with multiple people. Because if you're going to take things personal and you're going to assume and read into people's body language or voice tone etc, and make it about yourself, of course you're going to keep doing that with other people. And a person like that, and I've seen it many times before, they usually do get into this toxic positivity, manifestation, babe affirmation thing, right? Because instead of addressing the real root and being like looking in the mirror, wow, this is a me problem. I have like some pretty dark, twisty thoughts that I project onto other people and I should probably work on that. The toxic Positivity, affirmation, vibe. It's easier because you do get to completely bypass, and I'm telling you right now, it won't actually do anything at all. In fact, it will probably separate you in a very negative way from the real underlying problem and probably trick you into an even deeper delusion that you're fine, it's everybody else's fault. When we're talking about things like journaling, chanting, affirmations, gratitude journals, I really do get the sense from looking at social media that people do present this version that it is a magical healing tool. Like, if I just do this, everything's going to be great. But the truth is, this shallow approach, like I said, does not touch your subconscious programming. And in fact, it can often be an expression of this underlying problem. So, example would be somebody who, and by the way, when people come into break method and they are journalers, they almost always have the same brain pattern type. And I typically will urge them, hey, for the next couple months, I want to encourage you to not journal. And then let's check back on the following things. And almost every time people go back and they read their journal entries after they've gone through the rewiring process and they realize I was literally like looping on my victim story and every time I would journal, I was actually pulling myself deeper into the self deception, which is of course why I encourage people not to journal. Now, for those of you who are really out of touch with how you feel and you do naturally compartmentalize and you don't even stop to think about what's going on in your inner world, you're probably not a journaler. For you, writing some of those things out would actually be pattern opposition. So you see here it's about pattern opposition. It's not that journaling on its own is inherently bad, but journaling. For a person who's already sucked into and bought into their personal narrative and their victim story, journaling can be something that feeds that and feeds it in a very sinister way. A person like that needs something that pulls them out of that, into more prefrontal cortex objectivity. But someone like me, for example, I probably would benefit from taking an account of how I'm actually feeling because I am naturally inclined toward compartmentalizing. So when we're thinking about things like affirmations, journaling, these toxic positivity things that we're looking at, it often can keep you running in place or trapped in a healing loop that people think on the outside shows that you're doing well and things are great, but you are aware if you're listening to what's happening in your mind, that you're actually in the same place that you always were. You're having to still combat the inner monologue or the negative self talk. And maybe again, you've gotten good at blanketing over it. Maybe you've put a bunch of stickers up on your mirror. But if those initial negative self talk messages or internal monologue is happening, there's still more work to do. And that brings me to people that seem to always be on a perpetual healing journey. And you certainly see this with Instagram influencers where, and I will say for what it's worth, there are a few that I know personally, where their entire Instagram channels were built and their whole Persona as a whole was built around their healing journey. And at a certain point, these people were healed. But. But it was like the people that were following them, that wasn't why they were falling, right? They wanted to follow the struggle, they wanted to follow the pain and the striving. And eventually some of these people did kind of put their hands up and they're like, I'm actually like, this is not me anymore. And I've seen some of these even like, stop their podcast, right? So I want to commend a lot of these creators because I do think that there's this shift right now to authenticity where they're like, I'm. I built my whole thing on the struggle, and I'm literally not in struggle anymore, and it's not authentic. So hats off to you creators who are actually being authentic and saying something. But I do think that there is this trend toward people seeking healing and wanting to always be in some sort of healing, striving process. And I think people can become incredibly addicted to it. And I want to just point out here that if you are the type of person that's always in some sort of endless healing loop, it might be time to ask yourself if you are addicted to the process of seeking and striving and struggle. Because what I know to be true is when you rewire properly, you reach a place of peace and stability where you don't have to do that anymore. Like, there's no part of me that would want to put my time, effort, or mental state into struggle. Striving, seeking. I'm just. I'm not there. When I say nothing, my mind is quiet. That is the place that ultimately as human beings, we can get to. I am not saying that it's an easy process, but it is a part of the process. And if you are constantly justifying this next thing, this next course, I just want to learn more. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing to want to learn, but I do think you have to check in with yourself and be honest. Are you striving because you like to be part of a community? Are you looking for a challenge? Or are you collecting a bunch of things, but not actually integrating and embodying those things? I think it might be time for some of you to hit the pause button on all these new things that you want to do and be honest with yourself about the integration process because things do take time to integrate and sometimes sticking with one thing and staying really focused there is required, right? We, we live in this sort of rapid fire, like you can get anything you want, right? Change the channel. All these videos are built for a short attention span, right? Like so. We're used to going from one thing to the next to the next. When it comes to healing, that is extremely detrimental. Focus on something, see it all the way through, integrate it. Don't go looking for a hundred other things because you like the chase. That is likely part of the underlying pattern that is needing to be rewired in the first place. So I want you to remember that a lot of these tactics can not only be emotional bypassing, right, where you're just trying to get around doing the hard work, but they can become its own loop of chasing healing. When I don't think, if you're honest with yourself, that's even on the table for a lot of the things that you're engaging in. And as I mentioned, when you are emotional bypassing, you might be temporarily avoiding the discomfort or the pain of having to go into the trigger. But. But it is going to delay you in the long run, and it does compound. And every time you try to silence something and avoid it or pretend it's not there, you are pushing something even more deeply into your relationships, into your parenting style, into how you show up at work. Because as much as you think you can suppress it and keep it down there, it finds sneaky ways of spilling out and justifying through your communication, through your perception of reality. And it won't go away until you actually uproot it once and for all. If you've been anywhere near the health and longevity space lately, you've probably heard the word peptides thrown around everywhere. Some people are calling them the future of medicine. Others are warning you that the space is going to get messy fast. The reality is that both things are probably accurate to some extent. Peptides are rapidly moving into mainstream healthcare. Clinics are prescribing them, biohackers are experimenting with them, and regulatory conversations are evolving quickly. Which means one thing is becoming very clear. Your education on peptides matters. That's why I wanted to tell you about a program created by Ashley Madsen. Ashley is a double board certified physician assistant and a longevity clinician who's been prescribing peptides in clinical practice for over a decade. She's also one of the few educators in the space who approaches the topic from a clinical physiology perspective. 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Just head to the show notes and enroll. This is why so many people find themselves trapped in cycles of burnout, self sabotage, and of course, unexplainable emotional outbursts. What was once a small thing that you could just push past eventually will become a deep undercurrent of resentment, exhaustion, or a full blown disconnection from reality. And if you're going to fully retrain your brain, you have to ditch this. Good vibes only, bypassing mentality. Growth only happens with opposition. It does not happen with avoidance. You cannot rewire a trigger that you refuse to be exposed to. It just will not happen. That is not how neurological rewiring works. When we're thinking about growth, it absolutely requires a willingness to face discomforts head on and to challenge those deep seated beliefs and to take tangible, very precise actions to rewire the old pattern. Real healing does not come with some sort of artificial glow where someone just looks at you on your Instagram and is like, oh my God babe, what have you been doing? Maybe that happens with Korean Skincare. But when you're actually doing the real hard work, it's happening in the trenches, it's probably happening in private. And if you're the type of influencer that notices that you're gonna start crying about something, you're like, wait, I have to set up my tripod. That's probably not real emotion either. This is something that's happening likely in the trenches by yourself. And when you can truly be alone in your pain, not avoid it and have the right tools to move through it, then when you get to the other side, you can actually sustain that. But when it's all these other things that you're reaching to that have no sustainability and no real resilience attached to them, it's going to keep you stuck in a loop. And I do want to remind you that happiness is not necessarily a choice, but I would argue, is happiness even really what you should be striving for? I think I ask clients this probably multiple times a day because I do think we're in this culture where it's like, just choose to be happy. Just be happy. You look so happy. I would argue not to go biblical here for a second, but I know many of you are in my renew your mind course. Was Jesus a happy person? Like, do you think people would have described Jesus as happy? I think people would have described Jesus as emotionally regulated, peaceful, methodical, intentional. You know, this is kind of more of a current word, but like, deep, right? But probably not happy. He probably wasn't like, hey, guys, how's it going? I'm Jesus, Nice to meet you. Right. That's probably not how that started. So when we're thinking about happiness, happiness, first of all, is a hard word to define, and I actually would encourage you to maybe think about that right now. How do you define happiness? Because everyone's definition can be slightly different. And I think, really, rather than happiness, what about contentment? What about peace? What about the absence of both high and low emotional states? Because I think, truly, when I look at the example of Jesus, it was the example of true emotional regulation, true net neutral. So not neutrality. Like, you can't have the light without the dark, right? Not that sort of like false light neutrality, but where you're not in either high arousal or low arousal states, you're just literally at peace. I think that has more longevity attached to it. And I know for me, where I'm at turning 41, I will take peace over happiness any day of the week. I will take contentment over happiness any day of the week. And that doesn't mean that I don't have moments of happiness, because I surely do. But I think people who seek or chase happiness are really chasing something dopamine related and they're chasing something pleasurable or joyous and that never lasts, right then, then you want more and more of that and then you become, you get taken out of the present, where I think we do experience peace and contentment. So I want to just encourage you this sort of phrase, happiness is a choice kind of. I think a lot of people's brain patterns set them up to chase happiness, but only to chase happiness to feel like a failure. Because I think the way that they're ultimately setting up their understanding of happiness is flawed. So I just want to encourage you that if you're one of those people, that I just want to be happy, maybe do some digging on how you're currently defining happiness and make sure that that is something that makes sense. And maybe adjust what you're searching for to being something that is more long term attainable and achievable. Because happiness, if you look at it biochemically, we're not always supposed to be happy. There are plenty of moments in our life where, especially if you look at it again from a spiritual perspective, we learn a lot through pain. And when you can be in the pain and present in the pain without wanting to hit the escape button and get out of it as quickly as possible, then you learn some really powerful lessons. You can become refined. But when you're chasing this like happiness, it's really hard to be present. And it's really hard, I think, to make progress with emotional regulation because you're, you're starting from a false place. And it will inevitably, just from it being a false start in the first place, you're gonna end up putting yourself on a bit of a hamster wheel. So I want to encourage you to just do that work before we meet on our next podcast. Because I'm going to keep pulling this thread for a while because I think how we seek out emotional healing and what our goals are are going to determine what we achieve and don't achieve. And I think it's important for us to do a little bit more self interrogation on that. As we've been talking about, our social media driven culture has sold you a lie, that positivity is something that you can just choose or slap on like a face mask. But I think at this point we all know that that is a lie. It isn't something that you decide on. It is something that you are Able to build, arguably through learning emotional regulation techniques and possibly, like we were just talking about, reorienting your idea or definition of what happiness is. But that building process takes time. It requires sequential effort, repetition, resilience, right? Being able to sustain yourself through the storm without quitting, without wanting to turn back and go back to the negative coping mechanism. But I do know for a fact that all human beings have the capacity to rewire and to renew your mind. And that means rewiring your perception of reality to address and uproot the language that your brain is generating that is keeping you stuck. Because self deception always comes in tandem with language. You can rewire the beliefs that you hold. And when you do this, your actions change. And over the past 11 years, I've seen seen some of the most negative, overtly controlling clients radically shift their paradigms. And some of these people were 65 years or older into these destructive cycles. So I know you can do this. You have the knowledge to understand how to do this, right? That brain pattern mapping as even a first step is a great opportunity to understand who you are, what made you that way, what are your blind spots, what self deception patterns do you get locked into and how can you see your way out of them? And when you're able to know that information, you're able to experience a very radical paradigm shift. And the thing that I hear almost with every client in break is you can't unsee what you see and break. And it's because you see beyond the blinders, you see beyond the facade. And once you see it, you can't go back because going back would mean full blown denial and it would mean personal responsibility. Right? If you know that stuff and you choose to go back at a certain point, that's on you. And I do encourage clients activating their agency by saying, once you know better, you do have to do better. Right? Before I always tell clients this before you come to break, what you didn't know, you didn't know. And you can forgive yourself for all the bad things that you did. But once I actually show you what you did and how you did it so that you know how not to repeat it again, at that point the responsibility does transfer onto you. And for some people, that feels really scary. And I get it. But it is an important step to take into your agency where instead of it being everybody else's fault or my childhood's fault, at a certain point it has to be your fault, right? It has to. And if we're not able to step in the mirror and actually take a cold, hard look at these patterns of self deception and blind spots. We're not really ever going to get to the other side. And some brain pattern types are going to be more likely to reach for this toxic positivity affirmation culture because it will be easier for you because it will absolutely get you from facing the cold hard truth. It will be easier because it doesn't cause you to address that you are part of the problem. But my hope is that just because it's easier and it's flashier or it looks cooler on Instagram, that you will choose hard and that you will choose to do the thing that ultimately changes your life for the rest of your life. Even though is it going to create some upheaval? Yes. Is it going to feel unstable and messy for a while? Absolutely, yes. But is it worth it? I think so. Toxic positivity might feel good for a very short period and it might look good for the gram, but choosing toxic positivity tools and purely motivation, it's not going to solve your long term problems. And like I said, it's probably just going to cause those problems to go into a deeper level. And as soon as I said that, I immediately thought of like Caddyshack, you know, where that, I don't know if it was like a mole or a groundhog or whatever it was just keeps like popping out on the golf course. That's going to keep happening to you. So what are you going to choose? How are you going to choose to navigate that? Are you going to go buy another positive motivation self help book or are you going to crack open your brain as a filthy liar? By the way, one of the. I never told you guys, this is actually pretty funny. I went to Joe Rogan's comedy club in Austin with my friend MC and it was one of the nights, I think it's called bottom of the barrel, where you write down. It's like an improv comedy night. So you write down stuff on a piece of paper and you have to write your name. They say that you have to, right? So you write down two different things to start for the joke and then the people on stage just reach in there and grab something out and they have to do their jokes from what they pulled out. So mine got pulled out by a pretty famous comedian and instead of all focusing on what things I prompted, he just got fixated on my name. And it turned out that he ended up doing this like nearly 20 minute bit by figuring out who I am and what I do and he went onto Amazon and read all of my book reviews out loud. And you could tell he was. I'm not gonna he swear. He swore a lot. So I'm not gonna say exactly what he said. But as he was going into it, you could tell that he wanted to try to be mean. And then as soon as he read something, he's like, oh man, this girl's really out here trying to help the world. Let's look at this. Let's go to the bad review. And even though like the one star bad review, he was like, oh, she really needed this book, didn't she? Yeah, because the feedback was basically like, this book made me feel like crap. And then at some point she sandwiched it in with I actually learned a lot. But this book made me feel bad about myself. And I bring this up up, number one, because obviously it's a funny story and ultimately this comedian bought my book and he's awesome. But number two, I think having somebody read my book and being like that was really long and really hard and I feel like shit about myself. I am okay with that because doing this work is confronting. And of course my goal isn't to. I don't want to make you feel terrible about yourself, but sometimes we have to confront things in ourselves that are ugly and disgusting and sinister. And if the first pass of that makes you feel bad about yourself, it's still, in my opinion, a step in the right direction. Right. I never pitch my book as a positivity book because it's not. It is a very confrontational book, I thought, as evidenced by the title, your brain is a filthy liar. We all lie to ourselves. No one gets out of this. Some people's brains lie to themselves in a way that tends to produce slightly more positive. Although there's never any case where there aren't some negatives. And some people's brain pattern types produce a lot of negative behaviors with significantly less positives. The point is, every single person can change, but you can't do it. If you just choose to be happy and choose to put on facade. You have to face the hard part and I've had to do it. And eventually you have to navigate through the knee jerk reaction to go into regret and remorse and shame. And if you're in my renew your mind course, we just did a teaching on that the other day called the purity myth. That's a part of the process. You just can't get stuck there. And we will certainly continue to pull this thread on shame because I think it's an important thread, but you can't get stuck there. But you do have to go into the hard part. So I hope that this episode encouraged you to maybe take a look at what you're consuming online and what you're reaching for. Because just because something might feel good and feel uplifting, it a, doesn't mean it's solving the problem and B, you run the risk of possibly having that make the problem go deeper and become more confusing and still not stop you from ruining your own life. Right? You just disconnect yourself from it ever so slightly, which just makes it all the more confusing. So the choice is yours. Are you going to do the hard thing? Are you going to face yourself in the mirror and you're going to confront those things or you're going to, you know, keep reaching for the affirmations and manifestations and journaling? I hope that you choose the hard part. I really do. In the long run, the benefits that you get from it are they're different and they stick. I'll 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.