Better Than Happy Jody Moore | It's Simple. It's Complicated.

Do you ever find yourself feeling confused, frustrated, or stuck in negative emotions about certain topics or situations in your life? It’s possible that your brain is either oversimplifying complex issues or overcomplicating simple ones, and in this episode, I explore how our minds tend to distort reality in these two distinct ways, leading to what I call “dirty pain.”

When we oversimplify multifaceted topics like politics, religion, or parenting choices, it’s easy to feel angry and confused. On the flip side, when we overcomplicate straightforward issues like how to eat healthily or grow a business, we can get stuck in guilt, overwhelm, and indecision. Recognizing these patterns is the first step to breaking free.

Join me this week as I share examples of how this plays out in various areas of life, from personal health to relationships and entrepreneurship. You’ll learn why our brains love to stay stuck in confusion rather than take action, how to identify when you’re in dirty pain, and my top tips for steering your mind back to simple, honest truths that will help you make progress in the areas you want.

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What You’ll Learn on this Episode:

How oversimplifying complex topics can lead to anger and confusion.
Why overcomplicating simple issues keeps you stuck in guilt and overwhelm.
The difference between “clean pain” that helps you grow and “dirty pain” that keeps you stuck.
How to recognize when you’re experiencing dirty pain due to oversimplifying or overcomplicating.
Simple strategies to steer your mind back to clear, productive thinking for better results.
Why your brain prefers confusion and complication as a way to avoid necessary discomfort.

Mentioned on the Show:

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Human brains are so fascinating. Mostly they take really good care of us. We don’t even have to think about it and we have unconscious or subconscious things happening that really make our lives better and easier and make us better. But occasionally, our brains need a little bit of management, a little bit of direction. And I find the best way to do that is with some awareness.

Today I want to bring awareness to this funny thing that the human brain does, which is to take complicated topics and simplify them, or to take really simple things and complicate them. Why do our brains do this? How do we know when we’re doing this? Why is it a problem? And what do we do about it? That’s what I’m going to be teaching you today. This is episode 487: It’s Simple. It’s Complicated.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

Sometimes, listening to a podcast is enough. But sometimes, you’ll feel inspired to go deeper. If you hear things that speak to you in today’s episode, consider it your invitation to a complimentary coaching workshop.

On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to jodymoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? Jodymoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

Hello, everybody. All right, I have this theory and I’m gonna talk about it here on the podcast, and I’ve thought through it well enough that I feel comfortable doing a podcast episode on it, but as I talk it through with you all, sometimes I surprise myself by some insights and discovery. So let’s just see if that happens today.

But I wanna talk about how our brains take things that are complicated and simplify them, and then we take simple things and we make them complicated at times. And my theory on this that I’m going to test out as we speak through it is that we can know when we’re doing this because we will be creating some kind of dirty pain.

Okay, so there’s this concept created in the world of behavioral psychology called clean pain and dirty pain. And I love this concept. I find it to be really useful because I’m not a believer that we should feel positive and happy all the time. I don’t think that’s normal or necessary and I don’t think it serves us to try to be happy all the time even.

I think that we should learn how to allow negative emotions. We don’t want to think positively about everything. And just learning to be with our emotions, to process them, to breathe through them, to make it okay for ourselves and also for our children or for other people that we have influence over is a big part of my work. It sets you free to learn how to just feel your feelings. But clean pain is the kind of pain that is really refining.

It makes us better versions of ourselves as we experience and allow clean pain. The best way I can think to describe clean pain is it almost feels spiritual, right? Like grief when we’ve lost a loved one or a relationship has ended or we’ve gotten some kind of bad news that we want to interpret as bad news. That is clean pain. It’s natural and normal to go through a grieving process, which can include all kinds of things, right? Sadness, anger, bargaining, denial, et cetera, all the emotions that come along with grief, right? Necessary, useful, moves us through an experience so that at some point we look back and realize that we are more expanded, maybe more patient, maybe more generous, more grateful. In some way we are better for having gone through that experience.

Now, when we’re in the thick of it, none of us wanna hear anyone remind us that you’re gonna be better on the other side of this, but it is the reality of what happens when we experience and allow clean pain. It can move us through an experience and refine us and make us better, right?

Dirty pain, on the other hand, is not necessary. Now, I don’t want to imply that that means that you’r...