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Welcome to Unlocking Your More with Janna Holterman. This podcast, we are going to dive into all things you, so you can understand your brain, how the neuroscience works, your emotions, how your body processes and feels things, so you can regulate your nervous system more deeply, your intuition, so that you can develop a deeper self trust and understanding with that spidey sense that you've always known that's there. This is about unlocking more of you so that you can create a life that you are completely obsessed with and know that you are making more of a difference and more impact than you ever have before. Today we're going to be talking about how your brain is not broken. It's doing what it's supposed to be doing. The problem is, we haven't evolved, right? Okay, so our brains are creatures of habit. They're designed, and we have instincts which are designed to protect us. So our brainstem, our reptilian brain, our lower brain, whatever you want to call it, is literally designed to keep us safe. But that brain
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is not prepared for modern day society. Our brain is still
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functioning and acting as if we are cavemen hunter gatherers, and so I want to get a little bit into this, so that you can understand why your brain can sometimes be a total bitch to you,
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and why really the more we understand about our brains and how our brains can work, the more we can catch it in the moment. So what happens is we're like, oh, I see this. I can see the pattern happening. I can kind of halt it and I can shift out of it. And every time we catch a brain pattern and shift out of it, what ends up happening is your brain is like, oh, maybe that wasn't a really good story. Like maybe she didn't really like that story. Let's change it. Let's find a new story. And what you're doing is you're actually shrinking
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the old neural connections and stories that we don't really love, and building new neural connections and stories that are actually more beneficial for us. And so,
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as we get into October. This entire month, leading up until November 5, is really diving into
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why our brain and our nervous systems and our emotions creates a
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situation, a culture within ourselves that we are extremely self-critical, that we're beating ourselves up, that we are really
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focusing on all the things that we aren't doing right, and the reason that we're doing that is because we are building up for my course that is starting, you know, november 5, how to stop being a toxic bitch to yourself. So,
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all of the podcast episodes that are going to come out every week in October are kind of like along this theme of really, you know, how do we better understand our brains? How do we create a different experience so we're not constantly beating the shit out of ourselves and really understanding, like you know, why that's important, not beyond just how draining and exhausting it is. But
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let's got get into your brain is not broken. It is doing what it is supposed to be doing, and I think this is something where
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I really felt this way, and I see it in so many of my clients, one of the one when we end up working together, like they're like, there's gotta be something wrong with me. Like everybody else has their life figured out. I see everybody else has their shit together. Like I've been through some trauma. I've been through some stuff. That's gotta be why I am not where I want to be. That's like that's the reason that I'm so far behind. Everyone else has got it figured out. Like there's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough. I don't have what it takes. You know, if only this thing didn't happen to me in the past, then I would have had it. I would have had it all figured out. I would have had all these things, right? I've seen this spiral. I have been in this spiral. Here's the thing:
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there
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is nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your brain. You're also not the only one who feels that way. You're not the only one who is experiencing that kind of
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thought sabotage attack of the self, right? So,
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why have our brains gotten so toxic. Like, what the fuck happened for our brains to be like complete bitches to us?
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Here's the thing: we have to go back way back to the fact that we haven't evolved. We have not evolved.
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For modern day society, so your brain is
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designed to keep you safe in a hunter-gatherer, you know, tribe, caveman esque experience of being a human, and so in that perspective, evolutionarily, right? We
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had real life threatening threats. There could be a tiger around the corner that's coming to get you. There could be a bear. There could be a
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serious threat, right? Like there's a serious creature. Like you're out there hunting. There could be a creature that wants you for dinner just as much as you want it for dinner. And if you're ill prepared, you're not ready. You're not high heightened sensitivity alert. You might not notice, and you could end up harmed dead. Right. The same is true for
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when we make wrong decisions, right? Hunter-gatherer times. We are out there looking for food. We are out there looking for plants to eat and things like that. And if you make the wrong decision with a plant or a mushroom or whatever these things, right? You could poison yourself or your loved ones, right? If you make the wrong decision, there are serious consequences.
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Again, another situation. If you get rejected from your tribe, as humans, we are meant to be like tribe humans. We are we are meant to be a part of a community that is something that is integral in our DNA. We want to be, we want to belong, we want to be part of the group, part of the community, and so
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this comes and makes sense because if you are working as a collective, a group, you're more likely to survive. Like certain people are going to hunt, certain people are going to cook, certain people are going to,
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you know, create the clothes. Like all of the things. Like you need to have a community that can work together in order to survive hunter gatherer times, right? So if you
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get rejected, you say, "Oh, I'm not like them. There's something wrong with me. I'm gonna get rejected. So you're removed from the tribe. Your likelihood of surviving just significantly dropped. Right? You don't have all of the people in the community to support you like you would if you were part of the tribe. And so we want to be
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one with everybody. We want to be liked. We want to be accepted because that means that we are part of the community, and our likelihood of survival is so much higher. So
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we have to have to understand this from our brain's perspective,
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nothing has gone wrong because your brain is being a bitch to you. Your brain is being a bitch to you because
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evolutionarily,
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you make a mistake, you could potentially die.
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The beautiful thing is, this is how your brain becomes pre-programmed. Manufacturer setting. This is where it's at. So
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you, along with the rest of us, are all just being toxic bitches to ourselves because our brain takes these things very seriously.
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the The problem
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is our current society, right?
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Where are the actual like situations where there's life and death? It's very rare, and you know maybe if you're like me, you're a nurse, you witness some of those life and death situations, you participate in them, but you're not the one in the life and death situation, and so we can just we still create these
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such pressure, such intensity over so many things, and a lot of the times it comes to do with the people we're close enough with, like our loved ones in relationships, like our children, our work situations. Like, think about a time where you got a text message from somebody, and you just like felt that fight flight response go off in your body, like I like oh my god like do like I'm making it mean all of these things.
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These are all like this is like factory brain settings, right? This is like straight out of the factory. This is the way that your brain is designed and programmed. We have to understand that and have some compassion for that, but the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing is we have neuroplasticity. So just because your brain came designed this way, and then what happened? Okay, your brain came designed this way, and then you literally spent
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the first zero.
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To seven years building all of your belief systems, and I've talked about this 100 times, but it's so important to recognize that your belief systems, your self identity, how your brain sees itself, how what your brain thinks of you, was built in that integral zero to seven years old. So all of those belief systems were built then, and that was based on that child's perception of what they were witnessing in their world, and so you came with this brain preprogramming that really we can't make mistakes because life mistakes are life threatening. That's like
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preset factory settings, and then you're in your
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early sponge era of zero to seven, where your brain is consuming all of these things and seeing people and seeing things, and you know you look at your parents and you're like, are my parents handling everything that I would the way that I would want to? Probably not, because they're human, right? They're doing the best they can with the tools they have, just like all of us. But then you have this per this child who's perceiving it in a certain way, right? And so
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then you've got the decades after that, after seven, right?
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And you may have multiple decades, but depending on where you are at in your life cycle right now,
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and all of that time, what has your brain been doing? Your brain always wants to prove itself right, your brain really hates being wrong. Like, just think about yourself on like a human level when you're somebody tells you that you're wrong.
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Ooh, do your hackles go up? You're like ready to find some mad evidence to like prove their that they're wrong, that you're wrong, right? This is what our brain is doing subconsciously to every fucking day, it is finding evidence to reinforce what it believes to be true. And so, if your brain is finding evidence that it's not safe, that it's not, it's not good for you to put yourself out there. It's not good for you to try these new things. It's, you know, the unknown
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is terrifying because you don't know what's out there, you don't know how to protect yourself in those situations. So your brain is consuming and finding all of this evidence, and it's like literally building
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the biggest case on the planet for
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all of this stuff. And so
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that is why
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some of these belief systems that we have are so deep rooted, because
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number one, your brain came factory settings like that way. Number two,
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the things you witnessed as a small child, whether it be things that were said to you, whether it be the interactions of adults or other children around you, and how they spoke to one another, how they handled situations, right? Is not just the words that were said. It was like, wow, I noticed mom and dad always fought about you know money, and then you believe money means love loss, right? Like all of these things were absorbed by that child and say, hey, this is how I handle situations. This is what happens. This is what mean like this is what I make these things mean, and we already came with that kind of negative brain perspective of, you know, if I make a mistake I could die, and then you're consuming all this like data as a child, and then we've spent those decades building and building and building and building and building upon it, and so this is why our brains are naturally negative. We are naturally going to go to
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what have the mistakes I've made, right? You get in for a performance review at work. Your boss has five great things to say about you and one negative. What does your brain focus on? You, the five great things out the window. You couldn't even remember what she said the next day. Fucking gone. No idea. But the thing that she said that was that was a critique or criticism, quote unquote.
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You're gonna stew on it. You're going to be obsessed with that. You're gonna make that mean the biggest thing. You're gonna reenact it. Like you're gonna analyze every interaction that you've had for the last like 10 years from that thing. Why? Because your brain is like, hey, I made a mistake. This was I. I could have died in that situation. I could have died there, but I didn't. So what I need to do is I will need to analyze all of the possible moments that I went wrong, so that I can shift them and I can protect myself, so that the next time I encounter that lion,
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it ain't gonna get me.
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And so we have to have to understand that in order to
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shift this negativity in our brain, we really must come at it from this deep understanding and a place of understanding how the brain works, understanding our emotions, understanding our nervous system, and what actually creates safety.
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For our nervous system, because
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what you've probably done in the past, and I've been there, been there, right? You may have done some therapy, you may have done things, and you've talked things out. You said, okay, you know, this thing happened. I made it. Believe this. They said this. I said this. Like I, this situation happened, and you come up with a plan of what you're gonna do in the future. But what, and then it doesn't go according to plan, or it doesn't work out as well as you hoped. Why? Why didn't it work out? Like you literally, you you talked it out. You came up with a plan. You probably created a million a million scenarios in your head that never ended up actually happening. But why didn't it work? It didn't work because we didn't
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recognize that brain programming, the the underlying surface stuff that says, "Hey, it's not safe. Hey, you're not protected here. Hey, you know, like this is a threat. We have to understand our brain. We have to recognize and learn the learned skill of creating that safety at that nervous system level in order to be able to shift to feel better. If we want to feel a different way,
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we have to create safety because what happens when you try to be positive about it, right? What happens, right? Your your your brain's like, okay, I'm going into work. I'm going into work. I don't want to go into work. It's gonna be trash. Like I'm gonna I'm gonna have like the worst
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assignments and things being handed to me. I know that like Betty Jo is gonna come bitch to me about something or other, and I don't want to talk to her. I don't want to deal with it, and like, there's going to be all of these frustrations. Like, I just, ugh, like I do not want to go into work today. It's going to suck. And then you're like, you know what? No, I got to be positive. I got, I got to be positive. And it's like, fine. It's going to be a great day. It's going to be an amazing. I, I'm, I'm the most amazing person. I'm. It's going to be an amazing day. Everything is rainbows and sunshine. Like everything is gonna be so good. But what what is your brain designed to do? What is your brain doing under the surface? Immediately, your as soon as you went from like it's gonna be the worst day ever to your your brain being like no, it's gonna be amazing. Your brain is like bullshit. I call bullshit. I'm gonna take that. It's going to be amazing. Throw it out the window. It's not getting past your logical, conscious brain because your brain cannot believe it. It has your brain has years of evidence to say the contrary. It has years of evidence. So we have to meet our brain where it's at and create that safety within our brain to start shifting it, and a lot of the times we do a bridge. We can't go from it's going to be the worst day of my entire life to everything is amazing. I am the best rainbows and daisies and sunshine because your brain cannot believe it, and if your brain cannot believe
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it, It immediately throws it out the idea, throws it out the window, because it goes to its evidence. What does your brain have evidence to reinforce? Your brain has evidence to reinforce that you're not good enough, you're not safe, that nothing you ever do makes a difference. All of these things. So that brain, that thought goes out the window, and so we can often the best way about going about doing this is kind of like creating bridge thoughts, so something neutral, something in the middle, how something that you can actually get behind and believe.
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And if we work with our brain rather than against our brain, even if it's like, okay, you know, what if today is the worst day? Have I gotten through the worst days before, what do I like? What tools do I have in my toolbox to be able to handle the worst days? And we can like then almost validate our brain trying to protect us and really lean into okay, how am I actually capable of protecting myself in this situation? How am I actually ready and prepared for the worst day ever. And the thing about our brains is, if we're ready and prepared for it to be the worst day ever,
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yet also focusing on our brain on how capable we are, how the tools we have are benefiting us, or if it's like, okay, you know what? I know that it's going to be the worst day ever at work, but what is something that I do enjoy. What is something that I
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find beneficial? Maybe it's like you know what, my coworker Sandra is working today, and I love her. Like obsessed with her. Like we always have a great time. We can make jokes, and I'm like, you know what? That is what I'm gonna focus my brain on. I am so grateful that I get to work with Sandra. Like she's a great time. I know we're gonna be able to tell some jokes.
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What you focus on matters, and this seems so simple, but working with your brain in the way that your brain works, and then starting to shift what you focus on, is going to start to shift the neural connections. You're gonna go.
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From that like deeply only negative to a more neutral state, and then we from that neutral state we can go to
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I have everything that it takes. I can handle any situation that comes at me. I am unique and special and the best of the best. But we have to work with our brain to get there because if you just go from super negative to super positive, your brain is not going to believe it. It's not going to recognize it as even being a possibility for you, and it's going to throw away. And that's truly what toxic positivity is, right? Where we're slapping something that isn't real
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on our actual real situation. So we have to validate our experience. We have to recognize how our brain actually works, and then we can start to shift and change it. And if this sounds like something that you want to know and really dive more into, I am hosting a free to attend live masterclass on October 13,
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and that is called Overcoming the Inner Mean Girl. And then that is all getting you prepped, primed, and ready for the new program coming out november 5. How to stop being a toxic bitch to yourself. The really great thing is if you are watching this episode real time or within the next you know two weeks,
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you have access to getting $100 off the program, so the program is going to be 350. You can get the program for 250. There is payment plans available as well
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with the coupon code, which I will put in the notes, and it is on the web page.
