The Overwhelm Trap: This is Why You Justify Self-Sabotage

We actually have so much ability to change our lives. Every time you say, I'm gonna fix it, people eventually just stop believing you. It's something that happens to every single person on planet Earth. Every person cycle is going to be slightly different. One person's fear doesn't look like another person's fear. These are all things that we want to be paying attention to because there are underlying emotional states beneath this that need to be understood. Peace is a state of being that we want to achieve, but it is not actually an emotion itself. It's a trap that will keep you stuck forever if you don't learn how to get out of it. 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? We can all recall a moment in time that we have used the word. I'm just so overwhelmed right now. Maybe even throwing the word stressed, tense, exhausted, and if you know anything about my work with break method, you know how I feel about these words because they really don't describe anything accurately. They're describing a multi-part system that needs to be understood in its individual pieces to be efficiently rewired. My hope is that by the end of today's episode, you'll learn to stop using blanket terms like this and actually take a pause and do the work to reverse engineer each individual emotion, state, thought shift, rather than just use these blanket terms because as it says in the name of the episode, it truly is a trap and it's a trap that will keep you stuck forever if you don't learn how to get out of it. When I think about words like overwhelmed or exhausted or stressed, I use the term emotional mud. So if you've ever been to a old West town or a kid's area where you do sluicing, this is the analogy that I'm gonna go with. So where you have these kinds of bags of dirt that they give you and then you basically get to kind of sluice for them in these sieves. So you basically put all the dirt and all the rocks in there and you can't see what's really in there until you start to pass it through water. And in passing it through water, you get to essentially a pan for gold, but you also get to figure out what gems and rocks are inside of this sort of bag of sand. We're gonna use this example to try to understand how something like overwhelm is like getting this bag of sand that looks like nothing. You have no idea what's in it because the sand is so overwhelming that you can't see the individual pieces. Then you put it in your sieve, you're swishing it around the water and every time the water is passing over these different pieces, you're starting to move away and separate the dirt and the sand from the gems. So this process that I wanna walk us through today in the overwhelm trap is helping us understand how to purify or cleanse this experience that we're labeling as something with a umbrella term and learn how to separate into its pieces because there are some pieces here that have a lot of value, just like you turn a bag of sand into 10 to 15 different gems that your kids get so excited about. But in the very beginning, they just got this really heavy bag of sand. All of our emotional mud actually has these really important gemstones in it that will help us learn to stop repeating the cycle. But if we just keep tossing that bag of sand over our shoulder and be like, I'm just so overwhelmed right now and we just let that be that, we're really not gonna actually break through to the other side. We have to learn how to go through this process. These are all things that we want to be paying attention to because there are underlying emotional states beneath this that need to be understood. So I wanna go back for a second and make sure that we're understanding what an emotion actually is. An emotion is a biochemical reaction that happens in your body that typically accompanies some sort of physical reaction. A mood is something that you sustain for a period of time and a state of being is not an emotion. So peaceful, for example, is more a state of being than an emotion. I know that people use this potentially incorrectly and what immediately comes to mind is the movie Kung Fu Panda. Obviously I have four kids, so of course my brain would go there. But when you're thinking of like Po in Kung Fu Panda, meditating it's like inner peace, inner peace. Peace is a state of being that we want to achieve, but it is not actually an emotion itself. You don't peace. You can be in a state of peace, but peace itself is not an emotion. When we're talking about emotions, we're talking about fear, anger, anxiety, even shock. These are all emotional states that are then in turn going to an illicit behavioral response. So moods and states of being are different. And I think it's really important for us to understand how to draw those lines, because as we're going through this process of separation, how we decide to describe or label something could itself be a trap. How many of you experience what you would call as moodiness, and then you kind of tell, I'm just in a bad mood, or what emotion are you experiencing? What thoughts triggered this mood that you're in? These are all the breadcrumbs that we have to follow in order to heal. I want to empower you as we're moving through today's episode to be considering the importance of the language that we use to describe what we're experiencing, because just like overwhelm can be a trap, saying I'm just moody, that's another trap entirely. So we need to be able to more accurately describe where we are in our emotional spectrum, and what thoughts are connected to that experience so that we can get ourselves out of it. So we're talking about an emotional addiction cycle. We've talked about this a little bit in previous episodes. Emotional addiction cycles have a three-part process. So this is gonna be true for every single person. We're all gonna start with an origin emotion. We will then move to a protective emotion, and then we will finish off our cycle with an escalating motion. The most common cycle is going to be fear, too anxiety to anger, but about 70% of the population is only going to have that anxiety protective. The other 30% is going to have some variant of anger in their protective emotion. Understanding how each person's emotional addiction cycle shows up uniquely is another very important step to being able to sustainably rewire. One person's fear doesn't look like another person's fears. My fear state, I'm typically very flexible. I don't get myself locked into needing to know what comes next. I'm aware, I'm highly observant of my surroundings, but I'm able to pivot very quickly because I don't have my eyes fixed in a black and white perspective. By contrast, many people when they're in a fear state, they become controlling orderly. They wanna know what comes next, and they are more rigid in their perspective of what's taking place. So my fear state is very different from that person's fear state. The more common fear state would be the rigid controlled orderly fear state. My brain pattern type is one that historically lacks self-preservation. My brain is more considering what the group is going to need when I'm in fear rather than what I need. And because of that, I end up appearing flexible and able to pivot because I have to be more aware of what the people in my group need than what I need personally. Therefore, flexibility is required for me to meet those needs. If I am concerned about how I am going to navigate through this situation, and I wanna know what comes next personally, I might actually have blinders on to what people in the group around me need, and I'm more focused on the process that I think is going to get me out of harm's way. Another example of how this can be expressed, some people's fear state is managerial. It's assertive, it's loud. Other people's fear state is extremely quiet. They're assuming they're jumping to conclusions in their head, but they're not actually using their voice. So we really wanna understand here, not just what thoughts you're having in each emotion that's distinct from the other, but how is that actually carried out in the real world? Is it loud? Is it quiet? Are you decisive? Are you avoidant? Are you highly committed? Are you impulsive? There's all these different qualities that we need to use to describe each emotional state. And when we understand how this uniquely shows up for you, we can start to understand these transitional points between your origin, your protective, and your escalating. One of the things that I wanna make sure to emphasize here, and I'm sure that it's something that's impacted you in your personal life and your relationships, is that we are dynamic, and when we shift from one emotional state to the other, guess what? We can probably start to look like we have a split personality disorder, because in one emotional state, we may be very rigid and wanna know what comes next. And then, depending on how your childhood inputs programed you, you may then, in your protective emotion, actually switch to being flexible, people pleasing, agreeable. So people around you are like, who are you? Are you this person? Are you this person? The reality is we are all of these facets of ourselves, and we often don't understand each of these facets distinctly, and we therefore can't communicate about the state that we're into, the people that we're around. And this is one of, I believe, the biggest gifts that Break Method teaches you, is you can now help fill in some of these communication gaps with the people around you that may misunderstand or misinterpret what you're doing and why. Perfect example, my fear state, while I'm flexible and adaptable, and I'm willing to look around me to figure out what the group needs, I am assertive. I do go right into the danger, and if there was ever a time that I was going to be loud and more verbal, it's during my fear state. So for this reason, people with my husband's brain pattern, for example, he may misinterpret my fear as anger, when I'm not angry at all. But for me, if I were in my three different emotional states, the one I'm most likely to be dropping F-bombs and or cracking ridiculous, probably off-color sarcastic jokes is what I'm in fear. When I'm in anger by contrast, actually, I'm very quiet and very calculated. I'm not gonna go fly off the handle. So a telltale sign, if you know me or you work with me, my fear state is where I'm most likely to be loud. So now that I know this and my husband knows this, he's now not going to misinterpret or try to see my behavior through the lens of his own perception. He's going to be able to fill in those gaps now and be like, oh, you know, if I didn't know better, I would have thought that you're angry right now, but now I understand, like these are the cues that you're in fear. Is there anything I can do for you, honey? Oh yeah, let's talk about that. So understanding these subtle cues can completely radically change a relationship. So understanding not just how your fear state is uniquely experienced, but how somebody else's fear state is uniquely experienced can help you collaborate. It can help you stop assuming and reacting to each other based on something that's not happening in our three-dimensional objective reality. Using this understanding of this three-part cycle, typically when we're describing something like, I'm overwhelmed, we're usually describing either the cycle as a whole, and that we've run the cycle as a whole so many times that we are, fill in the gap, overwhelmed. Another way that we could be misusing this term is we're describing a transitional place. So for example, if we are moving from anxiety to anger and all of our previous efforts to placate people, please try to fix things are not working. And we reach that very top level where it's like, I've tried every single thing I know how to do, and it's still not working. What might the word be that you use to describe that? Possibly overwhelmed because every tool that your brain knows how to generate to try to save you has proven unsuccessful. That is a perfect example of that transitional point where your brain might spit out this very umbrella term of overwhelmed. It behooves us to understand that really what we're describing in an instance like this is that we are transitioning from anxiety to anger. And part of the reason our brain is using this word overwhelmed is because all of the tools that we tried during our protective emotion didn't work. And now our brain is transitioning to a tool set that may be very antagonistic to where we just were. Potentially we were in a place where we were trying to problem solve, we had a fix at mentality. We were willing to do what the group needs were anticipating the needs of others. And still none of those things worked. And guess what? Now I'm gonna completely blow my lid, push people away, lean into my toxic friend groups, willingly self sabotage, you name it. And the key trigger or the key word that actually made you feel justified to go do all those things was, I'm just so overwhelmed right now. Think about that for a moment. How many times in your life have you used the word overwhelmed, exhausted, tense, stressed as a way to justify not doing anything anymore? Or going to isolate, maybe letting go of your duties as a mom or dad. Sometimes we use these words as a way to justify putting our hands up and being like, effort, I'm not gonna do it anymore. What if instead of using these blanket terms as a way to justify or excuse what we're gonna do next, we were next time to hear that our brain wants to describe it in those terms and say, huh, you know what? I bet I am currently in transition from one emotional state to the other. And as my brain is kind of toggling these switches on and off and I realize that I'm partially aware that I'm about to completely antagonize or contradict all of my previous thoughts, behaviors and decisions, maybe I should stop and take a pause before I start to excuse or justify what I'm going to do next. Because for most people, especially if you have protective anxiety and you're moving toward escalating anger, you're probably about to do something stupid. You're probably about to do something that you are better off not doing. And you're probably about to do something that you will have to clean up later. So one of the tools that we use in break, once you start to understand the whole cycle and how it eventually repeats, is we help you understand something I call the bridge action. We all have a bridge action that takes us from the very end of our cycle back to the beginning again. So if you can become aware of what this bridge action is. So after you've basically burned all of your bridges, let go of all of your duties or just kind of put your hands up in the air and allowed yourself to willingly self sabotage, what typically is that behavior or action that you take that eventually loops you back to fear again. For some people, it is when they have leaned into toxic friends or an addictive behavior and they realize, oh crap, I've just gone on a bender or I've been sober for three months and now I drink, what am I doing? So that kind of moment of awareness and shame is what potentially puts you back into fear again. For others, again, still this kind of moment of awareness and shame, but realizing maybe if you're a mom and you just kind of put your hands up and you stopped showing up for your kids in the way that you know, you know how and the way that your kids deserve when you have that moment of realizing, oh my God, I've been absentee or I've been slacking on making dinners or I've been ordering out for five days, what am I doing? That might be that awareness that kicks you back into your fear again. So the key here is if we understand that we're eventually going to have to dig ourselves such a deep hole that we then need a shame spiral to snap our way out of it so we can start the whole dang thing again, isn't there a way for us to know what those behaviors look like and as soon as we have this moment of being like, ugh, I'm so overwhelmed right now, we can actually skip ahead in the movie and say, oh my God, this is that moment that Bizzy was telling me about in the podcast where I'm now going to suddenly start to justify isolating, taking more breaks, taking naps, not caring about meal planning for my kids anymore, maybe I'm gonna start skipping the gym or I'm gonna start to be a little bit more cutting or passive aggressive with my partner, maybe I'm gonna withhold sex and love, maybe I'm just gonna have just subtly more attitudes, slightly more eye rolls, all these things are eventually going to isolate me away from the people that I love all the way up until I feel shame about it and then I start the whole thing over again. Could I just cut the crap and not do any of these things right now so that I don't have to go into guilt and shame to start this whole thing over again? You could, especially if you do break method, you could learn how to actually meet all of those subtle justifications that are going to make you feel like it's okay to take a nap right now, it's okay to roll my eyes at my partner because they deserve it. When we start to shift into this level of awareness and we can catch how our brain is starting to excuse or justify behaviors that will eventually push us or propel us further into our cycle, we can radically change our lives and we can change our lives so quickly. We actually have so much ability to change our lives but we can't do that if we keep going for these kind of like 30,000 foot overview perspectives like again, overwhelmed, stressed, exhausted. We have to be able to get into the precise moment and start to observe the language that our brain is using to keep us stuck because don't be mistaken. We've covered this on previous episodes, everything that you're looking around at, your brain is tagging along language to that. They look angry, they look like they think I look fat. This person is happy, this person likes me, I look pretty. Think about it this way, for any of you that have experienced body dysmorphia, I know I'm certainly one of them. Have you ever looked in the mirror and thought, oh my God, I look hideous? Like what is wrong with me and you just wanna cry and then you're in a better mood later on in the day and you look at me and you're like, oh, huh, I don't look as bad as I thought I did. That's so weird. Our perception of reality is going to dictate the perceived choices that we have in that moment. So if we are in a state where we are transitioning from anxiety to anger, like the example that we've been pulling on here, and you're feeling what you previously, before today's episode, would have described as overwhelmed, when you go look in the mirror and you see a few things that maybe don't look the way you wanted them to, your brain is already looking for reasons to justify, just blowing everything up. So you're going to see your body with the most negative lens possible. Then when you snap out of it and you're feeling better and people are loving and people are actually doing what you've asked them to do in your family and you're having a good day, you might actually look in the mirror and be like, damn, I'm looking pretty hot today. Is it possible that you actually objectively look no different from one day to the other? It's totally possible. I am certain that this has happened to me before. I'm also certain that because I tend to be a more positively skewed person, I frequently think my body looks better than it does. So I'm sorry for all of you who have body dysmorphia where you feel really negative about yourselves. I think my brain tends to skew the opposite, although certainly not in the last six months. The last six months I've been in the trenches with body dysmorphia in the negative. But I think historically throughout my life, my positive outlook and my self-generated confidence tends to translate into me looking in the mirror and being like, yeah, this is good. Even though potentially I had just as many flaws as somebody who would have sat there and thought, oh my God, I look horrible and need to do something about this, I would have just willfully ignored it by my positive outlook in the mirror. Keep this in mind, chemicals that are flowing through our body. And of course, if you're a woman listening to this, certainly hormones impact us in this way as well. It'll alter your perception of reality. So when we're thinking about how this whole cycle unfolds, it is important to remember a term that I've taught in previous episodes called the neurocognitive funnel. It all starts with perception of reality. So how we are perceiving reality is going to be constraining based on the language that we're using to define it. Remember, this is, it's a funnel, but this funnel starts over again. So we've been through my work in the past. Another visual, if you're familiar with this term, would be a torus, right? So TORUS, which is a self-sustaining energy system. So it's basically a double funnel that just keeps coming back into itself. That really is probably more accurate description of what we're talking about here. How we're perceiving reality is going to then constrain or limit how we're defining our worlds. And then how we define our world is then going to further define the perceived choices that we have in that moment. So an example would be if you're out walking on the street and somebody makes you feel unsafe, you are very unlikely to perceive that you should go walk closer to them. Your brain is probably going to prompt you to keep your distance or across the street or to keep your eyes open, not turn your back to them, right? So it's going to give you these directives of things that you should do because your brain just perceived that this person is not safe. So from that initial perception, it's going to start to shape the choices that we believe we have in that moment. Technically, you still have all the choices in the world. You could go right up to that person, you could even agitate them. And some of you listening might be that type of person. It's a different level of impulsivity right there. But technically that choice is still available to you. But for most of us, our brain is going to start to shape those choices that we believe we have. Once we are actually emoting and behaving, that's when we know that this funnel's about to start again. So essentially we've gone from perception to defining what we're perceiving. Then our brain starts to constrain or form our choices that we think we have. At that point, this biochemical chain reaction happens in the form of emotion. We actually behave, we act something out, we react. And then that reaction is going to change our environment. And then we're coming back to that top funnel and we're perceiving reality again. Have you ever reacted to somebody? And then as you're perceiving how they're reacting to your reaction, this whole thing starts again. Let's say that you thought that you were saying something that was going to be really well received and you see that they have taken it in an entirely the wrong way. And you're like, oh, that is not what I meant. And then your brain immediately wants to backpedal or try to smooth things over. This is a perfect example. The way I'm perceiving reality is shaping what I'm going to say. And the emotional state that I'm in is also kind of shaping what I'm going to say and how it's going to come out. But as soon as we perceive their reaction, we're going back. And now as we're perceiving their reaction, we're coming through a new neural cognitive funnel. So this is going to happen with rapid succession all day long. This biochemical reaction is something that for some people happens quickly and for other people, it's much more of a slow boil. In break method, we actually break people's emotional addiction cycles down into something called the time cycle. So this helps us understand how quickly and intensely you move into an emotion and how long you stay there. And we also look at the proportionality between one and the other. An example would be some people go into fear slowly and methodically, and they may be more quiet, and they're there for a very long time. Then once they decide they understand what's taking place and how at risk they are, they may quickly, with high velocity, move into anger. And they might actually take very impulsive assertive action quickly. And then before you know it, they're into a prolonged period of anxiety. Each person's time cycle is going to be, again, slightly different. We're not all going to experience emotions and behavior the same way. But understanding how long we have in each phase also helps us from the behavior strategy perspective. If I have a very rapid onset emotion and I'm not there for very long, that is not a great place to try to input behavior strategy to try to get somebody to rewire. Let's use this example that we've been going with of the person that has a prolonged fear state where they're going in more of a slow boil, so slow velocity. And then they're in this very quick pop of intense anger. And then they go to a slow boil, long version of anxiety to finish off before they come back around again. From the break method perspective, we would place our behavior strategy work in the fear state rather than try to place it into the anger state because these are each connected. So think of these like passing of a baton. If you've ever seen a relay race, one person has to complete one lap. They pass the baton, then the next person completes the other lap. The other person is effectively not cleared to start their lap until they've received that baton. Another way to look at this would be going back to the emotional addiction cycle. Anger will not get triggered if the fear cycle doesn't complete its lap. We are able to effectively disrupt the fear cycle before the baton passes. There's no need for this person to ever go to anger. You see what I'm saying? Same here. If we're able to effectively help the person in their fear state, if they don't go to anger, they would also never pass the baton to ever need to go to anxiety because all of these behaviors are a chain reaction, one to the next to the next. In this person's case, because they have this slow boil, long version of fear, we have a lot of time and because it's that kind of slower velocity, the person's not rapidly turning over their thought processes, we're able to input behavior strategy that's really going to stick here. So this is kind of an ideal scenario. 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 DiMondis. I've been using this consistently at home, and it is truly next level. I found them at Dave Asprey's biohacking conference. The girl ran me down and was like, hey, Bizzou, we love what you do. You have to try this. Heats up in 60 seconds. 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If you are serious about your health, recovery, and longevity, go head over to HealingSana, use my code BGHeal for $100 off. Let's look at another example. We might, and this is much more common, have somebody who goes fear to anxiety, to anger. We'll use mine, for example. I'm not in fear for a very long time. So my fear comes on quick, and I'm going to quickly determine the best course of action and a strategy. My brain tends to think like a matrix problem. So I'm kind of like running scenarios, scanning my environment. I'm probably awkwardly laughing or swearing, or trying to find some sort of dark humor in the ridiculousness of the situation. And then I'm going to quickly transition to anxiety. So for me, I am not going to be in a fear state long enough for that to be a viable place for me to input behavior strategy, because I'm there and then I'm not. But I'm in anxiety for a very prolonged period of time. So my anxiety is going to be where I'm very strategic. This is where I'm able to use my communication style, whether that is placating or manipulating, or that is being assertive and learning what group needs what for me at that time to generate best outcomes. I'm going to be in this place in my life for a long time. So actually going, kind of tying my brain pattern to this example of overwhelm, anxiety is also where I set the most traps for myself to become overwhelmed. I over commit. We've talked about this on previous episodes. When I look at my brain patterns, kind of top self-deceptive message, it's all figured out, it's okay, I'm going to figure it out. And for most people, we think of this as being inherently positive. But the truth is this sets more traps for me to become overwhelmed, exhausted, and justify isolating myself or doing nothing. So if I were to be able to go into these moments and actually see clearly, just because I can figure this out doesn't mean I should. Or just because I know how to do this doesn't mean that I should. Or just because I might think I have time for this doesn't mean that I really do. I should probably go check with my husband to make sure this doesn't conflict with his schedule. Or Josie, if you're listening to this, my wonderful assistant, my schedule is an absolute nightmare. There are times that I've had to look at Josie like, could you, and she's got little tears in her eyes and I'm like, okay, never mind. We're gonna leave that alone. So example here would be for me, if I focus on putting my behavior strategy at the point of anxiety where I'm a little bit slower and more methodical, I'm very tactical, strategic, if I'm putting my behavior strategy here, this is the best chance for me to not get myself to that transition point where I will go to anger and I'll describe something as overwhelmed. So I have to prevent myself from saying yes when I probably should say no. I have to get myself to slow down and ask myself some questions about why I wanna say yes and is it that I don't wanna upset people? Is it that I don't feel like other people can handle it? Am I robbing people of opportunities to learn how to do those things by me saying yes and stepping in and doing it? Because those are all the things that if I keep saying yes and I keep overloading my plate, guess where I'm heading? Overwhelmed down. So I have to input my behavior strategy in this anxiety place where I can actually methodically learn to say no, to be more discerning, to let people make mistakes without me stepping in and learning how to say, you know, so that I don't burn myself out later, this is not my problem, it's their problem and they're gonna figure it out or they won't, in which case, either case is fine because I'm not setting myself up for a failure to justify being angry later on down the road. Another example, and this is something that I've experienced throughout my career, but certainly recently, there are times as an employer that you're aware of things going on in your organization and you end up bargaining with yourself. You're like, you know that something's wrong, you're like, oh, but this and that and like, oh, they've been here for a long time or they're good at this, so then you're kind of bargaining. So there's a part of you that knows definitively something's wrong, but you keep brushing it off or minimizing it. Eventually, is that problem gonna go away? No, eventually you're going to hit that transition point from anxiety to anger and you're gonna be like, oh, I'm so overwhelmed right now and then you're gonna go and do something potentially stupid. So using this example of kind of learning to get one step ahead and say, okay, what traps am I setting for myself where I'm then going to pass this baton so that when I'm in this transition point, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm gonna justify doing something stupid and do I actually want to be responsible for cleaning up that mess or can I prevent having to clean up that mess by changing the action that I take right now? As soon as I become aware of a problem instead of minimizing it, can I address that head on? As soon as somebody appears to not be a good fit, can you give them one chance to correct and if they don't correct it at that point, can you lovingly cut it so that you're not setting yourself up six months a year down the road? These are all the things that we each have to learn about ourselves and I know these are things that happen to me when I'm in that anxiety state. I don't wanna hurt feelings. I wanna give people the benefit of the doubt and I do naturally try to help people from the sidelines even in a way where they might not know that I'm helping and then eventually that sets them up to fail because I've created some level of dependency. So these are all examples of how we need to be able to get into these earlier states and break apart the subtle things that we start to justify and the smaller actions that we take that eventually get us to this place where we're transitioning to our escalating motion. Now, we've been spending a lot of time talking about this fear, anxiety, anger, where typically the place that one would describe overwhelm is that transition point between anxiety and anger but there are plenty of people who actually experience their overwhelm in the fear state and this one is a bit of a trickier emotional addiction cycle to work with because as I stated for many people if you have that kind of very rapid onset, high intensity fear and you're not there for very long, it's actually not a great place to try to input strategy because you're not going to be calculated and methodical and we don't have a lot of time to get you to shift the way that you're thinking. So in a case like this, overwhelm would be experienced immediately like as soon as fear comes, the overwhelm sets in and typically the overwhelm is actually describing a lack of self-trust. It's also describing here where your brain is thinking of so many options but it doesn't understand which one is right and it's actually believing that there's some pressure around choosing right and because you're lacking self-trust, you get paralyzed with not knowing what to do and that paralysis is what you're describing as overwhelm. So this state is a little bit more challenging because there's an underlying mechanism here that also has to be worked on rather than just saying, oh, we have to input strategy at this phase of your emotional addiction cycle because there's a core wound here that's actually pulling the strings and the core wound here is something has happened to you that has made you question yourself and your ability to choose in the moment and to carry that through. So there are a couple of things that are likely to be happening alongside this. We typically have people here that matching that state of more analysis paralysis where you can't make a decision, it's typically coupled with not being able to commit and take action. So you're going to essentially keep circling here and you won't know what to do and the more times you circle, guess what? The more times you're likely to say, I'm overwhelmed or I'm just so stressed. When really the reality is if we were to properly define it, the language that you should be using here instead of I'm overwhelmed or I'm stressed is I'm stuck in a decision and I don't trust myself to choose from here. So a couple of things are gonna happen from this place. You're going to be looking for other people to help you which is likely, but the other thing that could happen here and this is by the way, even more common and it's got a worse outcome is you're subconsciously looking for people to help you make a choice but you also naturally question authority and you are going to resent the person that helps you make the choice. So it's already a setup. You might actually be trending toward yet another one of these umbrella terms when you transition again because you're likely heading toward anger. So in this example that we're giving, your fear that rapid onset where you get stuck and you can't make a decision and you're not able to commit and take action, you're likely to have that experience that you're now labeling as overwhelm, push you into anger where now you're mad about it. It feels unjust and unfair. So you're either mad at yourself or you're mad at other people and for some of you, you're mad at both because you want somebody to help you solve this problem but you're also resenting the fact but someone has to help you solve this problem. We've now identified for you two different places where you might experience something like overwhelm, stress, tense, one of these more blanket terms. What we have to do for somebody that's experiencing a cycle like this is we have to of course get you to bolster your self-trust. We've got to get you to a place where you're able to learn how to take an action and commit to that even if it ends up being wrong where it doesn't go well because your brain wants to justify inaction as a way to stay safe. We've got to be able to in subsequent emotional states point out the error in the thinking that starts to justify inaction. We know the anger is also especially this is going to be a rapid onset, justice-centric sort of anger. This is also not a great place to input behavior strategy because you're not going to be thinking very rationally here. Interestingly enough, the flip side of the pattern we were just going through, this one I would input the behavior strategy in your escalating motion of anxiety. You're much more likely in this case to stay there for a prolonged period where you're actually trying to do damage control, clean up all the messes that you just made. Maybe now you're placating or trying to smooth things over because you just lashed out at everybody. This is our best chance of turning the whole system around because this is where we have the part of your brain's attention where it wants to fix things. Whereas in previous states, you were more easily agitated and therefore it's not a great place to put behavior strategy. You are understanding and tracking with this but you want more information on. A great place to start would be going to do brain pattern mapping on breakmethod.com. It will show you exactly what your emotional addiction cycle is and it will show you exactly what happens to you at each phase of your emotional addiction cycle. So there's no need to listen to this and just be in confusion. You can go sign up for that. It's birth, the time and energy that you put into it to just have that understanding of what is my emotional addiction cycle and what are the telltale signs of when I'm in fear versus anger or when I'm in anger versus apathy. It literally is like getting a cheat sheet to how to properly move through your life with a much higher level of awareness than you have now before you have information like that. So do go check that out. It will make everything that I'm saying mean so much more to you. And the time cycle information where we're understanding more of the nuance and how our thoughts shift or contradict themselves, that's all stuff that you would do in breakmethod and module one. With this person where we're talking about this rapid onset fear and then a much more impulsive or reactive justice centric anger, we're gonna be focused on correcting the thought process and spotting the errors when we get to our escalating anxiety because most likely you are going to be there in damage control scurrying to fix things for a prolonged period of time. We've got that sweet spot that we're looking for where we've got your attention, you're more willing to try to fix things and you're there for a long period of time. At this point, this is where we can start to input strategy to help you understand what are these transition points where I start to turn over my cycle again? What is that bridge or transition action that I'm likely to do that moves me from anxiety back to fear again? For somebody like you, and obviously this is gonna be slightly different from person to person, but the more of the archetype that we're unpacking here, what's most likely to happen is if you perceive that you're trying to fix things and trying to smooth things over, and people are not essentially letting you just move on and reset and it still feels like people are judging you or they are not taking your cues to try to fix things or they might even say verbally, like, well, we all know this is just gonna start over again. Like, I'm glad that you're being nice, but it's almost like they're walking on eggshells, waiting or anticipating for it to happen again. Though when you become aware of that, that typically is going to be your bridge action back to fear because as soon as you feel like people are watching you or they're not seeing the effort that you're trying to make to smooth things over, this is most likely mirroring the childhood wound that you experienced that made you not trust yourself anyways. That bridge action is activating that self-trust wound, which is putting you back into the sphere state where you are overwhelmed with a decision and you don't know what to do and you can't take action. Best course of action here, if this is describing you, as soon as you catch yourself assuming how other people feel about you or even somebody gives you negative feedback, like, okay, yeah, I know you're trying to fix things now, but it's only a matter of time until you X, Y, Z. This is your chance to say, hey, you know, I was listening to Busy World's podcast and I realized that this actually is the moment that triggers me to start my cycle over again. I'm really trying to work on this. So I understand that I have run the cycle so many times that it might be hard to trust me, but is there any way that we can kind of talk about this? Because I do think that you giving me this negative feedback is partially what makes the cycle start all over again. So can you just recognize that I'm actually really trying to do something about this? And I need to learn how to trust myself and take action more. Sometimes when I get negative feedback like this from you, I stop trusting myself again, and that actually is one of the biggest triggers for this. So can we work on that? They might be much more inclined to be like, oh, okay, yeah, sure, sorry. Yeah, do you want advice or do you want me just to support you making this decision? No, I think I wanna go make this decision on my own. And then you have to challenge yourself to go take an action. Because for you taking an action, even if it ends up not being the right one, just getting yourself to take an action and stick with it is going to actually disrupt your previous cycle. So for you as soon as you realize that that's the state that you're in and that you recognize that moment of transition where you're gonna go back to fear again, the best recipe to get out of it is to take an action or to go do something physical where you're pulling yourself out of getting stuck in your head. As soon as a person like you get stuck in your head because you think that somebody is judging you, this whole cycle is going to repeat all over again. Obviously everyone's is very different, but for the most part, overwhelm is going to be that transition point between our protective emotion and our escalating motion, especially if you go from anxiety to anger. And for the other type, it's going to be that kind of initial onset of fear. And of course there are variants from within this, but those two archetypes are going to be by far and away the most common. I mentioned this briefly, but I want to touch back on it about how when our emotional state is changing, it may look like we have split personality or somebody doesn't trust us because they're like, are you this way or are you that way? I don't understand. Like you say this and then you say this. When our emotional state shifts, our thoughts shift as well, going back to that idea of that neurocognitive funnel. So when our thoughts shift where perception shifts, our choices often shift and they can seem contradictory to each other. So I also want you to start to observe this week where you're starting to contradict yourself. Because if you actually try to focus on three hours ago, I really felt like I needed things to be done this way, but now I'm actually feeling a little bit more flexible. Why is that? It's not that there's something wrong with you or that you've lost your marbles. It's that you've actually transitioned from one emotional state to another. So let's say that you are one of those people where your fear state is very rigid, controlling and micromanaging. Now that you're feeling a little bit more flexible and willing to collaborate with people, this might be the sign they needed to show you, oh, I've transitioned to anxiety. That's what happened. We need to understand what makes a shift from one to the other. Because then let's say that you're having an argument with your husband, he's like, what is wrong with you? Like an hour ago you wanted this, now you want this. This is where you can fill in those communication gaps and be like, honey, again, so interesting. I was watching busy gold podcast, decoded, by the way, you should totally watch it. And I realized that now I'm feeling flexible because I actually changed my emotional state. And I'm gonna start to dig in and do the work to figure out what made that shift happen so that I can actually get ahead of it. Because ideally, if your flexibility is generating a better outcome in your household, we wanna try to figure out like, how can I get myself to that state? Or to talk myself out of and through that fear state as quickly as possible so that I'm not kind of ordering people around and I can quickly transition myself into my protective emotion if that's a place where I'm going to generate better outcomes. Keep this in mind is that most people when we shift from one state to the other, it will seem to the outside world like we are either splitting or becoming more rational or contradictory. And these are actually normal behavior outputs that come from a change in our emotional state. But we can do the work to become better understanding our transitions and being able to articulate those transitions to other people. We started off by talking about this term emotional mud. These kind of blanket terms that really do nothing to serve us in the long run. Now we know how we can break apart emotional mud. Our emotional mud is going to be either a transition point from one emotion to another. Emotional mud could also be us getting stuck in a decision where we don't know what actions to take. And we feel paralyzed because we don't know how to move and generate momentum. So emotional mud in that case, rather than it being confusing, we don't know how to separate it. It's more like it's sinking us down like quicksand and we can't get out of it. We also know that emotional mud could be that movement of thinking in a way that feels contradictory. I was thinking this way and now I'm thinking this way. And that confusion or contradiction is part of what's leading us to feel like, ugh, I just don't know. Because our brain is somewhat aware that we're in the process of transitioning where we're contradicting ourselves and it makes us feel uncomfortable. What you can do here is become more observant and aware of these moments of transition. And instead of telling yourself, I feel like I'm going crazy or like, why am I in a bad mood? Now we have new language to tie to this. Oh my gosh. I think I'm transitioning from one state to another. What was I just thinking? How was I just feeling? What's changing now? Have I done my brain pattern maps that I can actually literally map this out and see where I'm going next and start to make some real decisions with myself? Do I wanna do this? Because we know where the cycle's gonna go. The baton is gonna pass from origin to protective and escalating. And we do damage at certain phases of our emotional diction cycle. I know this is a very vulgar depiction, but I know for a fact this analogy has worked for many people to change their lives. Imagine that your entire house is covered in a nice thick white shag rug. Long, lost in power sort of white shag rug fibers. And every time you allow yourself to hit these transition points where you take the actions that do damage in your household or to your kids' lives or to your relationship that are hard to walk back from, imagine it's like pooping on the white shag rug. Okay? Just a big steamy poop on the rug. Let's say you do that in front of your husband, right? Every time you do something that is antagonistic to the relationship where you're acting out parts of a cycle, it's like a poop has been placed on this rug. It doesn't matter how fast you clean it. It doesn't matter how many times you try to get it out of those white fibers of the white shag rug. There's always gonna be a little stain and both parties are always gonna remember that you crapped on the rug. So our goal now becomes, how do we learn to observe these transition points and stop justifying and excusing, crapping on the rug because our brain's like, it's okay, I'm gonna clean it up. It'll go away. It doesn't go away. The more you crap on the rug, the harder it is to walk back in any relationship. If you do something repeatedly enough with your kids, by the time you're saying, oh, mommy is so sorry, I'm gonna do better, they're like, yeah, you're not though. They stop trusting you. So every time you crap on the rug, you break trust. And every time you say, I'm gonna fix it, people eventually just stop believing you. If we can get ourselves to a place where we stop allowing these sort of emotional mud terms to accidentally or intentionally let us justify crapping on the rug, we are going to rebuild trust with our family, with our friends, with our coworkers, with our partners. And we won't just have to sit there awkwardly and try to clean it up. Be like, I'm gonna fix it because we're all gonna know that that's seen to some extent is gonna be there forever. It makes sense for us to do what we can now to stop it before it comes out, okay? So I can't tell you how many clients throughout my career, once I explain this analogy to them, they're like, oh my God, last week, I was starting to get into a fight with my husband and I realized I was about to crap on the white chag rug and I figured out exactly what you told me how to back it up and not do it. And now things are great. It's like we reset and I didn't let myself get to that escalation point or that tipping point where then we had to go through our whole cycle together to try to reset. These simple shifts in awareness in each individual moment can completely radically change your relationship immediately, like today, tomorrow, and even communicating to people that are used to you kind of rapidly moving through your cycle, just stopping and saying, just like I've told you a couple of times, hey, I've been listening to this podcast and I'm starting to realize what these transitions are like and I'm trying to work on it or fix it. Sometimes that's enough to start to reestablish trust with the other person's like, okay, I'm not taking crazy pills. It does feel like you're gaslighting me. And you're like, yes, I can understand why it feels like I'm gaslighting you because I can see where my thought process is contradicting itself from one emotion to the other. And then the other person's like, okay, so it's not just me, you're aware of this, great, let's work on it. I want to encourage you, if this is hitting for you and you are aware that there's work to do here and you are in a relationship, get your partner to do this too, because you want them to understand this because communication and relationship is always a two-way street. In almost every single case where someone has come to me completely positive that their partner is the toxic one, they see all the ways that they're also triggering the cycle. So you both have to understand your unique emotional addiction cycles and how they mutually trigger each other. This is what we've called in previous episodes, symbiotic dysfunction. This is what ultimately creates a toxic relationship. And I have seen time and time again, even the most toxic relationship turn around with the right tools. I want to also leave you with the reminder that self-deception raise ways that we kind of skew and distort reality. It's something that happens to every single person on planet Earth. Nobody is excused from this, but we can learn what our brain pattern type is and understand how that then correlates to self-deceptive tendencies. In my book, Your Brain is a Filthy Liar, it actually breaks down chapter for chapter, each brain pattern type, self-deceptive tendencies, what language you use to justify, excuse, or rationalize, and exactly how to deconstruct that language so that you can set yourself free. You can go get the book on any major retailer, Amazon for sure. You just type in, Your Brain is a Filthy Liar, it is on sale now, it's just over my right shoulder. That is literally like an operating manual to learn how to meet your self-deception head on. And if you can meet your self-deception head on, you're typically able to stop this emotional addiction cycle from unfolding. It's up to you. Are you going to just stay with this awareness of your pattern and just say, yeah, like I know I can do this sometimes, but you just keep letting it happen over and over again? Or are you going to commit to doing the work to actually break apart these individual pieces, decode the entire thing, and actually sustainably rewire? Because all of these things can be completely sustainably rewired, but you have to learn how to separate out each piece and learn where's the best place to put that strategy for rewiring. Not all moments in an emotional addiction cycle are going to be fruitful for you, as in the examples that I gave before. Whether you came here listening to this episode because you frequently hit what you would describe as burnout, overwhelm, exhaustion, I hope now you're leaving with an understanding that these words are not helpful to you and you have to do the detective work to understand what choices got you there, what thought shifts that are now contradictory are making you put your hands up, and what behaviors are you now about to subtly or overtly justify because you're using these words of overwhelmed or exhausted? Each of these behavior patterns in these emotional addiction cycles, they all have childhood roots. There's always a childhood pattern of inputs that has to be tracked and understood. And when we do this, we can start to understand why certain triggers in your environment are triggering you into your cycle the way that they are. In next week's episode, we are going into emotional eating. And I think that this is a great segue from overwhelming burnout to emotional eating because guess what? Some of your emotionally addictive behaviors that are tied to eating have everything to do with these blanket terms and traps that we set for ourselves. We are going to dig deep into the childhood roots of emotional eating, what different childhood input patterns are that generate certain behavior outputs as adults, like binging, restricting, hiding food, being unable to share food. One of the things that I have seen in Break Method, in module three, we have a series of lectures on emotional eating. And I can't tell you how often people come out of that lecture and get on session with me and they're like busy. I have normalized these eating behaviors my whole life because of the way that I was raised, and not until this lecture did I realize that they were actually dysregulated and doing harm. So I think often we overlook or start to justify and normalize certain eating behaviors because they might've been normal in our family. And we will set the record straight so people understand by the end of next week's episode, what should more normal or typical eating behaviors look like and when are we stepping out of that boundary into something that's actually intended to do harm or move us cyclically through our emotional addiction cycle. Hope to see you next week for emotional eating, why we restrict binge, purge and fixate. So grateful that you tuned into this episode with me and I will see you next week for emotional eating. 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?