Make Peace With Your Mind by Mark Coleman

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the No Complaining Podcast where I'm going to try to help you move from feeling stuck and in a bad place to taking action and feeling more in control of your world. I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I'm Cianna Stewart, and I'm really grateful that you're here.

Several of you have written to me about, being really hard on yourself and complaining about yourself. A lot of stuff about dealing with the inner critic, about feeling really just horrible right now. And it's no surprise. I mean, the world is very, very stressful right now. And I'm going to talk today about how those two things are interrelated, and I'm gonna go a little bit into science of emotions and thoughts, and then how that relates to the inner critic. And I'm going to give you some tools that I hope will help you.

Let me start by saying that I can definitely relate to this feeling of being down and having your inner critic kind of having free rein right now. I've been definitely feeling my inner critic going into overdrive. I want to do that right by all of you. I also want to help fix whatever's going on in the world (which is a lot of things right now). And then feeling really frustrated and exhausted by everything all the time. And so then I feel like I'm not doing enough. And then my inner critic gets back down on me about not doing enough. And then we just go into a little spin. 

So that's kind of the place that I've been in, and it's actually included the push to try to continue to do this podcast. I'm very much aware of the gaps in my release schedule. And yet I still find that so many of you are listening and I'm really grateful for that and it shows me that there's something in here for you. And there's some way that this is I'm helpful to you, and that's really helpful to me. So thank you for listening and for continuing to gave me the feedback that there's something here. Doing this podcast is one of the things that I'm doing to counter that feeling of lack of productivity and lack of agency. And in a little bit, I'll go more into why that's important and how that particular thing helps. So thanks again. And now a little bit about the science. 

So, for anybody who knows me, you know that I read a lot all the time and I have just a love of science and I am always excited to learn new things. If you listen to anything even related, like even minorly related to, psychology, neuro-psychology, neurology - you'll know that there have been a lot of discoveries in the last few years, like the last 10 to 15 years, ever since the emergence of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI, which gives a great insight into which parts of the brain are activated during certain activities. This kind of insight wasn't available before. And so a lot of the things that were taken as truth about the way that we experienced the world have been challenged. So these kinds of discoveries are really exciting. Some of them reinforce the things that we sensed or reveal more information about them. And some of them are really surprising. 

One of the things that is not surprising, and that just got reinforced, is the idea that we are affected by other people's stress.

So we have these things called mirror neurons, and what they do is to help to keep us in resonance with other people. This is really important because we, as a species needed others for survival. We are basically pack animals. And so you need to know what the group is feeling and thinking in order to be able to stay aligned with them in order to be able to stay part of the group. So mirror neurons developed in us that... basically it's not really allowing you to feel what somebody else is feeling, but it kind of is. What they do is they evoke in you feelings that are in resonance with other people. Right now two big things are going on that are deeply affecting our ability to regulate ourselves. One of them is that many of us are on our own during this pandemic, that we actually don't have that many people around us who we can mirror off of and who can affect our moods. Because we are alone, a lot of people are self isolating or they're isolating with just a handful of other people or maybe just one other person, and those people that you are interacting with are generally very stressed out. Just about everybody right now is stressed out. We are exhausted. We are dealing with things that are uncertain and in general humans don't do very well with uncertainty. 

And so when we are falling into resonance with other people, We are falling into resonance with stress or depression or fear. And all of these things, then, they start to build up inside our own bodies. And so that's really, really hard. So it's like, not only are you taking on whatever you're experiencing, but there is a way in which you are taking on what other people are experiencing as well. Some people do this more than others. Some people are more empathic than others. Some people shield themselves off so that they don't experience that, and that actually has its own level of stress on your body. The blocking of other people's experience is actually very, taxing all by itself. So when you are feeling in resonance with others in general, they're not feeding you positive things that can lift you out of your experience.

This is one of the ways that we generally heal ourselves when we're not in pandemic times, when we're not on lockdown. You know, when we go to dinner parties, we have conversations, we laugh with other people. When we go dancing. We do sports. We do other things that are very much the things that heal us. Some of it is about shifting those feelings inside ourselves and then shifting other people's in response or hanging out around with people who are in a better place than we are. And then having ourselves shift because we are feeling their generally good mood, their confidence, their, hope. When we are around those kinds of people, then we feel better and it's just a natural kind of thing. But a lot of us don't have that right now. So we're, so we're very internally disregulated as one of the terms for it is just this feeling of like, "I don't know how to control what is going on inside of me, and I don't know how to get out of it." And it's that other people are also feeling that level of stress. And so you're kind of surrounded. You're in this little soup of depression and fear and anxiety. 

And I just want you to know that you're not alone and that other people are feeling it as well. And maybe that doesn't make you feel better, but there is a way that the inner critic has a special mean part of it that's, you know, "You are the only one," or, "You're the worst," or, "You know everybody else is doing better." And there's a way that the inner critic isolates you. And so you kind of need to start to counteract that by actually noticing that other people around you are stressed.

And there's a way that you might be taking that on and absorbing it as well. And so try to learn how to differentiate, like what is yours and what is other people's, and start to create a little bit of space there so that you can ease your own burden. Only work on yourself.

One of the other things that affects our self esteem and our inner critic and our general ways of beating ourselves up is whether or not we feel like we have agency, whether or not we feel like we have any level of control over what is happening around us. And right now the way the world is with what's going on everywhere, you know from the pandemic to politics, to climate, to everything that's happening right now, it's very easy to feel like you have no agency, that you feel very ...