Your Brain's Most Unfortunate Design Feature
Here’s the most unfortunate design feature of your automatic brain:
Very often, it sends you an INSIGHT in the form of a NEGATIVE EMOTION
Most people are very uncomfortable with negative emotions.
They don’t feel very good, so our first instinct, from birth, is to get away from them.
We act out, we suppress them, we distract ourselves — all in an attempt to get rid of this uncomfortable feeling as quickly as possible.
And depending on what you were taught about emotions and how you’ve seen other people handle theirs…
You cried and people rushed to make you feel better.
You see people eat or drink to relieve their stress.
You heard: “Chin up. Stiff upper lip. Other people have it worse.”
…the idea that negative emotions are a problem to be solved or a stain to be scrubbed away was further reinforced.
But here’s the problem with this approach:
Negative emotions are your automatic brain’s way of sending you INSIGHTS.
Your automatic brain is always working in the background.
It makes sure you keep breathing and your heart keeps pumping.
It maps out the physical space you’re in, so you know the colors and shapes and distances of everything around you.
It turns the random sounds people are making and the squiggles on the screen into words and sentences with meaning.
It maintains your identity, your memories, your current understanding of what the heck is going on and what you’re supposed to do next.
And it does all of this constantly. It is always updating its understanding of what the heck is going on as things keep happening in front of it.
It moves very fast. It does a lot of things at once. You cannot turn it off.
And it is not a very good communicator.
MOST of what it does happens in the background — you’re not even consciously aware of it.
And sometimes, it pushes something into your conscious awareness. It has something it needs to tell you. An important insight that it wants to communicate.
So it knocks on your door.
But it’s not very good at speaking in complete sentences or articulating a nuanced argument. Instead it hits you over the head with an emotion.
And when you rush to push the emotion away, you push away the insight too.
And your automatic brain, which truly believes it has something important to tell you, chases you down and knocks on the door even louder.
You run away faster and faster. It knocks louder and louder.
And you end up in a crazy dance with yourself that could have been totally avoided if you just sat down and asked your brain what it wanted to say.
Negative emotions are NOT a sign that you’re crazy. Or entitled. Or too sensitive. Or weak.
Negative emotions are NOT unbearable. They will not hurt you. They cannot kill you. (Though the things you do to avoid them just might.)
Negative emotions are just your brain trying to send you a message.
That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
So here’s what I want you to do, the next time you feel a negative emotion:
Open the door. Let it in. Sit down next to it.
Ask it: What are you trying to tell me? What did you pick up on? What insight are you trying to communicate?
Have a conversation. Uncover all the insights. Get the full message from your brain. (Here’s an example)
And then, decide what YOU think.
You may agree with it. Or you may overrule it. Either way is fine.
But work together with your brain to decide what’s going on and what you want to do.
Stop running away from yourself.
I know it feels uncomfortable. That’s the unfortunate design feature — that your brain delivers insights in this inconvenient way.
But you can handle being a little uncomfortable.
If you can learn react to your negative emotions with curiosity rather than judgment…
If you can take the time to listen to what your brain is saying, and keep asking questions until it’s able to articulate itself…
If you can have a productive conversation with all the parts of yourself and harmonize them instead of staying in cacophony…
You will unlock access to all of your best insights.
And you will finally be comfortable with yourself.
Here’s what I want you to do next:
Try everything I just described with the next 10 negative emotions that you feel.
And if it doesn’t work, or you get stuck, or something doesn’t makes sense — come talk to me.
You are too smart and too hardworking NOT to take advantage of ALL of your brilliance.
You have so many subtle, perceptive, unique insights stored in your brain.
The answers for how to get everything you want are already in there.
You don’t need a guru to tell you what to do.
You need a process for uncovering your own insights and deciding what to do with them.
And that is exactly what I’m going to teach you.
So let’s get started.
📸 Instagram | 💌 Newsletter | 👋🏽 New? Start here