John Assaraf explains the brain’s rapid fear-response pathway—amygdala signals can shut down the frontal (executive) cortex and inhibit action—and offers a practical counter: repeated mental rehearsal/visualization (like an athlete or high diver) to reduce amygdala activation, lower stress, restore executive thinking, and increase action-taking. He encourages viewers to visualize performing desired actions repeatedly until the brain becomes accustomed and behavior follows.
Chapters
Hey, friends, this is John Assraf, and welcome to another video blog. In the last video blog, I talked with you about fear and how highly successful people feel the fear, just like you and I have, and they take action anyway. Well, do you think that maybe they learned how to overcome that feeling? Well, the answer is yes. What's happening neurologically when you feel real or perceived danger is in nanoseconds, that's a millionth of a second. A signal is sent from the amygdala, the area responsible to monitor real or perceived danger, to the motor cortex of your brain, which is the part of you that actually is responsible for taking action, the motor. And that shuts off your genius frontal lobe, your CEO, the executive director, the rational decision maker. And when that happens, most people revert back to safety, and it's a loop of stress. So you feel the fear. And this all happens, by the way, unconsciously. And we have to learn how to override that control and response mechanism. Now, if you think about a high diver who learns how to dive maybe at 3 meters, then 10 meters, then maybe 20 meters, they all feel the fear, but through practice and visualization, they see themselves repeating the action over and over and over again in their minds. And that gets their brain used to taking the action or the behavior. So where does that come in for you? Well, what I want you to do is I want you to start visualizing seeing yourself taking the actions that you need to take, achieving the results that you want to achieve, and mentally rehearse it just like you were an Olympic athlete, played over and over and over in your mind until your mind becomes accustomed or used to you taking the actions, you achieving the results, and you feeling great about it. The more you mentally rehearse, the easier it's going to be. The less that the amygdala is going to fire off the danger signal, the less stress you're going to have. And the less stress you have, the more you're going to start thinking with the genius part of your brain. And that's going to cause you to take action. Where you've procrastinated before is going to cause you to do what you need to do more often. And guess what? Every one of us can use a little bit of doing more of what we need to do more often.
