Dr. Amelia Case Personifies: The Seven Beast Brains, Possible Triggers, And The Restep Required For Taming Each Beast

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the.

Capacity to be able to do the.

Things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is Stacy Lauren. I have such a treat for you today because I'm bringing you on an expert who is an expert in so many things, but specifically in the brain and how our mind can basically work against us on so many ways and how you can help to really work through that stuff and be able to use it in your favor in order to be able to do the thing and honestly, anything else you want to do in life. And she's someone that I've been working with on and off for the last several years and has helped me through so many things I can't even begin to count. Anyway, I'm excited to bring her to you, and I think I just wanted to mention also how important it is to surround yourself with good people because she came to me as a referral from a friend of mine who I value so much. And just by being able to be like, have good relationships around you and be able to be vulnerable with people, it opens up the door to so many things. And I'm just grateful for my friend for introducing me to her because she's helped me so much throughout this process. So, Anyway, I've got Dr. Amelia Case here today, and I'm so excited that you're going to be able to hear from her and learn wisdom from her.

Hi, Stacy. I'm so glad to be here and thank you for saying all those wonderful things. I really appreciate it. Oh, good.

Well, I don't even think I said enough, honestly, with how much you've helped me.

Oh, thanks. Well, I just love and adore you, so I'm glad to be here. Thanks so much for asking. Yeah, I would love to just start.

Off and if you can just tell us about your background and more about you.

I think what I'll do is instead of talk about the professional background, that stuff can get boring. But I'll keep that really short. I've been a clinician almost my whole life, 32 years, officially running a multidisciplinary healthcare business in Chicago. But more than anything, almost the entire time of that, I have had a second business, which has been a coaching business that was born out of my own experience of dissatisfaction when I tried to get care for myself, when I felt so stressed out and I felt what many people would call general anxiety at different points in my life, and I couldn't get answers. And so that is how my coaching business started and my coaching practice, I should say, started. And that's what brought us together, is that line of business. Now, having said that, owning a multidisciplinary clinic has helped me see a really broad picture of how much people suffer and struggle when they have mental, emotional, psychological, spiritual problems with stress and anxiety. In my clinic, we've seen everything from pain syndromes to autoimmune problems and all diseases, including injuries, by the way, that I think are all related to people just being disconnected from their own minds, from their own brains. And so that part of my experience as a clinician has really informed how I thought about mental health and psychological, spiritual, emotional health. And like so many great things, it starts off with your own suffering. And that's how it started with me, and now I don't suffer anymore, I should say that much.

Yeah. And I think that's been, I think probably what is. I'm sure you know this, but that's probably what's made you so successful with what you're doing because you have such a deep connection to the suffering part to know what you needed to help you. And then also you have the medical, like from the clinician side standpoint, so you're able to integrate both of those together, which, I mean, that's. That's pretty powerful.

Yeah, I feel lucky. I would say, though, the. Let's say, for example, like, you know, I've had my share of injuries and I've had some health problems and a couple of health crisis points in my life. And everything is either made easier or harder or better or worse according to how my brain is working, according to how much I believe I'm the boss over my brain and I can direct my brain and how to help or hinder me. So even though health problems can be really scary and really awful and troubling and can make anybody feel hopeless, it's made so much worse if the person doesn't feel connected to what's going on mentally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. That's what I call sort of collectively being the boss of your own brain. And so that's, I think, after so Many years in health care. The thing that strikes me as predominant as missing in our whole kind of health care system, from soup to nuts, is just a lack of understanding of the brain, a lack of, of presentation even of what the brain is about, even to, I think, everything from health care classes in elementary school to being adults. There's just hardly any mention of, you've got a brain, and it's so much the basis of your experience. Let's do something with it. Let's make sure you know what it is and you can anticipate how it, how it acts and reacts so you're ready. So that, that's, that's what I'm more dedicating myself to now, is trying to bring that information more to light across all age groups. Yeah.

And I know that's what helped me the most too, is so, okay, here's what I'm hoping we can do together. Since you brought it up, there was a moment in time, I remember, where it was pretty much after a few months of us working together, you had told me the story of. And I don't remember if it was a neuroscientist or some neuro. Something. And they were giving some really complicated tutorial about the brain and reactions and things like that. And that was when you, you had the idea of the beasts and, you know, how to define it better so that normal people like me, you know, could understand parts of their brain that, you know, they've never understood before. So are you open to talking more about that story and kind of a little bit about that, that modality?

Yeah, I think you're talking about Edward Bergmark. He's the chairman of the board of the new school of a couple of schools of psychology. And one of them here is here in Chicago. And I used to have that. I love neuroanatomy. So I used to sit down with people and say, oh, yeah, let's talk about the amygdala, the prefrontal, prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate gyrus. Let's talk about these brain parts. And, you know, people's eyes would just sort of glaze over like, what the heck is she talking about? And so one day, Edward and I were talking about some. Just about psychology and the brain and some experiences that in fact, that he had. And we were talking about some pretty complicated, let's say, actions of the brain and somehow got separated from what we were really trying to do, which is solve a problem. And so while I was talking to Edward, I said, no, wait, wait a Second, let me just. Let's put it this way. Suddenly I had this point of clarity where I could explain to him by personifying the brain into beastly characters, what was going on in the brain. And so at that time, there were three or four characters that. That the brain. The brain can actually be. The actions of the brain can actually be distilled into these seven characters. And at the time, I think I was. I had thought of only four, I think, at that moment. And I explained them to Edward. And here's this guy with a PhD who's chairman of the board of the schools of Psychotherapy. And he said, my God, I never understood that. I never saw it that way. I can't believe that we began this dialogue. It's the last time that I ever tried to talk about the brain using the proper neuroanatomical parts. I finally realized that if I could personify the parts of the brain into beastly characters, that it made them accessible. And then people could identify even someone who had his PhD in psychology and who was chairman of the board of these schools. It made it so simple and accessible for him. I realized it had a much broader application. That's, in fact, one of the things that I think was most exciting when we first met was for you, your eyes, to light up and say, oh, my God, I see that. I see that in myself. I can see how I'm that beast and make sense of your experience. Instead of feeling like your brain was just doing something crazy random that didn't make any sense, and somehow your brain was doing something wrong, you were able to see how your brain was actually doing something right, and it made perfect sense. And then you could do something with it and about it.

Oh, I mean, it was like life changing for me. And it still is, not only for me, but when I was dealing with my employees, because we had. It was during COVID and I mean, it was like they were so dysregulated, you know, like everyone else was in the world. But I had been working with these people for 15 plus years and totally acting totally different, you know, during COVID than in the beginning of it, you know, than ever before. And by understanding this concept, it not only helped me kind of regulate myself, but it helped me understand the lens they were in, which was like. I mean, it was really. It just made such a huge difference, you know, to be able to not only understand what my brain was doing, but then to have an idea of what might be going on, you know, for them, too.

Yeah. And other people's brains. Well, can I tell you something that was really fun for me and flattering is Edward asked me at one point, hey, Amelia, you know, I'd like you to come and teach a bunch of doctors about this, a bunch of psychotherapists. And at first I was like, oh, no, you know, I'm going to get skewered. Like, I'm not, you know, at their level. And anyway, I didn't say that to him. I just said, you know, okay, I'll do it. But inside I was like, oh, geez, you know, they. They know so much more than me about this. You know, they know more. So anyway, I went and I gave the lecture to a large group. I mean, 100 people more. And they're all, you know, They've got their PhDs and their doctorates and their psydes and this and that. And so I was telling them about the beast brain. In the human brain, there are different ways to talk about the human brain and divvy it up. There's a very simple way that's really clear and that is to say there's one part of the brain that's the human higher brain. I won't go into that right now, but it's called the zeitgeist brain. Or we could call it the cast brain, but just for this discussion, it's just a higher part of the brain, the one we might more often think of as human, where we think and we reason and we have ideas and we make decisions. But then there's a different part of the brain that's the lower part of the brain. And that lower part of the brain we very easily call the beast brain. And the beast brain has only one thing it does, and that is survive. So much of stress and anxiety is born in that part of the brain. And in fact, it's labeled anxiety. Very often, when it's not even. It's more reaction by one of the beasts of the beast brain, of which there are seven. So I told this to that group and said, let's just talk about the basics of the brain. The human top brain, let's say, and now the beast brain. Well, the beast brain is trying to survive, and it's only trying to survive by getting food or having a mate and procreating or having territory or having resources or having a pack and protection, or having some advantage or having energy and strength. There are only seven things that this beast brain wants. If at any time the beast brain doesn't think, not even think, let's say, doesn't identify that it's getting one of those seven things. It will get triggered and it will react, and then suddenly it will just completely overtake and dominate and hijack the entire brain, including that human part. And so I describe this, and then I describe the beast. So in order of what I just said, the beast are the dog, the monkey, the lion, the wolf, the eagle, the rabbit, and the cat. So I described this, and I talked about each one of the beasts and how those beasts make people behave. So, for example, a lot of people identify with the rabbit, which is the sixth of the seven beasts. And the rabbit is sensitive to not feeling any advantage. It feels small, and it feels like everything else is big. And you can just sort of picture what a rabbit would do under stress. It would absolutely freeze. Its eyes would stop, it would twitch a little, and it would hold absolutely still. And then, according to what was happening, it would run and dart and run this way and that way and try to camouflage itself under something until finally it could get in a burrow and just retreat and hide. That is a normal and beautiful solution to the threat that the rabbit just faced, which is not having any advantage not being big enough. So it's developed these ways to protect itself and make sure it survives. And that's happening in our brains. We're human beings, but there's a whole part of our brains that's the ancient part of the brain, that is the beast brain, that acts just like this. If the threat triggers that part of the brain, meaning the rabbit beast brain, then the person will actually behave like a rabbit for the next anywhere from half an hour to, you know, one year or more. People can really get stuck in these reactions. Well, so I shared this with the group of these highly sophisticated psychologists, and, man, they stormed me after the lecture. And they were funny, too, because some of them said, oh, my God, I can't. I don't want to be a veterinarian. Like, how do I get rid of these people? Like, I don't want to. These are not the people I want to help. And I, you know, I was sensitive to that. Listen, if they're psychologists, they want to work with the human part of the brain. Guess what? The people who were really triggered and their beast brains were going crazy. They seem not to be listening or doing the right thing with their psychologist. So the psychologist was getting sick of them and thinking they're not trying. There's this whole communication breakdown. In other words, psychologists were saying, I don't want to take care of those people, man. I'm not A veterinarian. I'm not a zookeeper. And some of the doctors said to me, my God, how come we never learn this? I never heard of this ever. Are you sure this is real? I think this is what Edward liked, by the way. Edward. When I first talked to him about it, he got a kick out of it because he had never looked at the brain and behavior this way either. I think for psychologists, they might be forgetting that this lower ancient part of the brain will take over the whole brain whenever there's a threat. It. It has to. Because, I mean, that's the advantage for us. Right. That we have this part of the brain that will protect us.

I think it's that concept of, you name it, you tame it. Right. You know, and it's. All of a sudden you're able to understand the reasoning behind certain things.

So it helps.

It helps you. It helps almost validate whatever the feeling is. And I think the other. Really cool. So I am the rabbit that is my. My majority beast that comes out often. And I think the thing that really. The other thing that's really cool about this idea of being able to identify with the beast is you mentioned simple and accessible. But I think memorable is the other word that would come to my mind because I can picture a rabbit. So it's like really easy for me to almost embody what that is. So then it's easier for me to get out of it. And you haven't mentioned it yet, but I'd love to explore that more because that was the other thing. Not only acknowledging what my beast brain was. The other thing that really helped was you have like a restep for each part of the beast brain. So you know what that beast needs in order to get unstuck, basically. And I'd love to kind of talk through that a little bit more.

Yeah. So each one of. If I put it, will you tell me if I've gone off the rails here at all? Because this is such a massive topic and sometimes I'll go. And I'll go off in a tangent. So just throw a brick at me if I go off. Totally. Yeah.

And I'm glad you said that because I think it's important for people to hear it from the simplest terms. Right. And that's what I think I love about the beast, because I think it's easy to tune something out when it becomes more complicated, you know?

Yeah. If. If it gets too. Too complicated, if what I'm saying gets too complicated, just tell me, please. So in answer to, you know what Is the rest up? I think this is the most. Second most important thing to say. So the most important thing is to say that there are these seven beast beast characters represented in your lower mind in your beast brain, and they're there for everyone. Every single person has every single beast. But for whatever reason, one beast, sometimes two or three, but particularly one, will dominate. And I wish I could explain why that happens. I can't. But certain people have a tendency to be dominated by one part of their beast brain. And so for you, you very easily get dominated by your rabbit. Like that little bunny just sort of overtakes you. And even though you have had some experience with some other beasts getting triggered and reacting, it seems like, yeah, that one is kind of prevalent. So I would say that first is even though every single person has all seven beasts represented in their beast brains, it's not surprising if one beast dominates under stress and each beast is sensitive to a particular strength stress. So do you want me to go through all seven?

Sure, I would love it.

Okay, so I'm going to start. I say it in this order. I'm going to start with the dog. So it goes the dog, the monkey, the lion, the wolf, the eagle, the rabbit, the cat. The dog is. You want to think of the beast brain. Beasts are sensitive to threats as they should be because it's the threats that threaten our survival. These beasts are really ultimately protecting us. The dog is sensitive to a sense of hunger. In other words, that is the brain's way of letting us know that, okay, we don't have enough food. And it also could be food and water.

Can you give an example of who would have their dog come out and when that would happen?

Yeah, somebody who might have the dog part of the beast brain triggered would be somebody who, let's say, I've seen this many times. So I'll give you a real life story. Somebody who said, oh, I heard that if I fast, I'm going to lose weight. The person starts fasting and absolutely limits food and even might even limit the water. And then that person feels sort of like fainting and a little bit like, can't even handle one discussion. That's a conflict. Can't do any sort of focusing. Just feels like, oh, my God, I have horrible brain fog. I feel like, oh, I'm slumping, my energy is so low, and I feel like my limbs are tingling. I think I'm having a nervous breakdown. That really has happened. That's somebody whose dog beast brain was triggered because the dog beast brain is sensitized. To hunger for food and hunger for water. What's the re step on that? I know this sounds really basic, but it's to preserve the energy and to replenish means to eat something that is of nutritional value. Now imagine this person who feels this faint feeling, just reaches for, God forbid, a candy bar that's just pure sugar that's not really offering any nutritional value. That person, and this is not unusual to happen, that person can be really having that beast brain dog triggered over and over again because there's just this quick energy surge of the sugar and then there's a depletion and a quick energy surge of the sugar and then a depletion. And very often these people think that they have generalized anxiety disorder, by the way, when really what they have, if you went to medical terms, it would be a horrible blood sugar imbalance problem. But what is reacting in the brain is the dog beast brain. The dog beast brain. And, and why does the, why does the person feel faint and have no energy and posture is terrible and they can't be, can't focus and they feel confused because the brain is preserving its energy for, you know, the heartbeat and for the basic breathing. There's very little special attention and blood flow that just goes to the brain higher apparatus for thinking and figuring stuff out. It's actually the right thing that the brain's doing to slow down energy expenditure. And then if the person's eating a high sugar food or fasting, it's absolutely the wrong thing to do. So what is the step? Preserve energy by slowing down and replenish with something that is a high quality fuel. And then guess what? The generalized anxiety disorder, if I say that in quotes, goes away. That's a really common one. Very common. It seems a little bit more common in teenage girls and college girls than anybody else. If I go through my own experience with my clients, most of the time it'll be a parent who says to me something's really wrong with my daughter. And come to find out the daughter's dog beast brain is being triggered because the daughter is doing some sort of crazy diet or not eating high quality food. Monkey beast brain is sensitive to a hunger for sex or a partner. The monkey beast brain helps us want to mate and procreate and take care of our family. So one of my clients, her name's Daya and she was about 27, 28, 29 when she came to me. And she was having the worst problem. She had a long history of being like excelling at school and excelling in business and going really fast up in her company. And suddenly she said her whole life was falling apart and she had terrible anxiety and self consciousness and, you know, could I help her? And her cousin, I had worked with her elder cousin and that's how she came to me. But anyway, her story was really interesting. Her younger sister got engaged and got married. And she came from a traditional sort of family background where usually like the older ones should get married first. And she had very just traditional parents. And they had some judgment about her, by the way, being single and not having found her partner. But for her, her work was the most important. So anyway, right after her younger sister got engaged, she started having this problem. So she felt like she needed all this validation from other people. She couldn't keep track of her thoughts and words. She was having fantasies about boys and men and she was daydreaming, fantasizing and not focusing on her work. And so she thought that she was getting some sort of mental disorder. What happened was her monkey beast brain got triggered. That monkey beast brain, whatever it was in her brain, she wasn't taking care of her family or doing what she was supposed to do in her family. She didn't have a mate. She had been focused on work and suddenly she was. Oh, I forgot one thing. She wasn't prone to go out and just sort of, you know, pick up a guy or party with a guy or something like that. She was having sort of peculiar interests for her to want to go out and just find a guy. And so she thought something was really wrong with her. She started thinking she was being a narcissist or she had some sort of sex addiction. In fact, once we talked about these signs and symptoms of the monkey, of the monkey bee spraying, she could see it in context that her younger sister had gotten engaged. And oh, I forgot one part too. She had gotten engaged, gotten married and was pregnant all quickly together. Gaia was, you know, something in her beast brain did not like that. And so there was a reaction. So what's the re step for that? That was her question, like, do I have to get pregnant right now? You know, and what I told her is, I think really important point is I didn't have kids till I was 40. My first one was 41. Some people just aren't going to have kids at all. And some people, or they're not going to have their own offspring, let's say, or they'll do it late. And I want you to just think for a second of some of the fascinating images you've seen of how animals behave. Like I literally saw last year an image of a lion that had adopted a gazelle. You know, the lion should have eaten the gazelle. Well, the lion was not hungry, so it didn't eat the gazelle. And the gazelle was a baby gazelle. And so the lion took care of it as if it were a little lion cub. You can see things like a cat adopting a duck and all of those strange relationships that animals can have. And just know that there is some drive within every mammal, and we are mammals, to have someone to take care of, an offspring to take care of, or some sort of progeny or, you know, something to be parental to and watch over and, you know, kind of be the preserver of. And so that's how we addressed it with Gaia. She said, you know, she wants to work, she wants to get ahead in her career. She didn't want to get married and have a kid. So we picked out a bunch of things that were possible for her to do where we used to say, okay, basically, it's like you have to adopt your own duck. Like, what is it that you want to do to solve that part of your beast brain that feels threatened that you don't have a mate and that you don't have offspring? Yet it worked with her. We tried a couple of ways, a couple of solutions, and found the one that seemed to settle with her. It just wasn't a priority. For her human brain, it was not a priority, but her beast brain, for whatever reason, when her sister got engaged and married and had a kid, man, did that trigger something in her brain. And no, she wasn't a narcissist. And no, she wasn't a sex addict.

How can you tell if your monkey brain is activated?

You know how you hear about the things called fight or flight? I call these the seven Fs. So with the dog, it's fade or faint. We just talked about the dog. With the monkey, it's fawn or flirt. The next one is the lion is sensitive to a sense of displacement. So imagine if there's no territory, then the lion can't rest. And so what happens when a lion doesn't have a territory? It will pace. Like, just, you know, use the beasts to sort of imagine what that animal would do. Right. So a lion that doesn't have territory will pace. It will start to feel frantic. It'll be unsettled. You could see it might think of pacing as maybe bouncing or tapping or going back and forth, looking, looking. It can look like obsession A lot of people who have the lion beast brain triggered will think they are developing obsessive compulsive behaviors. Also, guess what? Without a territory, a lion can't see sleep. People who have a liability triggered will feel like they can't get to sleep or they are struggling with insomnia. That's common. Another really interesting thing about the lion is if the lion beast brain is triggered, the person can have problems with urination, bladder infections, can have trouble, can't even eliminate in a bathroom that's not their own, but can feel like having to pee all the time, like wanting to have frequent urination. Lion beast brain. One of the people who came to me, she was referred by somebody. She came and she said, okay, Dr. Case. She said something, almost these exact words. My anxiety is so terrible, none of the drugs are working and my bladder is killing me and it feels like it's sticking out to here, and I have so much pain down here. And she was pointing to her groin and her underbelly parts. Anyway, come to find out she's here in Chicago. She was moving out of a very luxurious skyscraper building that had a doorman and tons of security. And she was moving with her family to a suburb, to a house. No doorman and no special security. And so, even though the house was however many millions of dollars and in a wonderful neighborhood, it was a drastic change for her beast brain. So her lion beast brain was going ballistic. So she felt like, oh, that's the other thing is she was saying she couldn't get a good night's sleep, you know, for. For anything. Her. She was taking drugs for sleep, she was taking drugs for anxiety. Nothing was working. So I said, here, you know, that's the lion beast brain that's getting triggered from you moving from this very safe place where you've been for 20 years now to this, you know, house where you have no, you know, no doorman and no specific security. So I want you to go to your house, the new house, and I want you to walk around the periphery and really identify to yourself, this is my land. This is my property. I want you to go in the house and really look at the windows and see which windows open and which ones seem dangerous and see how you lock the door and really walk yourself through this place as territory and thinking about safety. I had told her about the lion, and I told her about why her bladder was feeling like she had to pee all the time. And she said, oh, my God, you are not going to tell me that I have to go and pee at my new house lawn. I said, to tell you the truth, I wasn't going to. But now that you brought it up, and you brought it up, I'm going to tell you that it probably would stop the problem even quicker. Oh, you are really crazy to quote her. And I'm leaving some of the expletives out. She told me I was on crack, so. But anyway, so she came back to see me. She called me and she, it's really urgent that I see you. And so I just saw her for about 15 minutes that day. And she came and she said, I'm leaving out of this, by the way, that I had never met her before. And so she was referred in by her family. And so she came and she said, you know, people have said that you, your ideas can be a little bit off the rocker, but this one, this one was crazy. And she said, I don't know if you're a witch or what. I don't know if this really worked, but it worked. But I don't know if it's because you convinced me or because it really is science. She explained to me she had gone to the property, she'd walked around the property, and she actually decided, because she was so desperate with feeling so stressed and so much pain in her bladder, she decided that she was going to pee the different corners of her lot. She said, I don't know, I can't explain this, but all the pain is gone and I feel so much more calm. Could it really have worked? And I said, yeah, well, because what you did was you just calmed down your beast brain. You just tamed your beast brain. You just went, you sort of claimed your land. You know, you, you walked around your land, you claimed your land, you saw your territory, you, you know, mindfully walked there. So if you were a beast brain, it would be like all the other beasts would have smelled your smell and seen you pacing and, you know, seeing that's your territory. Don't go there. So because you didn't have any threat there, you know, there's. There's no additional threat, except for the fact that you just bought the house is because there's no additional threat, your beast brain now has been tamed. So it's calm. You weren't being obsessive. You didn't have some sort of attention deficit problem. You weren't, you know, doomed to a life of not being able to sleep again.

I'm curious what you would have told if she refused to do that. Would there have been something else she could have Done to tame it, the.

Beast brain, it's actually relieved only in a very practical way. It doesn't work if you just think, okay, I'm just going to imagine that I have territory. It's not the way the beast brain works. The beast brain is a beast. It's a physical. It doesn't talk in words, it communicates in actions. She would have had to walk around there. People who had this triggered during the pandemic where they couldn't go to their same places, once they got used to walking a different way or driving a different way or going to a different store, the discomfort would have gone down and they would not have necessarily recognize that they were taming their beast, you know, their lion beast brain, because they were doing repetitive actions. But finding a territory is a necessary thing for every single beast, for every mammal, and that includes human beings. So however we find our territory, and by that I mean our, our territory, like where we can really put our feet and put our butts and rest. And so it could be shared territory. I mean, let's say I know you've done some traveling when you and I have shared this before, that we were traveling in Europe and going to hostels and, you know, that shared space. And so those first, you know, hours or moments in the hostel, you know, those aren't comfortable for anybody because everyone's beast brain will be like, huh, what's going on over there? But once people get used to the lay of the land and they have a sense of, you know, how in that space they could move and still be safe, then the lion beast brain will calm down. And guess what? In some people who are really sensitive in that way, the lion beast brain would never calm down. And those people would just never in a million years go to a hostel. You see what I mean? Totally.

Yeah. Okay, what's the next one?

Yeah, the next one is after lion is the wolf, which is the fourth out of the seven. The wolf is sensitive to a sense of isolation. This would be something like, as I said before, no pack and no protection if the wolf doesn't have any pack. And protection if the wolf be spraying gets triggered by a sense of there's isolation, there's no pack, there's no protection. That means there can be no safety. This is always about safety. So this is the most classic one for feeling panicked. I think this is a really common one. So this is about, like someone who moves and doesn't have a friendship or doesn't have a group of people at the office or, you know, is Far from the family. This person can feel like, oh, God, I've got separation anxiety. You know, I'm really too self conscious and I'm too shy. And this person will often like over groom, let's say, like pull hair or bite nails or like pull out eyebrows type of thing. And of course we'll feel like suspicious. Weird. It's weird too, because the person whose wolf beast brain is triggered really wants a pack and protection, but also feels like a sense of suspicion. Like, can I fit in there? So that's that kind of like think of a wolf going into a new pack. It would kind of crawl down low on its belly. Like that little bit of uncertainty, is there another wolf that's going to attack me? A sense of isolation that's most common in somebody who is going into say, a new office, like a new job or a new neighborhood, a new school, say when a kid switches schools. I noticed that my daughter, when she went into high school, that she struggled a little bit with this because her regular, she had a clique in elementary school. And then that changed. Even though some of the kids went to the same high school, they were all scattered through different classes. She was feeling panicky. She wanted from me a heck of a lot more reassurance. She was absolutely obsessed about her hair. Did she look okay? She was getting really nervous because she was having separation anxiety from her very best friend. So the answer and the restep for the wolf is to join or rejoin, you know, or, you know, kindle a new relationship or rekindle an old relationship in a new way so that now there's a pack. And this isn't a. This isn't just somebody who's like your mate, but somebody who is your crew, you know, like a group. So it's feeling like it could be people who like. Did you see the playoff games recently? Whenever there's a playoff game, you find out like all these people who relate to the team, you know, that's kind of a pack. So even if the people didn't know each other, but they were all at a bar, restaurant, they would all suddenly, you know, have a camaraderie. And that would make them feel like they had a pack. So it can be something like a school, like an alma mater. It could be a company like everybody who works for, you know, particular company. Like you hear, you've heard stories about people who work for Zappos, for example, for the old Zappos shoe online shoe company. Like that they. That those people didn't all know each other, but they had a tremendous amount of camaraderie. There was a sense of togetherness. Right. It's the opposite of a sense of isolation. So if that part of the beast brain has been triggered, the most common thing you'll see is panic. You know how you hear people say, like, I've got a panic disorder. I have panic problems. The first thing I'd go, when I hear the word panic, the first place I'd go to is finding out, does that person feel isolated? I'll tell you, nine times out of ten, I don't think a lot of people really have panic disorder so much as they have. They are really missing their sense of pack and protection. And all they have to do is join or kindle or rekindle something and that goes away. I've seen it hundreds and hundreds of times.

Isn't that amazing? It's amazing how predictable. It's so complicated. But yet when you define it in such simplistic terms like you do, it's so simple. Once you almost have a I'm doing formula for do the thing, yours is the formula for your brain.

I feel like this is. I feel like it's a tall order because, you know, I've done this with small groups. This is sort of my dream is to do it with groups. Because I think when, like, when you really go through life for like, say six months or a year, like, you know, you've been knowing this stuff for so long, so it's second nature to you now. But in the beginning, remember when we talked about the rabbit? You were like, wait a sec, I actually have to do the retreat. I actually have to do it. And I was like, yes, Stacy, you have to do it. I remember that we had the dog, the monkey, the lion, the wolf. Now we've got the eagle. And the eagle is sensitive to a sense of scarcity. This is really common for the brain. It's a sense of, well, there's scarcity, there's no prey and so there's no hunt. This is the classic fight, if you've ever heard of the fight or flight. And what the eagle does is really get, compete, compete for resources and have to tangle and win. Actually, I don't even like the word win. It's more like has to dominate. And so this person, let's say the sense of scarcity could be one of many things. But I'll tell you about a client I had just a few months ago. She and her husband own an IT business, and it was very, very successful. And then she got pregnant and when she got pregnant, she's a little bit more the sales arm of the two of them. And so, you know, she was taking care of herself and preparing for the first kid. And then what was happening is that their new business development just started dropping because it was really like her brainchild. Even though she had people who were working under her and with her, her attention to it went away because she was preparing for the baby. And also she had horrible nausea. So she did, even if she wanted to, she couldn't have the focus. She was so sick to her stomach. So anyway, she and her husband started fighting like they had never fought before. And then she said she was being horrible to her. Her people who worked with her in her new business development role. She said she was being mean to them and she was being horrible to them. And she said she's always been really calm and all of a sudden she couldn't be calm. And she was having just constant racing thoughts. And she was supposed to not be working at night, but she was trying to work way past when she should have worked because she had missed work while she was feeling nauseated. And she said the biggest thing that happened was she said, we have a business so we can have fun. I'm having no fun whatsoever. And so we went through and looked at what was the one thing that was feeling really scary for her. And she said, obviously it's that we've built up this overhead based on the numbers and we're just not having this new business. And so what I recognized was that her eagle beast brain, rightly so, recognized scarcity because there's no way that she could keep the number of people on her team and sustain the overhead if they didn't have the constant influx of new business. So she was behaving like the classic eagle beast brain would behave. Confronting people, criticizing people, fighting with people, her mind racing and racing, like working too much, being super focused and, you know, hyper focused, like so not enjoying anything about her life, just like on the attack, so to speak. So we retooled some of the things in her relationship with her husband and so he could take on some of the new business development. Even though it wasn't totally his thing, when he took on the new business development, he was more successful than her team working alone. And then she started to feel at ease. Someone could have said she had anger management disorder. Someone could have said she was just bitchy from pregnancy. But it went deeper than that. And she was smart enough to know that, that her actions and her mind just didn't seem right to her to reach out and say, is my whole life falling apart? After the nausea, she had sort of like late pregnancy nausea as well. After the nausea dropped down and she could devote more of herself to her new business development team, the eagle beast brain sort of faded. And in fact, I think she might have just had the baby maybe a month ago or so. It was really that recent. But that's one example of scarcity, a sense of scarcity that I've seen among entrepreneurs that they're so involved and so deep into their business that their beast brain, even though the business is a thing that they've created with their human mind, the beast brain is alert to any kind of threat to survival. So if their business tanked, the beast brain was letting her know, like, there's a threat, there's a scarcity threat. And then she had the behaviors that went with it. What's the restep for that? And this is a big one. The restep for that is to race, and it is to feud, and it is to conquer and dominate. And so when teenagers, when kids are teenagers, when they feel, when they're. I don't want to say feel, when their beast brain is triggered, their ego beast brain is triggered in scarcity, and they naturally want to compete and dominate and race and conquer. They're often called bullies or it's called inappropriate behavior. And that really concerns me because they're actually doing the right thing for their base brain. So this is a really important one for parents to be real clear on, to learn about and be clear on, because it's the wrong thing to do to say to the kid, be nice to everyone, or don't compete or share. That would be completely the wrong thing to say to somebody whose eagle beast brain has been triggered. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah. And this is the one I saw come out the most to my employees during COVID because, you know, it's scary when you don't know, like, what's happening with the business, right? Like, we ended up surviving and everything. And after going down 50% with COVID and then it went back up again. But I saw a whole other side to people, and I didn't understand what was going on. And when we talked about the beasts, it opened up my eyes to understand what. What was happening for sure. So I think, I think it's so key, you know, and I've said this before, but just that simplicity of this, and once you understand it, I mean, it changes everything, you know, and then, you know, once you understand the Rest up for it. That changes everything. Like, understanding just the beast, I think, changes everything because it gives like a. It gives like something to it, you know, where, like, you can recognize it and acknowledge it and then the rest of. And really getting in touch with what that is. I mean, that's a whole nother. It's a whole nother level.

Yeah. It's so much fun, let's say I really, you know, I'm saying that word, and a lot of people would say, like, are you crazy? Like, there's nothing about misery that's fun. But it really is fun because, like, it was so much fun to work with you and hear you, like, the giddy success of, like, oh, my God, it was my rabbit. And I did this. I remember when you told me I went kayaking and that must be my retreat place, because it's out. It's far away from everyone. No one can get in touch with me. You know, one hour of that, and I was just back and ready, and everything was gone. You know, I was good.

You know, I remember that too, because when I first heard about the retreat, the restep, you know, and then. And for rabbit, it's retreat is. I tried, like, walking my dog, you know, but that didn't. It didn't do the same thing for me, you know, but then the kayaking, it did because it just, like you said, it just completely took me to another place. So it's also knowing what works for you and what kind of re. Step it is.

Yeah. I have learned so much from my clients and my students over the years, because a lot of times, what I thought would work, I mean, I can give tons of suggestions because I have so much experience, but still, it's a matter of this is your brain. Even if it's a beast brain, it's still your beast brain and it's your experience. And it's like each. Each. Each individual is individual. And even, you know, I've studied so much about animals since I've been learning this. That's why I could tell you about the lion adopting the gazelle. I just think that's one of the craziest things I've ever seen. But, you know, really, like, why is it that some. Some lions are the alpha lion and others aren't? I don't know. It's just, you know, like, beasts are not all the same either. If you've ever have a pet, you know, like, not all dogs are the same. They're dogs, but they each have their own little quirks. Right. Each cat is like the same. But each cat has its own little quirks. So I think that's how it is with the bee spraying, too. It's like there are certain things that are standards that you can really see and predict, but there are certain qualitative aspects of each person's beast brain that the person has to discover himself or herself. And that's, you know, that's the responsibility of each person. And it's also part of the joy of knowing this information is knowing you're on the right track and you're going to find the right restep. Because you only have like a narrowed, a narrow group of options of what it could be like with you. It could have been retreating, could have been like going in your bed under the covers. It could have been walking the dog around in the neighborhood. And we know the retreat has to be kind of quiet, right. It could have been getting in the kayak and just being. I think about the kayak with you, and I learned something from you, by the way, because not everybody has a place to go put a kayak. But I think about with you, you were in the kayak, and there was this border, you know, this moat of space between you and the rest of the world. And even though you were in the kayak and moving and, you know, in the sun, in the light, you still had this space between you and others that made you safe. That's a retreat. Kind of like a bunny would go down into a burrow. You know, it had space to its itself. So I think that's why the kayak was such a great solution. You know, I had never suggested a kayak to anyone in my entire history of doing this. I probably have told. I probably told 25 people. You know, the kayak, like, getting in the water might be a really good choice, you know, getting on a boat or something. Yeah.

And I've kind of learned more after that because I started. I don't think I told you yet, but I'm paddleboarding with my dog now.

With Sweetie.

With Sweetie, yeah. And I actually had the girl that is. She owned a. She created a business teaching people to paddle board with their dogs. She. She came on the podcast. She was one of my first interviews. She actually reignited my inspiration for doing this podcast because, like, when she pulled up to, like, you know, do the paddle board lesson for me and Sweetie, my dog, she had this, like, huge van with her billboard of her company and the dog on it, and it was just. I don't know, it was the coolest thing to me Showing that is doing the thing right. Like you have this commercial white van, you know, with like your whole company branded on there. I was not expecting it. But anyway, she was talking about the idea of water therapy and how it's so good for you and. Yeah, so I think we're. It's really resonating what you're saying right now and why that's so impactful for me at least.

Good. Well, so the next one would be the rabbit. So this is that sense, the threat is a sense of defenselessness. So, meaning there's no advantage. I mean, when you think about a rabbit, it really doesn't have many advantages, does it? It's so tiny, everything eats it. So the, the rabbit's got to be quick. You know, it doesn't have any size, so it doesn't have any big authority. It doesn't have any particular advantage. It doesn't have an easy escape. You know, it can't stand on its back legs like a grizzly and just scare the crap out of you. It's a little rabbit. So this is the classic flee in your flight or fight. The classic flight meaning flee, run away. The rabbit has some advantages, of course. It's got incredible acuity to its senses. It's really fast, it can camouflage itself well. So each one of the beasts will always defer to whatever its strength is, is. And so it is the case with the rabbit. I had a client about almost two years ago now who is an entrepreneur. She owns restaurants and catering. And as you can imagine, that tanked during COVID Right. And so she called and she said, I thought maybe I was having a neurological problem. But I went to the doctor and I'm not. I've been like jumping. My reflexes are really fast. So even if I bump my knee on a chair, you know, it's like my leg is jumping and I feel completely like stiff and frozen. My muscles are sore all the time. I've been feeling really. She's just self described outgoing person. And she said she was feeling like almost depressed. She didn't want to get out of bed. She felt like she didn't want to see any other people. But more than anything she was having this dizziness and this kind of ghosting where like part of herself was, you know, over here. And then she'd move and it would be like she wasn't like holding together. Part of herself would move, but she'd leave part of herself behind. And she said she was really having a tough time with all of her senses. Like something was too Loud. She couldn't stand. She couldn't stand how anything smelled. If she looked at something, she felt like she was going to throw up, like her senses were just too sensitive. And what happened was this whole notion that she had no advantage. So she had these businesses. They were very reliant upon weddings. Everybody's weddings were canceled. They were reliant upon social interaction. Social interaction just stopped. And she had no idea what she was going to do. So she kept saying, what. When we met, she said, what am I going to do? You know, what am I going to do? Talking about her business. And I'm. And now I'm getting this sickness, and I don't know what it is. No one knows what it is. The doctor said there's nothing wrong with my eyes, my ears. I had everything tested. Anyway, it was the rabbit. It's that sense of having no advantage whatsoever, of being so small. And the situation for her was just so massive. And so she ended up going to Florida for six weeks or eight weeks, and she had a place to stay there, and the goal was to just get away from her, you know, the business. There was nothing she could do anyway. She had enough money in the bank that she felt like she could survive for a while. But so what she did was she retreated to Florida to some, like, condo or place that she knew somebody owned. And what she did down there was she thought about what her talents were and what she could do with her business. And she decided to make a gift box business. And she would use her list, like her client list, to sell these gift boxes. And so once she had an idea of what to do, she felt like she got her mojo back. That was the having an advantage instead of not having any. And then when we talked about her senses, it made sense to her because when the rabbit beast brain, and you may relate to this, when the rabbit beast brain has been triggered. Think of a rabbit in the middle of the field. You know, it just stops, and it's listening and its eyes are stuck and it's smelling. Its advantages have to be that acuity of the senses. So the fact that her senses felt like they were completely strung out, she couldn't smell another thing, she couldn't hear another thing. It was too overwhelming for her. Made perfect sense to me that it was the rabbit beast brain that was triggered. And sometimes you don't know if that was the right thing till after the re step has been taken. But she let me know from Florida that close to the end for her stay there, that all of her symptoms were gone. No more dizziness, no more ghosting. No more hypersensitivity of her senses. No more feeling like she couldn't go out. No more feeling like she had to stay in bed. No more aching stiff body, joints and muscles. Well, she had the rabbit bee sprain triggered like you. And so it's interesting to see and maybe you can really feel this because you can relate to the rabbit beast brain. So it's sort of like conditional, like what's going on in the person's life. And really look at the behaviors. The behaviors never lie. And look at the behaviors and then look at the situation, what the brain is interpreting in the person's life. And then you can usually figure out which beast it is that's been the most triggered. And then you apply the restep and the restep works. And it doesn't take too much effort to find the restep, you know, which variety of the restep. When the resep works, it really works. And then all of that stuff gets erased. But you kind of see what I'm saying.

Oh, definitely. Yeah. No, and I think it's amazing to get the different examples because it could connect with someone differently. What they hear from one person is different from another. And then I think people can then relate to what. What it is more when they can see themselves or at least someone maybe they even know in one of these things. Because I think that's something to note too, because like I said earlier, like, this not only helps me so much for my own self, but also helped me understand what people that are around me potentially. I mean, I can't predict or I'm just making assumptions unless I'm going to go deeper with them and talk about it, but help potentially see the lens that they're operating out of and which.

Piece might be coming out. Yeah, going on. Well, I mean, sometimes when you're a leader, you really are a zookeeper. You know what I mean? Yeah. You've got to look, when people are under stress and their beast brain reacts, you cannot talk to them. There's. They. It would be like going to the zoo right now and trying to chat up a wolf. I mean, it just. It doesn't work. So that, by the way, that's one of the ways you can tell if the beast brain has been triggered. Like you just said, how am I going to know if the beast brain has been triggered? When somebody has a behavior and that person cannot form words and cannot make sense, the words just don't make any sense. Then you can say like, okay, the Beast brain has been triggered. If someone is talking and their words just don't make any sense, and the person, you know, has an ability to speak right and formulate ideas and words, and that person just doesn't make any sense, you can be sure that the beast brain has been activated. The beast brain has been triggered. So, you know, if you're, if you have a kid or if you're a leader and you notice that the person just can't put two words together, can't put ideas together, it's not making any sense. The absolute wrong thing to do would to be say, you know, go back to your desk and figure out what you want to say. I mean, because the person, if the person's triggered, if the person's beast brain has been triggered, the person is going to be like, I just said it, you know, I mean, they won't even like necessarily recognize how crazy they sound or how discombobulated their words are. See what I mean?

Oh, totally.

Yeah.

Actually I do venting voice notes now and I'll like record it in my phone when my beast has been activated just so I can like hear what I'm saying later. And it's funny.

That's a great idea. Yeah, I like that. Venting voice notes.

So there's, there's one more, right?

Yeah. Also, if you're talking to yourself, you know, if you're talking to yourself and you're like, I don't make any sense. Like if you're, if you're lucky enough to be able to hear yourself when you talk, if you're talking to yourself and you're like, God, it makes no sense. Like, I don't even make any sense. What am I talking about? Then? You know, the next thing out of your mouth to yourself is to be like, okay, check your beast brain. What's just gotten triggered. Okay, so the next thing is, we did the rabbit. So the last one is the cat. The cat is triggered by a sense of weakness from injury or illness. So, and this is, I mean, this will make sense when you hear about it. But I have one really interesting case study from a few years ago. Now, Alex, he is like a self proclaimed foodie, loves to go out to eat all the time and entertain and knows everything about wine and food and what goes with what and super social guy and he had to have an ankle surgery for. There was kind of a big ankle surgery and it really put him out. So he couldn't, he couldn't move around easily. He had to be on crutches. It Wasn't an easy recovery. And so he said that he was getting depressed and he said he didn't care about anything anymore. And he said he was middle aged and life was over and he was sick of people and he just didn't care about anything. He just couldn't have cared less. Didn't want to talk to his wife, his family, everybody was worried about him. The only thing that happened was that ankle surgery. And so I want to share this with you because he is one of the sweetest people I've ever met. And such sunny, sunshiny guy, such a sweetheart and so much fun. What he experienced was he was weak, he lost weight because he couldn't work out, he couldn't do his regular stuff, he couldn't cook, he couldn't go out, he's independently wealthy, so he didn't really have any particular job he had to go to. But he just was a wreck after this ankle surgery because he lost weight, he felt weak, his body felt kind of under the weather. He didn't feel like he had any sort of strength. That's the thing with the cat, is no strength, no energy. And so what did he do? He withdrew. He withdrew from his regular joie de vivre. Cooking and trying new things and pairing his wine and going to special places. He didn't want to interact with anyone anymore. He wanted to avoid people. He even was avoiding his own family. He could have cared about, couldn't have cared less about anything. In other words, he just got kind of reclusive and apathetic. And so he thought that he was struggling with middle aged depression. And I think that guy was like a hop, skip and a jump from starting to get medicated. And I'm so glad he came to me first because what ended up happening was he could see how his beast brain is cat beast brain. Let's put it this way, if you're a beast and you have an ankle injury, somebody is going to eat you. You need to withdraw because that weakness from an injury or an illness makes it so that you lose strength, you can't do your regular stuff. So you have to withdraw to protect your life. But so here he was thinking he doesn't have to protect himself from anything. He's financially secure, he's got a wonderful family, he loves what his life is dedicated to doing. Travel and enjoy the finer things of life that for him include so much food and food and company, let's say food and get togethers. But his beast brain was saying you have to withdraw and heal and get off the crutches and get back to be able to walk. And so his beast brain, that was kind of an extreme reaction. But his beast brain was saying withdraw period. And so he read that as middle age depression, which it wasn't okay. Once he went and he got off the crutches and he got off the boot and then he got his proper rehab, his whole nervous system righted itself and he was right back to regular Life. But those eight to 12 months were horrible for him and would have gotten worse had someone said, oh, yeah, you're right, you're suffering from middle aged depression. He wasn't. He was suffering from his cat beast brain trigger. So this can happen with, you can imagine any sort of illness. And with illness it seems more understandable. I find when it's an injury, the person is a little bit more shocked by it. Like he was really shocked that sprained ankle, an ankle surgery, could have this sort of impact on his beast brain. But he's, now he's, you know, he could see that the restep for that is to become reclusive, you know, to withdraw and to repair the part or the body that has been injured or is ill. And then the cat beast brain stops being uppity because it's been solved.

Those snobby cats.

Yeah. Think of what a cat does when it doesn't feel well. You know, it just goes under the couch and you don't see it for a week. Right. Yeah.

Or climbs up on the cupboard.

Yeah. Just hides, just, you know, gets very reclusive. So those are the seven beasts. And so there's so much more to this. Oh my gosh. I'm grabbing my forehead because I'm thinking, I hope I gave like a good amount of information and examples without, you know, missing too much. But I think the most important thing is this is an introduction for somebody who hasn't ever really understood the origin. You know, we're people and we want to know why things happen. Right. Like, why do I feel like crap? And so to really get specific with looking at behaviors and say, okay, I want to know my behaviors, because my behaviors are the clue and they're the clue to tell me what is going on in that beast brain. And then to really understand that the beast brain will hijack and dominate the whole entire rest of the brain, I think is something that it's not often talked about. And that is a real problem in mental health care because it sends people down the wrong path so often and also trying to delegate out their mental emotional wellness without even Knowing the very basics about the place where it comes from, which is the brain. Yeah.

And I think that's what motivated me so much to be able to interview you now, because I've done about 10 interviews so far on the podcast because it's still relatively new, but I feel like I've done enough to kind of. Of have an idea of what the common thread is, you know, and this has been one of the most common pieces is people overcoming themselves. And I think under. There's so many things that we could have talked about, obviously, so many strategies.

I think you're right about this is the tame the beast kind of framework is so fundamental to human quality of life. And also feeling strong in yourself and feeling like you've got this, you're good, you know what to do. And then once the beasts are tamed, well, you can speak to. This is like once the beast brain has been tamed and you've taken the restep, it opens up the rest of the brain to get busy with what it's supposed to do. So the human brain is supposed to be creating, and, you know, creating is the number one thing, but creating and acting and taking action and, you know, being curious and executing the purpose and, you know, that's really what we're supposed to do as human beings. But the thing is, we are born with a beast brain for a reason, to protect us. And it's there, and it does try to protect us when it thinks that it can't survive. And when that happens, you can throw away the idea of creativity. It is not coming. You are not going to feel purposeful when the beast brain has taken over. It's just, you know, you can't think. It's like, you know, the dog is barking and the monkey screeching and the lion's roaring and the wolf is howling and the eagle is screaming and the rabbit is tapping or whatever, and the cat is mewling. You know, there's just so much noise in the brain that the human brain is like, good for nothing at that point. Point. So you got to use what little bit of the human brain you have to tame the beast and be the zookeeper. And then once those beasts are, you know, in their proper cages, so, so to speak, you know, their proper corrals and they've been tamed and they have what they need, then the human brain is like, oh, yeah, I'm good, I'm good. You know, the human brain does not get that kind of stress that the beast brain gets. It just doesn't. Gets A different kind of stress. Yeah.

And I love that you brought that up because I just, I have a monthly business mastermind I'm in and I just was talking to them, their business, but we talk about personal stuff too. But I was just telling them a few weeks ago, I'm like, now that all this crazy noise in my head is like gone. My. I'm literally like this idea person. But then also I know I'm able to notice everything now. So that was actually right before we came on. I was talking to you about. I have a new project I'm thinking about starting and I wanted to see if you were interested in helping me. And that's kind of what this. It's just not. It's like I just have this abundance of just like everything because finally I'm in control over, you know, myself. And it's, it's really cool and it's very exciting to be understanding it all. And I'm, you know, it's exciting to.

Do the work and your creativity is exploding, right? That's what it is.

Yeah. And I think that that's, you know, that's part of doing the thing. And that's why I thought it'd be good to start with this first because I do think this is a fundamental thing that I know helped me. And you know, there's other stuff we could have done with helping people find their purpose. And I mean, it's non stop with the amount of stuff that you helped me with. But I felt like this was a good first part. So I am.

Yay.

I'm really grateful that you were able to take the time to go through this for sure. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I had asked you?

I wish more parents and teachers and doctors would learn about and talk about the beast brain in this very simple structure to just give people a chance to tame their beasts early. If they can tame their beasts early, then the quality of life and their chance to use their human brain just expands so dramatically.

This is actually perfect for me to have you tell everyone how they can learn more about you and things that you're up to.

Well, I think the most important thing to start with is find out about themselves what beast is possibly triggered in their case, and that is to take a quiz. There's a page that I made up here that I think will help your audience and it is under www.donewithanxiety.com do the thing so you can take the quiz there and find out which part of your beast brain is possibly dominating your entire brain and stopping you from doing the thing you want to do, making you do something you don't want to do.

Yeah, I love it. And you guys are doing the thing just by taking the quiz.

Right. That's the best way to start with being done with anxiety, by the way, is to find out which part of the beast brain is dominating. Yeah.

That's incredible. Actually, I didn't even know you had that quiz. I'm excited.

Now. It's not really that applicable to you anymore, but I know when I take the quiz, I still take it sometimes when I've written quite a few quizzes, there's one really long one, and sometimes I'm too lazy to take the long one, and so I just take the short one and I'm like, oh, my God. Okay. Like, it's just this objective, like, reminder, like, oh, yeah. Because when the beast brain takes over, remember, you can't always think.

Yeah, actually, I'm. I'm excited to know about it because it still gets activated, you know, and now it's just understanding it. So it's less time that it takes for me to restep it than it used to be used to take, like, longer than now. And so, yeah, I think it's kind of cool to know. But anyway, yeah, that's.

Yeah. I don't know if you knew that I had the blog, so, yeah, it's blog.donewithanxiety.com well, thank you so much.

I am immensely grateful for you and all the help you've given me over the years. And I'm so just appreciative that you were able to take the time today to talk about this. And I'm just imagining how many people it's going to help just from them even understanding the concepts that you went over today.

Yeah. Thanks so much, Stacey. I love sharing it.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. But even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the thing. Do you have a burning question on doing the thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at dothing callcast co or email us@helloothethingpodcast.com.