How To Beat Fear + Anxiety (powerful life advice)

One of the most important things about your brain, to fully embody and understand and constantly evaluate is it all comes down to meaning. So when we are struggling in our life, in anything, or we're feeling resistance that we can't overcome, sit and ask, what is the meaning? I have attached to this person, to myself, to this goal, to this ambition, to the world. Right. We will see what we believe, the meaning. Like I love Albert Einstein, Stein, at least it's been attributed to him, says you can either see the world as if everything is a miracle or as if nothing is a miracle.

Right.

Either way, your brain is going to validate it, it's going to seek it. And we know that with the reticular activating system it, they're powerful. Don't think of a blue car, right?

You think of a blue car, think.

Of a blue car.

It's like you can't cheat the brain.

You can't. And that's, I wish we taught this, and I've taught it with my daughter growing up and it's been so powerful for us to really understand. The brain cannot decipher really what we're telling it not to do.

Yes.

It just responds.

The universe doesn't hear negatives, God does.

Not hear negatives, no negatives. It just responds to what we focus on. So part of the problem so much with fear and anxiety is that it's, it's a lie in that we think, well, if the more I think about it, worry about it, we've all been conditioned. How many times have we heard what's the worst case scenario?

Right.

What's the worst that could happen? Well, no one really understood that in focusing on what we don't want, the brain is not saying, oh, I'm so glad you spent three hours today telling me you don't want this to happen. All I heard was the thing, the subject material, the focus. And I'm going to respond accordingly to that.

So good.

Seek information to validate it.

Yep.

But I'm going to protect you. And so now you're fighting this powerful system with your brain and nervous system to actually go after the thing you want. Because if all you've attached to it is the meaning of fear, a failure of it, not happening, the brain's going to do all it can to keep you from even going after it.

Listen, what you're saying is a hard hitting truth because I've been getting emails for ever since the whole pandemic insanity came down. Then the email signature will say, stay safe.

Yes.

And I always respond back and the people that work at these corporations, they're just like, oh, my God, what is he doing? Like, I'm just, like, signing off because I was told to do so by my superior. But literally, that phrase, stay safe, Ashley, or no worries. That's another one. No worries. I'm like, oh, so you want me to worry? Like, the brain doesn't process negatives like you're talking about. And I've heard this in spiritual speakers. I've heard this in neuroscience speakers. I've heard this concept in nlp. I just finished a second wing of NLP training with Scott Jackson, who's been on the show, and his wife, Joanie Dillon, and they actually unpacked over almost an entire day. How? Truly, on a scientific level, the brain cannot process negatives. That's why my family doesn't watch scary movies. We don't fill our brains with trash. I don't. If I see something on social media that I know doesn't align with me, I immediately block it, and I don't watch it or engage with it anymore. Can you go a little bit deeper into that? Because if you were in your healing journey and you would have watched scary movies and watched things and absorbed content when you were trying to heal connected to your purpose, you maybe you wouldn't have healed. And maybe a lot of people won't heal when they focus on the shit they don't want.

Well, no, I mean, and it's. What's really important is this isn't like, a personal attack on you as a person. It's understanding our wiring. Like, this is the human conditioning of our brain, which really only cares to your point of staying safe, keeping us safe. Right? So we. We already have this internal mechanism that is fully designed to keep us safe and protected, because that means we'll survive. Right? It's. It's not built for confidence and daring and dreaming and really becoming into our best selves. That's that deeper spiritual heart that has to work with the brain. Well, but the brain's not just out to get us. If we understand how it works, and that's the root of my work now, we can harness it to also be our greatest asset. So it's really interesting you said that, because if we go back to my journey at 13, again, no idea about neuroscience, and it wasn't even out there, really, in the world as we know. Neuroscience has really been in the last decade of truly starting to understand how powerful the brain is and all these mechanisms. I had this, like, real epitome moment where I Thought I have a choice. So I've already decided I'm gonna fight and I'm gonna not just accept these limits and I'm gonna live. But then I had this feeling. Every day I have a choice. I can give all of my energy focus, attention into not dying, or I can give all my energy focus, intention into living. Same outcome, completely different approach. And so that's where I decided to condition my brain every day. It wasn't from fear of running away from what I didn't want, which was very real. And don't get me wrong, I had my moments where I was afraid. And definitely when I would stay up in the middle of the night, some of that was the fear of going to sleep. But the bigger thing was the drive to live. And so every day, if my focus needs to be on living, how do I condition my brain to do that? And so what I read, what I consumed, everything became a focus of reading miracle stories. Do you remember even Chicken Soup for the Soul way back? I read all those books because they were stories, inspiring stories of people who faced lots of different challenges and overcoming them and, and not just overcoming them, becoming greater through them, right? It's not always that maybe you get the exact outcome, but who you become is the real hero journey, right? And so I read all those books, right? I read, I read my scriptures because I always believed in God and I believed in a higher purpose. And I wanted to be in tune always with my spiritual self. And something that's interesting is my mom and I watched a lot of humor, right? And back then humor was more humor than what we see today.

It was on VHS or dvd.

Yeah, exactly. And we would watch funny movies, my mom and I, we would make up games when we were going to treatments to try to bring some humor into what was not humorous. But now with understanding the brain, we know that humor takes your system out of fight or flight. And so without really knowing what we were doing other than, of course, it felt good to bring some light heartedness into a very heavy reality. Every time I did that, I was helping my system also heal because I was taking it out of survival, putting it back in the parasympathetic, which is where healing happens. And so I always tell my clients, we universally accept we have to condition our bodies, right? Like that's we know it, you know, if you actually want optimal health or endurance or strength, it's going to take your active effort.

You're going to have to have beef sticks and salt in your purse. Ashley came in with beef sticks and salt to the studio in her purse she walks her talk, y'. All.

You got to be prepared.

And that's for your brain health, right?

Yes, absolutely. Salt and beef. That's right. Your brain needs those healthy fats, and all of our cells need those minerals. Right. So we all accept that. Okay. And I can't just condition my body. Let's say I'm training for something. I'm going to condition it for six months, and then I'm going to stop completely and think my body is going to maintain that conditioning. It's like if we're going to have to keep doing it, and the more you do it, the more your body does work for you, and it becomes more habitual, and it's your way of being. The brain is no different. And that's been the real thing that we haven't taught or accepted universally. It's not you as a person. It's. We also have to condition our. Our brain, our mind, our whole life. Because two, as we continue to live, we're going to have challenges worldwide society, collectively, individually. And if we're not conditioning our mind to what we want to be, you know, the reality for us, what we want to see, what we want to believe, then the mechanisms of the brain are going to take us back to fear, to survival. And it's going to divert all of our energy in our brain to the limbic system, the emotional brain, which is where all fear and uncertainty is amplified. And we know that the more that keeps flowing, those neural pathways, they get larger, they get wider, they get stronger. So they become the default pathway. And the brain can do it reflexively, in a nanosecond. So if we're not conditioning our mind, the world will, our life will, our challenges will, our past will, our parents, our friends, tv, social media. We have to take stewardship over our mind the same way we understand we have to do with our body. If we want to live and feel a certain way, it's not just going to happen. But that isn't a negative thing. That's an empowering thing. And that's what I really try to tell my clients, like people who are super into health. It's not something you have to do. It's something you choose to do. Because feeling good in your body serves every area of your life. Taking control of conditioning your mind is empowering. It's your greatest mechanism to how you feel and show up in your life. And that's something, once you start doing and you realize the profound impact of that, you don't want to do it any other way. You don't want to be at the mercy of everybody else's beliefs. And listen, the hard part with that is it might be the people you love, your family. Right. And we've all had to evaluate our, our friendships, our family and say, you know, I love you as a person, but I don't need to take ownership of your beliefs or your negativity or your fears. And we've seen that just with society and media collectively, we can just take ownership of everyone's fears and beliefs. And in fact we're being conditioned that we, we must all think and believe the same or we're not accepting or tolerant. Right.

It's so true what you're talking about. Literally this week or last week, YouTube put out new health guidelines which basically is going to crush anyone that's giving alternative health advice. Which by the way, alternative health advice is usually the mainstream advice that actually gets you well. So it's a total catch 22 there. And their guys is for community guidelines to protect you against misinformation, which everybody knows. When I say that you can hear that and you feel it in your soul that it's not true.

Right.

You don't need to be protected from information. You protect yourself.

Exactly.

So when we outsource our sovereignty to the overlords and the technocrats at Google.

Or any of these platforms, we then give our power to change or heal to someone else. I'm literally handing over my soul to my captor and I'm. I forget what it's called where you fall in love with your captor. There's something. Do you know the phrase where you. It's like a Swedish term. Somebody now.

I can't think of it.

Somebody's hearing it right now. But it's where you fall in love with your victimizer and you start sympathizing with them. I feel like that's what's going on with social media and just with people as a whole. There's this wetico going on which Paul Levy has talked about in his book about the Native American mind virus. And I say mind virus because every single input, like you said, where we focus or our attention, that is actually what grows more and what feeds our limbic brain and eventually gets stored in the deep recesses. To quote one of my favorite movies, Inside Out, I don't know if you've seen it, the Disney movie. Everything gets stored in long term memory.

Absolutely.

And it gets accessed when some kind of stimuli on the outside brings it up. So we literally are the amalgamation of every single thing we've been through in our life.

And.

And you and I see more things in a day than our grandparents saw in a week.

Right. Our brain is overloaded.

Overloaded. We're just like. We're like belching from just systematic overload. Like, where do we begin the process of nourishing ourselves? I understand beef and salt. Like, we get that. We've talked about that on the show a lot.

But from a physiological and neurological perspective, like, what are the healthy habits, tried and true, that you work on with your clients that actually allow the operating system of the brain and to not be captured by these really deleterious things, that these people don't have our health in mind. They have their goal of profit in mind. And I'm sorry to be not sorry here, but that's the truth. Like, we get to defend our children. We get to defend our nation. We get to defend our families. Love protects. Love does not just lay down when some villain comes and knocks on your door. Not everything is fucking good vibes only. That's not the world we live in.

No.

So what do you think about this? How do we begin to nourish the neurology and the physiology of the brain in every aspect?

Yeah. First and foremost, you have to become aware that this is even happening. And I want to. When we said meaning. When we said meaning, just that meaning of I need to protect you. Again, the underlying of that is I'm not tough enough or emotional, resilient enough or intelligent enough to. To learn information and decide for myself and do research. So underlying all of this is a crippling of our emotional resilience, intelligence, and our superpower as humans to get information, decipher, research, think, and decide. So we literally are programming and especially all these younger generations growing up this way to no longer think and don't think they have the capacity to do so because we're telling them we must protect you. Well, that's. That's not empowering me. That's telling me I must need to be protected because I can't handle the harshness, the reality, the different opinions of life that has always been the human condition. Because we're all so different, I don't even care. Even male, female, right? Or different countries, ethnicities, religions, we're all different and how we were raised. So we're now conditioning unconsciously this undertide of you're weak and need to be protected. Therefore, let me coddle you and tell you.

Yeah.

What is what and who's against you. And who's for you and what is truth. So we just need to understand this is happening and, and almost stand upright and take back our power of like we are highly intelligent beings. Humans are most, the most adaptable creatures that exist. Our brain is this supercomputer that is not fixed, that is an adaptable device that will absolutely respond to what we give it. And if we aren't taking conscious control of that, it's going to respond to what the world is giving it. And we've seen that massively so. I've been so conscious within myself but with my daughter of raising her to know how powerful she is. That's not an ego thing, that is almost a, a reverence for this human existence and the gift of being a human and having our spiritual selves and this brain that can be so powerful either to hold us stuck in prisoner in our life or to truly be able to set us free and help us to become superhuman, create our life, create great purposes, overcome challenges like I think too much. It's like we need to live in a kumbaya world, you know, and I, as far as what I've always said is, you know, freedom has never been free. When you talk about love, freedom has never been free because there's always been evil. And so it's always taken bravery and courage and people to fight for freedom, stand for freedom, rooted in love for freedom and love for the human race and our capacity to choose in this life. And we have to give up the reins of allowing people to do that. And because people will choose, some people will always choose evil. And so if we, we need to just understand that and then say, okay, this is happening. If I'm just living in this world, I'm being conditioned. I always tell my clients, a powerful interrupter, when either you're giving information or you just had a conversation and now your brain is replaying it or from the news or social media is just interrupt it and say, well, do I want this to be true about my life, right? If it's fearful, do I, or what it is this what I want to be the outcome, right? If you're, if you're worried and scared, well, if it's not, which usually it's a hundred percent not, what do I want to be true? You know, and then how do I condition my brain, take action from that? And then I get a choice each day to lean into fear or to lean into possibility. That's it. Like at the end of the day, we've got to simplify it. And if I want to lean into possibility and hope and purpose. I better condition the machine in my brain as responsible for it all. And, you know, when you brought up love, I just want to share this so people understand how powerful this is. There was a study done at the University of Ohio where they were feeding rats a super high cholesterol diet. And with time, they realized one of the groups was not having high cholesterol, but they were all on the same protocol. And they realized that the. The man in charge of this group, he wasn't just throwing them the food, he was giving them love. He was like petting them, stroking them so they were feeling loved, happy, prior to literally eating this food that wasn't good for them. But because they were in such a state of feeling love and happiness, their brain created neurochemicals that literally took this cholesterol and turned it into a different metabolic pathway, which tells you our state of being, how we are feeling, what are we creating, what we are giving is the greatest power over not only our physical health, but everything in what we see and how we show up and how we see and interact with other people in our worldview. It comes down to us. And I think it starts with a radical personal responsibility, that we're also being conditioned to say, it's everybody else's job to make me feel good, to make me feel safe, to make me feel like I didn't have doctors telling me, oh, you're safe. You can do this every time. I was going to die and to accept it. But I also innately knew, although I felt it was wrong, a lot of the ways it was handled, nonetheless, it wasn't their body, it wasn't their life. So therefore, it was my responsibility to choose for myself. And I think no changes can happen for you in your brain, in your life, until you take radical responsibility, stewardship, dominion over your own mind, your own body, and every single day.

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