Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 105
One of the things that we hear quite a lot in popular pop psychology these days is to tell ourselves to just "be less judgmental". "Stop comparing yourself to other people". Like, cool, dude. But how is my general reaction to most things I read on Instagram? Yeah, cool. Thanks for the top tip. If I knew how to do that, I'd be doing it already. Thanks very much.
Don't worry, Spam Filter for Your Brain is here, at least with one approach. I'm never attached to the idea that I'm right, and life's a lot nicer that way. I just really, as always, want to put some ease into the idea that when we're telling ourselves that we should be doing something or we shouldn't be doing something, I just don't find it that useful.
But... what I do notice is that most of us are very inclined to compare ourselves to other people. And when I learned why, it gave me some of that ease. And that's quite simply the knowledge that it's really natural. We come from a long line of people whose survival depended on ensuring we weren't standing out too much. We were going to be accepted within the group, and we were going to be able to be chosen by someone to get the food, water, heat, procreate, and stay within the community.
And there are so many little moments of residue where we still have that about us because. Because our whole DNA programming, up until this very moment, for most of us, and still for some of us, our very survival has depended on being accepted by the group. And so comparing ourselves to other people is a really important part of that, because you need to check around you to check if you're doing the right thing and learning your social cues and pulling your weight, and that no one's just about to be the person who's out to get you.
So when we have that little pause and go, oh, this is really normal. This is really, really natural, it means that we can be slightly less judgmental to ourselves.
That's where most of this stuff comes down to the same theme. When we start being really horrible to ourselves about something, our whole body gets into defensive mechanisms because we're attacking ourselves. It thinks it's in danger because it is, because we're being really mean to ourselves.
So what normally happens with people, with myself, with many people I coach, is when you notice that you're comparing yourself to others or judging someone else, and you think, "oh, I shouldn't be doing something like that. That's a bad thing. Bad people are judgmental, and so, therefore, I am now a bad person". And your whole body just reacts. Your nervous system doesn't understand the intricacies of that. What it hears is "danger". "I'm in danger", but the danger is internal, so you can't escape it.
So your whole system has to start either ruminating on what is going on here and how we can escape the danger because it doesn't seem to be ending at all, or it starts going, but you're not getting away from the danger. And so I'm going to make it louder so that you listen so that we can escape. And you can see how those two things just become this really uncomfortable loop of feeling like you can't focus on anything else. And that, I think, is what happens in most of our heads. Most of the time, we think a bad thought, we're horrible to ourselves about it, and then we get really fixated with the fact that we've just done a horrible thing and we're a bad person. And it really quickly declines into some variation of "I'm not good enough". That's what happens for a lot, a lot of people.
And there is just a really simple, I was gonna say exit ramp, but I want to say waterslide, out of here for folk who just want to create a little bit of an exit strategy from this trap of being mean to ourselves. And that is just to remind ourselves it's normal when you kind of neutralise all of the pressure that you've put on yourselves about being a bad person or there's some kind of moral thing that you have failed at because you had some electricity fire off in your brain, you can go, "oh, yeah, that's literally a survival mechanism developed over a long, you know, thousands of millennia. Probably something that's going to happen again in the future." It doesn't mean anything about you as a person. It's literally how we're hardwired.
When you ease that kind of level of judgment on yourself, you're then able to step out of the bubble. It becomes less dramatic, and over time, you'll probably find that you're less judgmental of other people, too, because it isn't such a big thing for you. What we try and do is take the heat off some of these cruel traps that we lay for ourselves where we keep looping on this behaviour that ultimately comes down to us being our own worst enemy and the more ease and kindness that we can put into that just by taking it down to neutral "Oh, that's natural", "that's normal". "I understand why I'm doing that, rather than I'm a terrible person." "I shouldn't be allowed nice things", which I think is where most of us go quite quickly. It just takes the sting out of it.
And therefore, as soon as you've kind of looked it in the eye, in a way, you've looked the demon in the face kind of disappears off into smoke. You don't have to judge yourself just because you have had judgmental thoughts in your life, or you've had judgmental thoughts about yourself. You can just look at it as going, that is some electricity firing off in my brain. That's a normal, natural human thing. And of course I'm going to react like that because that's how I've been wired to.
When you stop telling yourself that you're a bad person, you create more space and more ease in your life. You should be able to not only bring more nice things to you but also set an example to other people around you, showing them how they can treat themselves and how you want to be treated by others as well.
This stuff isn't that easy. And that's why www.SeflCareSchool.co.uk trains people to really start noticing this stuff and really start bringing it home to themselves. How they can start being more kind and create more kindness in the world. And that's always going to start with the way that you speak to yourself and the way that you use your own brain.
So good luck noticing some of this stuff out there this week, and I wish you kindness, especially in your own brain.
I'll speak to you next week.
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