Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 92
This is something that I find myself telling people on coaching calls and in www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk all the time. And I thought I'd also share it with you lovely listeners of the podcast. And this is that it is perfectly natural and very, very human to be worried about being rejected.
I think for the majority of the coaching calls that I do, if I were to pop a shove a stake through the middle of all of the layers of different thoughts and judgment and emotions that we have about the stuff that's going on in our life, quite often at the core of it is the fear of being rejected. And I just want to normalise that and let you know that if you are someone who walks around worrying what other people think, how you're going to be perceived, or worrying about not getting things right, there is secret spoiler there. You're worried about not getting them right because you're worried about how you'll treat yourself, which is rejection. Or you're worried about what other people think of you, which is rejection. Or you're worried about not fitting in, which is rejection. There's a lot of fear of rejection going on over here.
If we identify this fear that we're not going to get on in the world, we're not going to fit in, we're not going to be seen to be doing the right thing, we're constantly rejecting ourselves. This is something that we have hardwired into our very selves. It is the essence of our being.
If you think back to the people who lived in caves or all of the hundreds and thousands and billions of years that it has taken to make you, your cells, your very DNA is made up of all of the frightened people because the people who were a little bit adventurous and a little bit curious, who might have, I don't know, gone outside the cave to see if that sabre-toothed tiger was kind of cuddly, or the people who went along and worried had, nice, exotic tastes and wanted to taste all of the berries, not just the ones that everyone else in their little group dwelling were eating, maybe they wanted to eat some of the poisonous ones as well. Or maybe if they came across some other humans or early beasties throwing rocks at them, they might have gone, "oh, I wonder if those rocks are squidgy". All of the people were quite wild and full of all the things that we revere in today's society: bold, brave, daring, and courageous. They fell off cliffs and got eaten by tigers, and died of poisonous things. And wondered if fire tasted as nice as it looked, maybe I could stroke that pretty dancy flame. All of the adventurous people, the ones who are bold and brave, they're dead now. And all of the people who ran the hell away, every time something got a little bit scary, they are the people who managed to become your great, great, great grandmother. The frightened people did not. They wrapped themselves in poisonous bushes and went to go and see if they could saddle up a crocodile. They are not the people who made it into a genetic heritage.
So when we realise that we come from a long, long line of the people who ran the hell away, the people who stayed in the cave and didn't go and work out what that big flashy bolt of lightning was, or the people who didn't get lured out into the trap of the delicious dinner and the gold by the pirates. Whatever your genetic history story is, there will be some wild mixes in there. The people who stayed at home and did the least possible are the ones who got to make you.
And so when you're giving yourself a bit of a hard time for why you couldn't rationally know that, you shouldn't worry about that thing. Maybe it's worth looking back into our histories and going, oh, wow, I'm actually hardwired for this stuff. This is literally in the very data that makes me.
Knowing that we are the product of all of the frightened people put together makes more sense when we know that the fear centre of our brain is the oldest bit. It hasn't done that much evolving. Your brain doesn't know whether that thing that is frightening you is whether no one's going to come to your birthday party or whether it is, in fact, that a tyrannosaurus is running after you.
Your body's response is linked to the oldest possible survival strategy. Because your brain would rather be wrong 99% of the time and you be alive than take a little bit of a dabble of a chance and fail at its one job, which is to keep you alive. Your brain's one job is to keep you safe, well and breathing. Frankly, not being on that CV list is being your friend.
So when it can feel like your brain might be against you, sometimes I wonder if it's worth a little reframing. And thinking, "There it goes, trying to keep me alive again. I see what's going on there". Because this fear stuff is all rooted in having your best interests at heart. And it is not a personal failing. It isn't that you don't have the strength, courage, or tenacity you need to get to the next level of you. It's just we've been programmed this way. And sometimes, that fear is so deep-rooted that we are not able to access any of the other parts past it when we're triggered.
At www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk, it's one of the things I teach to be able to stop trying to avoid all of the fear. So you can maybe expand your definition of fear tolerance. And to realise that actually running away from fear makes it bigger. And when we're ready to sit with it a little bit and experience some of those sensations in our body that we'd call fear, it starts to dissipate quickly, and then we can start bringing the rest of our brain back online. We can start linking into some of the things that we want and rationally know. You can't access any of that stuff when your fear centre is acting like a roadblock, with all of the barriers and the alarms that come with it. And that fear centre is also triggered by you telling yourself that this is a personal failure. Your brain receives the message that you're getting it wrong, that you are wrong, you're doing the wrong thing, and it will tell you that's dangerous.
So adding more compassion into your life enables you to bring more logic, more values, more of your personality into the mix, rather than just having this reflex of "Shit, I need to protect myself". And from there, you can start to build and orientate yourself to more of what you want in life, rather than just trying to run away from the things you don't want. So maybe it's normal to be frightened. And also, maybe that doesn't have to be the only way.
If you'd like to learn how to do some of this stuff, I'd love to see you over at www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk And here's a little splendid, a little trailer telling you more about it. I'll see you next week.
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