27. Neuroscience basics & protocols

Throughout the healing journey, we will all face discouragement. We may feel like we're fighting a war on all fronts and not see the way out. We may think that everything we try still ultimately leads to failure, leaving us feeling powerless over changing our lives. What we don't realize is that healing stands on multiple moving parts. A house isn't built on one stick, or branch - it's built on multiple items bonded together, and just because you have one of those items doesn't mean you're failing or it's the wrong one, it's simply that there's still more items we need to bond together and integrate to get to the finished picture. In this episode, I talk about how to deal with despair when it comes knocking, helping you see from a new perspective rather than the one that got you into despair in the first place.

While interrupting the cycle teaches specific skillsets at the nervous system, thought, feeling, body sensation, urge/impulse, and behavioral levels, renewing and rebuilding is all about making those skills become an integral part of your daily routine to not just choose healed responses, but to live a completely healed life. In this episode, I talk about how interjecting these practices work to re-program your earlier childhood development, allowing you to rewire your brain and body toward health and holistic wellness rather than living in the dysfunction of your past. This episode is all about the integration of previous episodes and how they fit into your daily life to bring about maximum growth and sustainable change.

This is the rehab episode! Therapy and treatment centers are not always accessible to the general public - especially those who truly need the help, so I've decided to bring rehab to you. In this episode, I've compiled everything I've learned from psychological facilities, therapists, self-help books, counselors, and my own life experiences over the past 12 years to tell you what really works when trying to break the cycle of addiction or toxic cycles. Even if you don't specifically struggle with a life impairing problem, this episode will help you break just any bad habit because it gets to the root of the issue rather than trying to fight it at the branch level. After a decade long battle with an eating disorder, I can assure you, I touch on every level of the journey, so you can learn and heal much faster than I could.

In a society that runs from emotions, you might find it surprising that building healthy self-confidence grows from an almost entirely emotional base. In this episode, I go through what confidence truly is, where it comes from, and how to grow it in your own life. I talk about how far-reaching the effects of confidence really are, not just in your life, but the lives of almost everyone you encounter. In my honest opinion, true and stable self-worth/confidence is the new generational wealth, and I just want to see everyone cash in and live their best lives.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." - JungIn order to master your mind, you've got to read the manual on how it works. In this episode, I synthesize everything I've learned about neuroscience as it pertains to mental health. I explore the dopamine cycle and how it relates to mental health struggles and addiction, as well as offer insights on how to heal and leverage the dopamine cycle. I also discuss how childhood dopamine wiring affects our brain, body, and behavior in adulthood, and just because something was wired as "safe" or "good" in childhood, doesn't mean its optimal for adulthood. Using various Huberman podcasts as a framework and guide, I provide a succinct version of all his protocols that relate to mental health. By putting together these protocols with complementary mindsets, my hope is to bring you a synergetic dose of healing at the brain and body level.

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be happy for getting ghosted, but here we are. It's almost like the only way to truly get over your fear of rejection and abandonment is to get repeatedly rejected and abandoned. In other words, the only way out is through, and this is me finally getting to the other side of my breakup. The deep pain it caused pushed me to learn more about attachment styles, not just from how they behave in their adult life, but where that behavior comes from. By finally coming to a deeper understanding, do I really see that people's coping mechanisms have a lot more to do with them than they have to do with you. We can be so quick to internalize people's rejections as indications that we are inadequate, but sometimes it can be because we're so impactful that we leave a mark they don't know what to do with. In any case, this is me leaving shame and blame behind and finally owning the skills I always needed to be healthy in relationships. If ghosting got me more stable self-worth, honed emotional regulation skills, healthier communication understanding, deeper wisdom on attachment, the ability to recognize my own and others' cognitive distortions and emotional reasoning impacting their logic when in a triggered state, greater discernment to be stronger than my need, diversifying my needs, and finally come back to myself in a way that I'll never abandon myself again - then I guess it was a win. Sometimes painful consequences are necessary to shake you out from behaviors that are out of balance so you will finally be motivated to make the necessary changes - and that was definitely the case for me. Now that I have really felt and processed and learned the lessons from this breakup, I'm finally ready to move on and let it all go. Hope it helps you do the same.

In the beginning of me learning emotional regulation, I didn’t really know how to “feel my feelings” - like what did that even mean or look like? I put together this short little audio guide to give you a real time example of how I emotionally regulated today - putting blueprint for the anxiously attached overview into a real life practicum. When we get more into interrupting the cycle, I’ll have different situations to work off of, but since this was relevant now, wanted to give you an example of what emotional regulation really looks like in your day to day life in practice - not just theory. Hope this helps!

For some, breakups are just, "he's not for me, I'm over it." They mean it and they move on. For me, it's, "why did this happen? What did I do? How are they seeing me? Why won't they come back?" And then I go and do a doctorate analysis on the "why." I find it extremely hard to let go even when the person has proven to not be a good fit for me. Now instead of asking myself why they left, I'm asking myself why do I do this at all? In this episode, I explore why it's so hard for an anxiously attached - a person who fears abandonment and loathes rejection - to move on. In the moment it can feel like your whole world is crashing down, but what if everything was simply just coming together? What this breakup was just a mirror to get you to see the more profound lessons your soul needs to learn in order to find and keep the love you truly desire.

Dealing with emotionally immature parents and partners can feel like you're fighting for your life. You desire close and meaningful connection, but it feels like it's just a matter of time where the other shoe is going drop and you'll be the one blamed. It can feel like you're constantly in fight-or-flight mode and don't know how to break through the walls of constant emotional explosion or emotional stonewalling. We see all the ways they're hurting us, and they don't seem to see any of it. It's frustrating and invalidating and it can feel impossible to know what the right thing to do is. This episode and graphic series explores the themes of emotional immaturity in our relationships and how they are often mirrors for us to explore where we still need to grow and evolve in our emotional maturity. Very often what we see being mirrored to us is what we often engage in. How we judge our parents is very often what we are presenting and we often find ourselves in the same dynamics our parents modeled with our partners. While it may seem them changing is your best bet at resolution - the control really lies in you controlling yourself and using these conflicts as an opportunity to become more emotionally mature yourself. Only by owning your own ways can you hope to see any positive changes, regardless if they ever meet you halfway. We think it's about them, but it's really about us.

Following my breakup, I really wanted to make sure I was learning all the lessons I needed to learn to not only pick a better partner in the future but also be a better partner in the future. I started to realize that the majority of my part in our issues were around communication and understanding where I faltered not just in what I said, but the larger picture of my attachment wounds being activated. In an effort to learn how to manage my fears and maintaining bonding connection, I wanted to explore the best practices for resolving conflict with your partner with respect to their attachment style and gender. I also wanted to understand how to unlock vasopressin bonding to ensure communication wasn't just effective in resolving conflict but also deeply bonding in the long run. I wanted to use my communication errors as a template to figure out where and went wrong and how I could have improved. This episode highlights my key takeaways from my research and offers reframe to how I would have handled each situation differently now that I have the tools.