An Introduction to Your Brain

If you want to engage with your life and feel more alive, you need to know how your brain works and how to work with your brain. When you understand what your brain is doing and how it’s impacting your life, you can work with it so you can get closer to the outcomes you desire.

the survival brain

The human brain is wired for survival. Let me tell you what this means. Your survival brain wants three things. It wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and to use the least amount of energy. To your brain, these three things are the only things that matter. This is what your brain needs to be survive. This is what MOTIVATES your brain to keep you alive. It’s called the Motivation Triad.

I like to think about it like being in the cave. Your brain thinks this is the safe place to be, where you are protected, and it wants to keep you there. The cave is like sitting on the sofa. It’s pleasurable, there is no pain, and you don’t have to use up your energy.

If one of these points is off (seek pleasure, avoid pain, use the least amount of energy), your brain will sense danger and it will send a signal to your body to alert you. This signal is an uncomfortable feeling. If your brain thinks you’re not experiencing enough pleasure, or if you’re in pain, or using up your energy, your brain will send you an uncomfortable feeling that will direct you back to having more pleasure, avoiding the pain, and conserving your energy.

This is why you eat when you don’t want to or you don’t take action on your goal when you actually want to.

In other words, your survival brain makes you feel terrible so you go back in the cave.

And that is how we quit. We quit because we don’t direct our brain. We let it direct us.

While the motivational triad worked in the past to keep us alive, it’s literally killing us now. It’s ruining parenthood. Kids are growing up with parents who don’t have emotional maturity and so the kids don’t learn emotional maturity, and that’s scary. We’ve got to take responsibility and direct our brain. And it is possible.

the prefrontal cortex

Your survival brain isn’t your only brain. You also have a prefrontal cortex. This is the part of your brain that can think about your future. It can dream. It can think about what you think about. It’s the part of your brain you use for planning. Your prefrontal cortex likes growth. It wants you to grow and evolve. I call the prefrontal cortex your higher brain or higher self.

So think about this. Your survival brain just wants you to feel good and basically do nothing, and your higher brain wants you to grow and improve. But in order to grow, you have to go against the survival brain. You have to delay pleasure, actively seek discomfort, and expend lots of energy. This is called the Growth Triad.

And this is why people deal with the start and stop. It’s like a tug-of-war that happens inside of you. Your survival brain wants to stay home and do nothing and your prefrontal cortex wants you to go out and be successful.

This back and forth can be exhausting, but I want you to know this conflict is normal. When you operate from the growth triad and you feel uncomfortable, your brain will tell you to stop because it just wants to protect you. It literally thinks you’re going to die if your survival triad is off, but it’s wrong. This experience is normal, and when you learn how to work with your brain, you can make progress and create change.

This is how your brain is sabotaging you, or why you stop taking action and don’t make progress. Your brain is literally signaling you to get back to the cave as a way to protect you by making you feel uncomfortable.

It’s really important that you understand this because it’s not your goal that’s causing the discomfort. It’s not that you shouldn’t be doing what you set out to do. Even if your goal is aligned with your values, you’re still going to experience discomfort. It’s part of the process. If you want to grow, you have to operate from the growth triad.

how your brain works

Let’s shift gears a bit and talk about how your brain works overall. It’s pretty simple. Something happens, there’s a situation or a circumstance that you are presented with, and your brain has a thought. A thought is just a sentence in your mind. That thought creates a feeling. A feeling is a one word emotion. That feeling drives your actions and behaviors, and those actions that you take produce your outcomes. Your outcomes are your results or the experiences you have.

Circumstance → Thought → Feeling → Action → Result

Regardless of what triad you are operating from, this is how your brain works. You set a goal (Circumstance) and then you have a thought about the goal. If you feel good, you take forward moving action and create results that bring you closer to your goal. If your thought makes you feel bad, you’ll go back to the cave. You won’t take action that supports you—you might beat yourself up instead, and create a result of feeling badly about yourself or your situation.

You can put anything into this framework and understand what’s going on in your brain. This is the model I use when I coach my clients. I am a certified life coach from The Life Coach School and I use this model to help my clients feel better.

how to work with your brain

Now I want to take this information and help you use it to feel better and create a better life. You might be wondering, how does knowing this help you engage with your life and feel more alive? Because it sounds like you can do nothing and feel okay or feel terrible and grow. But the truth is, when you work with your brain, you can make progress. But you have to come to terms with feeling good all of the time.

One thing that you must get through your head is that half of the time you’re not supposed to feel good. The human experience is 50/50. Half of the time we experience pleasant emotions and half of the time we experience unpleasant emotions. This is by design. Look at the world around you. It’s universal.

So you want to let go of needing to feel good all the time. It will sabotage your growth. It will have you going back to the cave and you can be stuck in a tug-of-war for years. I think that’s fascinating. We can want something for YEARS and never make progress. If there is something you have wanted for a really long time, the reason you don’t have it is probably because you keep avoiding discomfort. You keep going back to the cave.

This is why I want to help you ENGAGE with your life. I want to help you take the action that will bring you forward. I want to help you manage that uncomfortable half without getting pulled down or off track. And for that, you need to work with your brain.

To work with your brain you need to take responsibility for it instead of letting it react to everything. I like to think about my brain as if it’s a toddler. If there’s nobody responsible in charge, of course it’s going to run around and make a mess and not care about or understand the consequences of their actions. It won’t know if something isn’t safe or dangerous. Responsibility is key. You can still have fun, but you need direction, boundaries, and discipline.

Responsibility is also called Personal Power. You have to find what’s in your control, and you can control more than you realize. You can control your thoughts. You can’t control all of them, but it is a choice to continue to give them attention after you become aware of them. You can come up with new thoughts that serve you and think them on purpose. This is called Intentional Thought Creation.

You can control how you feel. You can. How you feel comes from what you think. It doesn’t have to be true. You can read a book and the words become thoughts in your mind that create how you feel. And if you have an emotion like anxiety that you don’t want to feel, that might seem out of your control, it is also caused from your mind, and you can direct it. (I have a lot of experience with anxiety.)

You can control what you do, your behavior, how you show up, all of your actions and your in-actions. Nobody is forcing you to do something. Nobody is putting the cookies in your mouth against your will. Nobody is making you skip your workout. Nobody is forcing you to buy that coffee. You are deciding to do those things and you can decide to not.

You can control your outcomes. Your results. The purse you use, you created that to be in your life. How? Make yourself figure it out. Even if it was a gift. See how you created it to be in your life. The coffee you use, the cup you put it in. The clothes in your closet. How you spend your time. The money in your account. These are results that you have created, and the more you look and see how your thoughts, feelings, and actions have created them, the more power you will have to change them.

This is how you work with your brain. You take responsibility and you embrace the full spectrum of emotions.

I hope this was helpful and that you can start to see your life in a new way.