Change Your Brain Every Day - Is Your Own Brain Creating Problems in Your Life? With Guy Finley

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

Our brains do our best to warn us of trouble and protect us from harm. Therefore, our brains, in all their best intentions, could never actually contribute to our problems, right? You may be surprised. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Relationship Magic author Guy Finley describe how unconscious thought mechanisms can self-sabotage us, and what to do about it.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. I'm here with internationally bestselling author, spiritual teacher, Guy Finley, the author of Relationship Magic. We're having a relationship week and it's so important. You know, I know when Tana and I get along, I'm so happy. And our audience knows she's strong-willed and she has red hair and that I just completely adore her. Yes. And I'm so glad I sort of met her when I had become a little bit more enlightened about relationships. Yes. What inspired you to write this book now?

I'll try to be as brief as I can. I don't know, Danny. I was 17 or 18 years old. I'd had a number of experiences as a child that, you know, one would call, I don't know what you call them, religious, mystical, definitive phenomena, unexplained, that have stayed with me my whole life. Probably just different parts of us awakening. And as you intimated with these circles, the more integrated we are as a human being, the healthier we are. And to me, the healthier we are, the more aligned we are with health, with a capital H period,

which we don't create, but that we participate in as a being. I was walking down the street. I actually put it in the first chapter of the book just before this one. And I walked into a place, an outdoor market where they were selling bonsai trees, you know, the little Japanese, Chinese trees. And I walked in and I looked at these trees. I started weeping. I have no idea why, but it elicited out of me something I didn't know was in me. And I came to realize that that moment of relationship with these little trees was introducing me to qualities in myself that I didn't know I had. An ancient 500-year-old tree, Danny, in a pot. And you can feel everything about the tree,

all that it's been through. The tree literally tells you a story. Now, they're called bonsai because in Japan, there's no space to grow big trees. So people have to have nature in a pot. But the point was that in that moment of relationship, something that I didn't know lived in me was awakened in me. And I felt the age of the tree. I felt the timelessness of it, the suffering of it, if you will, all of that in a heartbeat. And there it was asleep in me and suddenly awake. And I realized, you know what? That's exactly what all relationships do. Why do I go to the ocean? What do I love a mountain for? Because when I'm in the proximity of it, the deer on my property, they awaken in me things I don't know are in me, qualities, characters. And when we are awakened to qualities and characters that are

ordinarily asleep in us, we discover things about ourselves. We could call that self-realization, couldn't we? I'm realizing that there are things in me I didn't know were there, and they're fantastic. I love these things. So relationship, revelation, revelation, realization. That simple. And that's what this book is about. This book is about the fact that when I'm with you, I experience things that I can't experience with any other human being, but it's not just you I'm experiencing. I'm experiencing what is in me that is in parallel with Danny, what's similar and what's dissimilar, which is also to the point of the book,

because if we get that every moment reveals to us qualities we don't know about ourselves, and when we first fall in love, like you said, hallelujah, brother, this can't get better, that's the best of me. But then comes the rest of me as the relationship moves along, where I move from infatuation to, uh-oh, this is trouble. Because now my partner is helping me discover parts of myself I didn't know were there. And if I'm willing to learn about what I didn't know was there, not just the highlights, but the parts of me that are limitations to love, easily set off, then relationships have a chance to develop into something completely different where you complete me by teaching me about myself and knows no limits to what I'm willing to learn. Then we grow together, Danny.

We become in our relationship something more than the sum of the parts, which is what I call love. So instead of reacting to the thought at the moment, it's pausing and being curious. It's a phrase I have a lot. Curious, not furious. Yes. Right? When I get triggered. Exactly.

Because the reaction is, it's knee-jerk. We do not, see, one of our problems, if you will, is that we believe that our reactions are who we are. Our reactions belong to who we have been, not who we are. Because who we are wouldn't hurt ourselves. Reactions are always negative of that type. And they hurt the people we're with. And they certainly hurt us. In part because when I'm reacting, I'm blind.

Danny, anger is blind. All negative states blind us because we only see the world around us through the eyes of the nature that has reacted. And if I get that idea, we see the world around us through the eyes of the nature that has reacted. And if I'm reacting negatively, I'm already loaded with it. We talked about it. So I have a foregone conclusion about how you should be and how you should treat me. And the moment you don't do that,

up comes this old idea, this image in the form of a reaction. It says, no, you're wrong. And I'm blind. I can't see what's going on in me. And I blame you for it. I love that. That's so helpful.

It is. Explain waking up together. We're talking about it. I'm with my wife. I'm very blessed. I've been with my wife for nearly 40 years. We go to dinner someplace. Have you ever gone to a restaurant, sat down,

and it was like you were the invisible man and the invisible woman? Nobody even notices you sat down. 400 people sit in, they come in, they get waited on. They're done with their dinner and you're still waiting. I've had that experience. Yes, I have. That's a very common experience. But the point is that as a rule, we sit there and we get pretty negative, don't we?

But if I understand that- Now that we have cell phones, we're at least distracted. Oh, see, oh, God help us. Isn't that the truth? And that's, you know what? Right. I've been able to wait so much more happily in line. So I have something distracting.

Which is a whole other topic for us. Because really, what is that other than something is distracting me from my negativity, essentially? Seems like I'm being productive. But if I was to put down the cell phone, I'd feel a lot of pain. And the point is- Well, that's really only if you don't know how to manage your mind. Yes. know how to manage your mind. It's one of the things we teach on the Brain Warriors Way podcast is, well, how do you manage this thing that tends to go toward the negative?

And a thing you'll like that we introduced to our audience are called tiny habits. It's the smallest thing I can do today that will make the biggest difference in the health of my brain. What I do is I wake up every morning and I say to myself, today is going to be a great day. Then my unconscious mind will begin to figure out, well, why is it going to be a great day? I knew I had this interview with you and I got to see my sister. And if, but left to itself, given that it evolved in a time of great drama and trauma and we were being eaten, um, it's natural status to go to fear.

And especially if you're not taking care of your brain. So, so molding it in a, in a way that's helpful. Look, I'm all on board with creating a proper frame for the mind. But one of the things that I think that we need to do, all of us, is to start to understand, and you said it, we are more or less a creature in which a certain protective mechanism has been built into the brain. And its mechanism is always before the problem appears often to predict the problem and then try to protect itself from it, which is why we get a lot of these aphorisms and positive statements. But what if, Danny, we could start to recognize- And that's why my wife is a prepper. Don't say that to her.

But she's so ready for the end of the world. But what if we could see the following? If we could see the following, what is it that causes me to say today is going to be a great day unless some unseen movement in my own mind, part of this fear mechanism, is starting to look at, and this is key, all the things that could happen. And as it analyzes all the content of itself, it begins to project where a problem could appear. And this is what's so incredible.

As the brain projects the problem that could take place, it begins to resist its own projection so that the mind sees something it doesn't. All right, I'm getting confused. All right. The mind sees something it doesn't want to go through. It hasn't gone through it. Where is it getting the content of that? It's getting it through imagination. It's imagining a problem. Now, the mind that imagines a problem doesn't know it's imagined it. So this image, this idea appears in my mind, and then the mind goes,

Oh, my God, I better protect myself from this problem that could happen, that could go wrong. And in that moment, Danny, essentially we are living out a pattern produced by a brain that's asleep to itself, where if I could wake up in the moment to the fact that I'm being, I'm resisting an image, I'm resisting a dream my mind had, and I don't know it's a dream, but if I knew it was a dream, Danny, the dream's over, and then I don't need to protect myself from anything. I'm awake, I'm vibrant, I'm alive, and I'm meeting every moment like that, understanding there is this fail-safe mechanism in a brain that's asleep to itself that is trying to protect itself from what it imagines could happen to it, And it doesn't know, Danny.

It doesn't know what could happen to it. It can only project, and it's almost always a negative projection. Well, part of that depends on your experience, right? Of course, absolutely. As a psychiatrist, I have seen so many people over the years that have grown up in chaos. Absolutely. And one of my specialties is children and grandchildren of alcoholics. Yes. Because my first wife grew up in a very abusive alcoholic home and it just

changed her where I, I grew up with five sisters, but I grew up in a loving, consistent, predictable family. And so our set point or our go-to points were very different. Right. Right? So trauma changes your brain to more quickly look for what's wrong. No doubt about it. No doubt about it.

Rather than what's right. And which will totally affect your relationships. Totally. Right? Because I would look at her and like, why are you mad at me? Yeah. I'm like, I wasn't used to failing and having somebody mad at me so often. I know this isn't my therapy session.

But I think a lot of people, when they struggle in relationships, they haven't worked through those traumas. And so they're not really awake. They're reacting. That's correct. To what has happened to them or what they imagined. What they imagined. Has happened to them. So it's both. And I like a treatment.

I don't know if you've heard of EMDR. It's a specific psychological treatment for trauma. And it's fascinating because when I have you bring up that trauma and I get your eyes to go back and forth, it actually calms down a part of the brain called the amygdala. So that's the fear center. And it activates your frontal lobes, the most human thoughtful part of you to like be in better. So they're in better balance, so you can be in better balance. All of this is spectacular because it gives a person an immediate understanding that change

is possible, but that the change has to come from a new kind of knowledge that one has, which is very much at the heart of what we're talking about in this book and in our related fields. Look, I'm growing up and I have an alcoholic parent and they're abusive. So I grow up automatically fearful of a certain sound of laughter because I know a drunk laugh. I mean, it could be anything like that. Right. Because your brain works through association. Because just, I mean be anything like that. Right. Because your brain works through association. I mean, just like that. And the point here is that when I begin to want to transcend

the limited reactions I have under certain social circumstances, then I can begin to recognize, and I've seen this all the time. I'm sure you have too, Danny. People believe that it's possible to change the past by reliving the past instead of understanding that the past wants to relive itself. It's part of the wiring of this brain. It wants to relive itself. And it needs me, if you will, to be involved in its machinations so as to validate the very past that I'm trying to escape or change. So the... That's a conflict.

It is a complete conflict, perfectly said. And is that why people pick fights? It is why people pick fights, and listen to this, and it is why people can't walk away from fights. Because there's something in us that wants the continuity of the past even though it says it wants to escape it how many because you're used to it so you get into that groove it's like who would pick if you grew up in an abusive family right right who would pick someone to abuse you no but we see it over and over again. And who would pick to relive it over and over and over again? So the man who suffers or the

woman who suffers reliving the pain from the past doesn't understand that they have been more or less drawn into this activity of a mind that is only familiar with recreating and re-experiencing itself. Whereas we as men and women who can become conscious of this pattern can begin to understand something is inviting me to go back and think about that person who hurt me 20 years ago. It wants me to relive it. I don't have to relive it. It isn't who I am now. That moment served a purpose. It produced the changes in me that it did. And now it's time for me to exit that level of consciousness, understand it literally out of existence so that I can have a new relationship with everybody that comes into my life.

So relationship magic is not just about intimate relationships. It's about all relationships. Stay with us. We're going to come back and talk about specific things you can do. The guy talks about in this book, relationship magic, stay with us. Use the code podcast 10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at

brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.