Emonthebrain - Neuroscience shows: Desperately wanting something blocks you from getting it | What to do instead

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

Neuroscience shows that desperately wanting something actually blocks you from getting it. Here are the 3 solutions. Reference: Fredrickson, B.L. & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19(3), 313–332. Sign up for the free masterclass: https://learn.emonthebrain.com/masterclass RSVP to future tour: https://laylo.com/emonthebrain/m/2jAoUd?utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emonthebrain?igsh=aG1wNDY0OXZ1c3pi

Neuroscience shows that constantly wanting something actually blocks you from getting it. And in this video, I'm going to tell you the neuroscience behind exactly why that is and what to do instead. I'm going to give you three of my top solutions. And if you're new here, hi, I'm Emily McDonald, also known as I'm on the brain. I'm a trained neuroscientist. I've got two degrees in neuroscience, as well as plenty of years of research in the lab. I am now a coach to people in over 55 different countries all over the world. I'm an author, a speaker, and I'm here to help you level up so that you can live your best life.

Now, this video is extremely important because most people think that if they just want something bad enough and they work hard enough that they will achieve it or receive it. But science says the opposite. Science says that chronically wanting something is actually blocking you. And there are really three main reasons for why this is that I'm going to touch on in this video before we get into the solutions. So reason number one is dopamine. When your brain is in a constant wanting state, you experience frequent, basic dopamine spikes.

So we have a baseline level of dopamine. It's kind of this baseline rate, right? You can think of the ocean or a pool where, I like to think of a pool where you kind of have water just at this baseline state, right? So that's your dopamine baseline. And then you've got your spikes. Let's say somebody jumps into the pool and all of a sudden there's a wave created. Well, the water is going to go up right in that wave and that is that sort of spike in water, that, you know, crest of a wave. You can think of it that way. And so we have these spikes and dopamine that happen every single time we experience that feeling of wanting

or craving. It happens every single time we reach for that phone to scroll social media. because when we are experiencing these constant dopamine spikes, our dopamine baseline actually lowers. Now, this makes sense. Every single time somebody jumps in the pool and makes that splash, water splashes out. Also, right, the baseline level of water in the pool goes down. So just to summarize that really quick, when you have chronic and constant dopamine spikes from wanting and craving, your baseline level of dopamine lowers. your baseline level of dopamine is extremely important for motivation for this feeling of satisfaction of enoughness of feeling truly like satisfied and good with your life so when you're constantly

wanting something all of a sudden now you're you have less dopamine in that dopamine baseline which means that you have less motivation to actually go and do the work you have less energy less joy to go and do the work with. Let's move on to reason number two. When you experience that decrease in your dopamine baseline, now of course, you're going to feel worse. You experience more anxiety, more stress. So constantly wanting something when you are constantly thinking about the thing that you want, of course, you're also reinforcing to your brain that you don't have that thing that you want, which is teaching your brain that you don't have it, reinforcing lack, which together with the dopamine baseline and reinforcing lack and the fact that you don't have it,

increases stress and anxiety. Now, why is this so important? This is important because when your brain is in a stressed or anxious state, you actually get a sort of tunnel vision. Research shows that you're less open to opportunities, synchronicities, and you're less likely to notice the things that are actually going to help guide you on the path toward what you want. So taking number one and number two together, right? You have less motivation, less joy and satisfaction, and a decreased ability to perceive the opportunities and the blessings that are already around you. So you've decreased your motivation and you've narrowed your perception. You've blocked yourself on both ends. You're exhausted and you're less able to notice the things that you actually are saying that you want.

But here's where it gets really interesting. Because number three is where we bring this all home and we bridge into the solutions. Reason number three is that we don't actually even want the things that we want. We want the feeling that we believe the things that we want are going to bring us. We want to feel happy. We want to feel more confident. We want to feel more successful. Think about something that you want right now.

Now, recognize that you don't really want that thing. You want the feeling that you believe that thing is going to bring you. And the thing about it is is that when you're in this chronic and constant wanting state, if you're always reaching and never landing and allowing yourself to sit in the feeling, you're never getting the thing that you actually want, because the thing that you actually want is the feeling. And this is why so many people can achieve so many great things. And I've even experienced this in my own life. Just everything that I've ever written down, everything that I wanted to manifest has happened, at least up until this point. And I have, from my own experience, recognized

that if we don't sit back and allow ourselves to really sit in appreciation and sit with the feeling when we achieve something, when we're working towards something even and celebrate those small wins, we are never actually allowing ourselves to feel the feeling that we're after. And this is where people start to feel this sort of emptiness, which is so common in high achievers. Let's move into solution number one, is to activate the feelings of your desires now. Stop waiting for the thing to come to feel the way that you want to feel and give yourself the feeling now. A few of my favorite ways to practice this are presence and gratitude. And what gratitude actually does in the brain is it starts to activate liking circuits.

So in the brain, you have these wanting circuits and you have liking circuits. And now when you are always activating the wanting circuits, right? We already talked about this. Your dopamine baseline drops. But when you activate the liking circuits, you actually start to allow your dopamine baseline to reset over time, which is a beautiful thing. This is how you start to bring more joy and your motivation comes back online. You start to actually feel the feeling that you've been chasing this entire time. So I want to introduce a little bit of an interactive moment right here and ask you, you know, as long as you're not driving or operating machinery, uh, close your eyes for a second.

Take a deep breath. What if you could allow everything that you have right now to be enough? Just for this moment. When you're done watching this video, you can go back to wanting more, to pursuing more, to building, to growing. But what if just for right now, you could allow it to be enough, feel the peace and the wholeness that that brings you? and that feeling of satisfaction, that feeling that you're chasing. So gratitude, presence, mindfulness, meditation, sit with that feeling of wholeness. Sit with that feeling of what if this could all be enough right now? What if I could move now toward my goals with this feeling that I already have enough? I already am enough.

Imagine how unstoppable you would become. You unlock this sort of ruthless energy. where you have nothing to lose because you don't need anything outside of you. You already have it all. And now you're activating that energy if I already have it all. I already have everything that I need, which guess what? It attracts more of that. You fully stepped out of that desperation mode and into, I have enough and I am enough right now.

Now, solution number two comes from the fact that this sense of urgency, this need for more and for more to happen fast, it blocks creative flow. It blocks you and your nervous system from being in flow. I talked about it before how being in a rush actually dysregulates your nervous system, takes you out of your genius, right? Turns down activity in the prefrontal cortex. You're more likely to make mistakes. Your creative abilities decrease. Your thinking becomes narrow. And so this wanting and this need for something to happen quickly, it actually interrupts your process. And so solution number two is actually to uncover the fear that underlies the wanting. And you're like, Emily, what does that mean?

I'm going to tell you a story of a client that I work with. And we talked about this recently. I was working with her and she has this goal that she really wants to grow her business. She recognized that this want and this need to grow her business and she was wanting it to happen fast. It was actually blocking her from growing it. it was disregulating her and it was throwing off her energy and she wasn't actually able to tap into that creative flow and that energy and that excitement, that juice, the spark. And so we talked about

and I asked her this question. I'm asking you this question right now too. What if you slowed down? What would happen? What's the real fear? Like what if the thing that you want took a long time? Like what if it didn't come? What is the fear underlying that? And when I asked her this question, she said that she had this fear of other businesses passing up hers, that she needed to make hers the most successful first because she had this subconscious underlying fear of others passing her up. And I said right there, there it is. Because now you're rushing the process. And you rushing the process is actually the exact thing that is blocking you from achieving what it is that you want and it's going to make your fear come true. So in the end,

she was forcing more output in her business to get ahead. But because of that, she was skipping the creative process, which was blocking her from getting ahead and decreasing her dopamine because she was not enjoying it. And as soon as she gave herself permission in that moment to slow down and go back to the process and take her time in the process, the dopamine came back. She actually got an amazing idea right away. She's like, oh, I'm going to go act on this right now. I'm going to go move with this. I'm really excited to implement this in my business. And in my process. So that fear of being passed up for her was the actual block. And so surface the fear underlying the wanting. Whatever it is that you want, what would happen if you slowed up on that

journey? Like, what would happen? And now I'm not telling you that you need to slow up, but actually for my client, giving her permission to slow up was exactly the thing that she needed to get the dopamine to get the motivation back, which actually gave her her excitement back. And now she's sped up again. But this time, she's doing it with a different energy. She's not, you know, forcing output to get ahead and doing it from that energy of obligation. She's actually doing her work out of excitement, which is moving with a completely different energy. There's actually two different types of passion here that I'm kind of mentioning. There is harmonious passion and there is obsessive passion. And harmonious passion looks like moving with the energy of joy, with the

energy of excitement, which other people feel. I've made content about this before, how activating your whimsy is actually a pro-level brain hack. But the opposite, which is obsessive passion where you are forcing output because of pressure, because of anxiety, other people feel that. I mean, the output's never going to be as good as if you did it in flow and with joy. Other people feel that. People feel that it's forced. And it just never really seems to hit the same. And let's move on to solution number three, which is to detach and trust the process. I'm sure you've heard it before. Everything really does come when you let go.

The law of detachment exists. And you really do need to be detached from the outcome. I mean, this is so many times in my life where I was gripping and trying to control the outcome and make something happen. Didn't happen. I was stressed. And then as soon as I let go, oh, boom. Okay.

The things that you want find you when you're not looking for them, right? So you have to detach. you have to let go. And I know that can be a little easier said than done, but there is a little bit of neuroscience here that I want to explain. I'm going to explain it in a bit of a different way because I was just on the know-and-iself podcast talking to Andre Dukum. And I can't remember if this was exactly his way of describing it or if he was quoting someone else. But he was mentioning to me, he made this analogy for reality. And it very much aligns with how I talk about the neuroscience of reality, which is sort of this analogy of how a computer works, right? When you go and try to do work

on your computer, let's say you open up an app or open up Google and you put something into Google, your computer does not show you all of the code that's running in the background. It just opens up the thing that you searched. It would not benefit you to show you all of the little code that was happening in the background. It would just be system overload, way too much information, over-stimulation, it wouldn't be necessary for us to use the computer. It's not necessary for us to use the computer. We don't need to know all the wiring, all the code that's happening in the background in order to use the computer. Our brains work the exact same way. The brain evolved to show us what is necessary for our survival on Earth. And we actually know this,

neuroscientifically. We do not see the world with our eyes. All our eyes do is take in light signals. light signals travel through the brain where our thoughts, emotions, memories, and beliefs are all incorporated before the image is even put together that we see. We do not see the world with our eyes. Our brain is constructing an image. We are experiencing a construct created by the brain. We are not even seeing the world. We are experiencing a construct that's happening inside of a black box, which is our skull. There are animals that can see entire different light spectrums that we cannot see. birds can see the UD spectrum. There are animals that can see

magnetic fields. There are animals that can see heat maps. We cannot see those things. So we know for a fact that we are not able to see things that even other animals can see. So imagine the other things that are going on behind the scenes that we can't see.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes that we can't see. We cannot see the code running in the background. And it wouldn't benefit us to do that. It wouldn't benefit our survival to do that. It would be system overload. Our brains would fry. It would be way too much information for us to process in every moment. You have to trust the code running in the background. To tie all these three things together, number one, presence resets your baseline. Number two, remove the fear that is actually blocking you at the root from receiving the thing that you want. And number three,

trust the code that's running in the background. What if you could just let it all be enough right now? With that being said, if you are interested in working with me in joining my coaching program, going through my courses, being coached by me, all of the information that you need is actually going to be below in the description. You can check out the links and everything that you need will be there. If you like this video, subscribe, like, comment, let me know what you want me to talk about in the future and watch another video because they're all here to help you level up. Sending you so much love, I'll see you in the next one.

Bye.