HealthyGamerGG - This is Why You're Living Life on Autopilot

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

🎙️ Dr. K reveals the keys to escape autopilot living and reclaim your life! 🗝️💫 Discover the trauma response and practical steps to unlock intentionality and live as the protagonist of your own story. 🌟✨ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to talk about how to stop living life on autopilot. In my psychiatry practice, I would get tons of patients who would come in with essentially this complaint. And they would look slightly differently. So people would come in with something like chronic depression or people who have been depressed their whole life. Other times, it would be people like students who they could study for a test, but theoretically they know they should be networking or they should be doing extracurriculars. And they couldn't seem to motivate themselves towards actually moving towards something. And so it seemed like there were almost two groups of people.

There's this group of people out there who sort of thinks about the future, acknowledges that moving towards the future is going to require intention and direction and effort, and they successfully sort of move towards it. And there's this other group of people who sort of just lives life reactively. If something happens to them, they can respond to it. If there's some sort of external deadline, they can find some degree of motivation. but they usually procrastinate and wait till the last second. But they can't seem to find the motivation, discipline, or willpower

to actually craft a life with direction. Hey there, thanks for watching, and I'm glad these videos have been helpful. A lot of times I'll read the comments and see people asking, well, what do I actually do about it? Which is such a great question. And unfortunately, my experience has been that the resources out there aren't actually that good at helping people create sustainable change, which is why I started HG in the first place.

HG coaches are trained on a curriculum that integrates all of my understanding into what is motivation, what paralyzes us, and how to create lasting behavioral change. So if you're ready to take the next step, HG coaches are ready to build the life that you want. They've helped people build careers, find relationships, build networks of friends, discover what their passions are, and pursue their hobbies. So if this sounds like something that you'd be interested in, check out the link in the description below. And it turns out that this is actually a trauma response, which may sound kind of surprising because we tend to think about, okay, if I'm living my life on autopilot, isn't that an issue of like lack of discipline or motivation or whatever? I'm not a self-starter.

But it actually turns out that due to a lot of recent research we've discovered, this is actually a very common trauma response in a large portion of the population. So the research with this actually starts like maybe in the 60s when there were trauma researchers who discovered that people who experienced trauma have this problem called the paralysis of initiation. And so what that sort of means is they noticed that POWs, prisoners of war, from places like the Vietnam War, had difficulty sort of setting some kind of intention or direction in their life and following through with it.

That these prisoners of war essentially lived life in sort of a survival or reactive mode. Essentially what they're doing is just going through life every single day. and if something happens to them, they can respond to it, but they can't seem to kind of formulate a plan for the future. And you may be listening to this and sort of thinking, well, okay, that makes sense for people who are prisoners of war and we'll explain what the principle is. But as we did more and more research on trauma, what we started to discover is up to even 50 or 60 percent of the population has this kind of response. And we looked at people like kids who grew up even in non-abusive households who can sometimes manifest this paralysis of initiation. So what causes the paralysis of initiation? It comes down to something called being raised in an environment of coercive control. So if we look at the prisoner of war camp, what happens there? This is a situation in which you have no control over your life. You wake up every day, you do what the guards tell you to do, you eat what they tell you to eat. And really, your brain can't plan for the future because you have no idea, are you going to be here for a day? Are you going to be here for a year? Are you going to be here for a decade? So there's no point in thinking about the future if you have no control over the future and no agency in your

life. How does that environment of coercive control translate to even regular kids who are not prisoners of war? Well, it turns out that a lot of us grew up in situations where we also were raised in an environment of coercive control. And so think a little bit about your parents in the environment that you grew up in. Was this a situation where you could sort of set the direction of your life. When you were seven years old, eight years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, 15, 16, 17, 17, could you go to your parents and say, hey, I want to learn how to play this instrument, or I want to stop learning how to play this instrument? Or did you grow up in an environment where if you sort of expressed your desires or needs, those were constantly overridden.

There are a couple of other features that we sort of see from child development in this kind of paralysis of initiation. So these were also kids that were not allowed to express thoughts or emotions. So another really interesting diagnostic kind of test that I would do with my patients is that I would ask them, when you experienced emotions in your household, how were those emotions responded to? So if you got pissed off, were you punished for it? If you got scared, were you punished for it? If you started crying at home, did your parents get mad at you for crying and call you ungrateful? So if we sort of look at these situations, what we're starting to realize is that the things that happen within you start to become problematic.

So let's kind of go back to the prisoner of war example for a second. So if I get pissed at the guards, what happens? The guards aren't going to apologize. They're going to actually punish me for it. If I get pissed at my parents, what's going to happen? If I start yelling at my parents, they're going to punish me for it, right? And so then if you sort of stop and think about it, what's happening in your brain? What is the lesson that your brain learns?

Your brain learns the lesson that expressing emotions, feeling emotions, and even trying to build some kind of plan for the future is an absolute waste of time at best and is actually something that hurts and punishes us at worst. And so literally what happens in these kids as well as the POWs is our brain starts to suppress those thoughts and emotions. And something really devastating happens when we start to do this. emotional suppression. So in the mild cases, what we sort of result in is thought suppression or emotional suppression, right? Because our brain learns, hey, when we get pissed off, it actually damages us. So we're going to stop feeling anger. We're going to stop feeling fear. We're going to stop feeling shame. And then in the worst case scenarios, when we get into really traumatic situations, this ends up as frank dissociation. So dissociation is when we

completely separate ourselves from our emotions. So, Even though there are negative things happening to us, we don't really feel those emotions at all because the suppression has gotten to such a high level that we're actually mentally checking out completely. It turns out that there's actually some really fascinating neuroscience research that explains how suppressing our thoughts and emotions literally leads us to living a life on autopilot. Now, a lot of this research was done by Van der Kolk, who did literally brain scans of people who grew up with some kind of traumatic diagnosis. And what they discovered is essentially there's this cool neuroscientific phenomenon, which is damaging, but it's really fascinating, called hemispheric lateralization. Now, what does that mean? So we got to take a step back and understand hemispheric lateralization.

So some time ago, we sort of came up with this idea that our right brain is creative and emotional. And our left brain is sort of analytical planning. And this is where language also kind of is dominated by the left hemisphere. What trauma researchers discovered is that this old concept actually turns out to be true. And that what would happen in these people who did a lot of thought suppression and emotional suppression is they actually had a corpus callosum that did not allow the two parts of their brain to connect. And the corpus callosum is sort of in the middle of our brain that connects our right and left hemisphere. And so what VanderKulch discovered is that there is this hemispheric lateralization, which means I'm going to separate all of my emotional experience. and creativity from analysis, organization, planning, execution, and even language. And so what they sort of discovered is that when you dissociate, what happens is you take all

these feelings, but they don't affect you in the moment. So you're able to kind of still go through tasks and kind of like almost live life on autopilot, keeping all these emotions left to the side. And now what we sort of discovered is that even kids who are growing up in this environment of course of control have some degree. of this going on. So when we have this hemispheric lateralization and we essentially separate out our emotions from our ability to plan and execute tasks, which by the way is absolutely necessary, right? Because in the traumatic experience, we can't afford to have our emotions affect our

actions. We have to be completely separate. I can't let my anger result in me actually yelling at my parents because I'm pissed off or blaming them or holding them accountable because I'm going to get punished. So in order to survive, our brain decides to do this thing where it's like, hey, we're going to separate these two parts of ourselves. Organization, planning, and action are going to be over here, and emotions are going to be over here. Now, in that moment, it helps us survive in that kind of environment, but it causes us a huge problem long term. This adaptation, which supports our survival, becomes a maladaptation as we begin to grow up. Because it turns out that a lot of our ability to initiate tasks and sort of

plan for the future to live a life with intentionality requires integration across both hemispheres. So if we look at research on things like meditation, what we kind of discover is that when we enter these meditative states, we have a lot of synchronicity across both sides of our brain. And when we meditate a lot, we start to like get into these flow states. We start planning for the future. We start living our life to its fullest. And literally this trauma response does the exact opposite of that by separating these two parts of our brain. And there's actually good clinical evidence to support

this as well, because one of the things that we've sort of discovered is that one of the reasons psychotherapy heals trauma is because it actually bridges these two things. So remember that the right hemisphere is where we experience emotion, and the left hemisphere is where our language comes from. And so if you work with people who sort of have this traumatic upbringing, they have a lot of difficulty vocalizing their emotions. And so it turns out that even in psychotherapy, when you sit down with someone and you just get them to talk about their feelings, it turns out that that sort of strengthens the synchronicity across both parts of the brain.

So what we're sort of doing is I've got all these emotions over here, which normally I separate. And without any sort of emotion, I can't kind of plan or like live life to the fullest. And even if we sort of think about, you know, like these movies that we watch, where there's a hero or heroine who like digs really deep and like conquers all their fears, what are they driven by? It's usually driven by some kind of emotion. And so what's sort of happening in these people who are traumatic is that these parts are separated

and they can't harness that emotion to kind of plan for the future. And their left brain is actually sort of shut off. So one way that we can sort of reinvigorate that left brain is actually through the process of psychotherapy where we sort of get people to articulate their emotions. And this is what's also really confusing for people because a lot of people will say, I don't understand how talking about my feelings is going to fix anything, right? My problems are my problems. And talking about my feelings is over here, but I can't do anything about it.

Right? I need to fix the problems. And it's that, that's precisely the problem, is that right now, even though you know you have a problem, your brain isn't able to actually execute on those tasks. And this is what's really bizarre is that the way that we're able to execute it, the way that you can almost turn on your brain to execute on that task is by reducing this hemispheric lateralization, which can be done through things like talking. So if you're kind of living your life on autopilot, there are a couple of things that we can do to help integrate our brain. As we've already mentioned, even articulation of your emotional state will sort of lead to this synchronicity. And I know it sounds kind of bizarre, but we'll get you to actually.

start doing stuff for the future. The second thing that you can do is stop retreating from your emotions. So in the minds of people who have grown up with this kind of environment of coercive control, remember that your brain has learned that when I experience negative emotions, this results in bad things. So anytime you start to experience negative emotions, your brain will cope by retreating from those emotions or distracting yourself. And this process needs to be stopped. And the tricky thing about this is that if you grew up with a lot of emotional suppression, you may not even detect the emotion. All you're going to experience is the retreat behavior. So I don't know why, but today I'm going to get up. And instead of doing anything that I'm

supposed to be doing, I'm just going to distract myself with stuff. And if you really pay attention to yourself, what you'll discover is that the amount of distraction that you do is not the same on a day-to-day basis. Even though your circumstances are broadly the same, there are certain things that will trigger the retreat. So you really have to pay attention and pay attention to when you feel like retreating, when you feel like procrastinating. There's one question you can ask yourself, which is, okay, am I actually feeling some

kind of emotion here? Is there something going on where someone has said something or someone has done something or there's a deadline coming up or something is going on that is triggering or in a normal person would trigger some kind of anxiety or fear or something like that. And if the answer to that is yes, just stop for a second and try to pay attention to, okay, what am I feeling right now? You can take a look at some of these very simple things like your heart rate, you know, your respiratory rate.

Why is it that it's so hard for you to be able to focus in this moment? And this is where a lot of people slip up because they think that the goal is to force themselves to focus. But the goal is not to force yourself to focus. that's what's really bizarre. The goal is simply to acknowledge the emotion and to not retreat from it. So as we acknowledge the emotion and not retreat from it, what that'll sort of do is train our brain to, okay, we no longer need to do thought suppression and emotional suppression. These are things that are no longer dangerous and will cause us pain. And as we take a step forward into that

direction, and hopefully we can even articulate it by journaling or something like that, the more integration we're going to get across our hemispheres. And this is what we're we sort of see clinically with patients with trauma is when you do psychotherapy on trauma and they start to articulate all their emotions, their life starts to improve. Even though the therapist is not helping them, you know, get a job or apply for a promotion or form relationships or anything like that. All we're doing is sort of getting the brain to function the way that it's supposed to. I want to just leave y'all with kind of one last kind of analogy, which is that sometimes in life, we sort of feel like we're an NPC. We're not living.

living our lives as player characters, right? So a player character decides what they're going to do. They're going to be pursuing main quests. They're going to be going here and going there and there's some degree of advancement. But some of us feel like we're NPCs. And what we're sort of doing is we're just existing in our little corner of the world. And we're not even saying anything or doing anything until someone else comes along. And when they interact with us, when they right-click us, that's when we start to go through this dialogue and we become active. And this is exactly what happens in this trauma response, because you can't live a life with intention. You're living life very reactively.

And it requires external stimuli to motivate you to action. So if you're someone who's sort of living life as an NPC, it may not be due to a lack of willpower or discipline. It may simply be due to this sort of stealth and very common trauma response that affects up to 50% of people.