Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - [Revisit] Turn Your Life Around One Thought at a Time, with Jewel

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Welcome to our very first Thursday Bite-Sized Breakdown with Jewel (multi-platinum recording artist & mental health advocate)! We wanted to make it easy to revisit the enlightening moments and inspiring words of wisdom from our episode with Jewel. From her lifelong spiritual relationship with nature to practical ways to get in touch with our inner observer, Jewel captivated us with powerful advice to anyone struggling with mental health. Enjoy the best moments of Jewel, and tune in on Tuesday for a brand new full episode of MAYIM BIALIK’S BREAKDOWN. Check out our full episode with Jewel: https://mayim.simplecast.com/episodes/jewel-turn-your-life-around-one-thought-at-a-time BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if I started approaching my healing as something wasn't wrong with me, something was right with me. And when I learned to make anxiety my ally, I don't have anxiety because something's wrong with me. I have anxiety because my body is trying to communicate that I just participated in something that does not agree with me. I had had a lot of, I mean, I dare say brainwashing, right? So I had to figure out what were my thoughts and what were thoughts that I had learned to think were mine. And in a weird way, that's all anxiety and trauma is, right? We learn to have thoughts that make us sick. We start to engage in activities that make us sick.

And our anxiety is our body's way like a car alarm of saying somebody's trying to break in. Or if you eat bad fish and you throw up, your body's way is saying don't eat bad fish again. Anxiety was like my best friend. And when I learned to make it my best friend so that when I had it, I went, wait, what was I just thinking? And I would write it down. And I would go, am I willing to stop engage? in that thought and what thought would I replace it with. I had my own map.

I had my own map to my own healing, to my own authenticity, because my anxiety let me know when I was participating in something inauthentic. It's my and be all this breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. So break it down. We're doing something we've never done before,

which is revisit an amazing episode. There were so much wisdom in this episode. So many sound bites, as Jonathan calls them. We made it so easy to re-listen to this episode. You don't have an hour? No problem. We've cut out all the best moments from our interview with... Multi-platinum recording artists and mental health advocate, Jewel.

And if they don't know who Jewel is... My hands small I know, but they're not yours. And if I skipped to the next... Am I standing still? Need the dark in sky. And if I still didn't. Who will save your soul? Everyone needs their soul saved.

And that everyone knows because she sold 100 million plus albums. I think that's true. No one's fact-checking me. She's absolutely unbelievable. And our conversation with her was so incredible that I didn't even want to listen to us. So this is a super easy way to hear what Jule had to say, but all of it together, all of her wisdom, her lifelong spiritual relationship with nature, the way that she journeyed from really a person searching to a person finding and a person who then has taken this to help so many people all over the world. I'm going to go on a limb here and say that this woman channeled some knowledge, some universal.

wisdom and taught herself how to be okay. She's absolutely unbelievable. We are so excited to distill this all down into this very special breakdown. We hope that you enjoy the best moments of Jewel and make sure to tune in on Tuesday for a brand new full episode of Miami-Mialx Breakdown. Break it down. I moved out when I was 15. I was in a lot of pain and I saw a lot of people in pain. I was able to see that nobody outruns pain.

I'm a really visual person. So when I was singing in the bars, it looked like a, there was some kind of seed of pain and nobody made pearls. Everybody piled more pain on top of it, drinking or relationships or things to distract them from the pain. And the buffalo is the only animal to go directly into the storm because the quickest way was through. And so I remember making a bow to myself and I would try to move into the pain

instead of a pile more pain on. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't really know how to do it. Statistically, kids like me into repeating the cycle. And if there was any hope of me not repeating the cycle, I had to have some kind of plan. I could see that I had a physical inheritance, you know, like a genetic inheritance

that might predispose me to diabetes. But I also had this emotional inheritance and it would predispose me to abuse and addiction, basically. Because I was able to look back through generations and see that is the outcome. And so I really puzzled over where do I go to learn a new emotional language. And there was nowhere that I'd ever heard of going. You know, you could go to college to learn Spanish.

But there was nowhere to learn a new way of relating to myself, to pain, to conflict, to other people. Such a complex language, right? Our emotional language is robust. It's a million data points of trust and suspicion and so many things that, that form you and form your personality, that that was obviously pretty daunting. And so again, as I sort of puzzled over this of like, how do I have any hope that I could become successful, meaning happy as a human? What I started to kind of focus on was this idea

of nature versus nurture. And if my nurture was bad, right, the emotional language that I inherited, my emotional environment, if it was really bad, would I ever get to know my nature. and could you sort of lift the skin of nurture to get to know nature? Will I ever get to know my personality because I've had so much trauma? And so I set off on a very messy mission to try and figure that out. Plans made me feel better. Plans made me feel like there was something actionable and architecture to cling to because the type of terror that I was feeling was so overwhelming.

Maybe the ladder out of my misery because I was miserable. maybe that ladder out is through curiosity and through learning. And so I clung to that. It's happiness a learnable skill. Is it a teachable skill? Happiness is a side effect. It's the side effect of choices. Choices are the side effect of motivations and motivations are rarely examined. I kind of understood that chain of emotional or mental events, but life was so overwhelming. I know I was starting to have panic attacks. I started to have bad kidneys. It was messy. Finally, I ended up. up homeless, which for me was another, you know, massive transition. Stealing for me was a really

loving act. It's how I soothed my anxiety. It made me feel like I was in control. It was, yeah, oddly, one of the most loving things I knew how to do for myself. I think it's easy to sort of see, you know, what that is and was for me. When I became homeless, obviously it hit a new gear. I would end up in jail or dead if I didn't turn my life around. I remembered this quote that had been attributed to Buddha that said, happiness does not depend on who you are or what you have. It depends on what you think. And so I wanted to see if I could turn my life around one thought at a time.

And was that really true? You know, I had the strange privilege of being stripped of every single thing but my thoughts. I had ended up homeless because I wouldn't have sucks with the boss. Started living in my car. Then my car got stolen. And it was just this really crazy, vicious. poverty cycle I never thought I'd find myself in. I didn't know the word disassociation at the time, but I was, I was so disassociative. I couldn't witness my thoughts in real time. So I decided that,

you know, your hands might be the servants of your thoughts. So if you want to know what you're thinking, watch what your hands are doing, because it's your thoughts slowed down into actions. My huge life plan was to write down everything my hands did for two weeks and then see if I could see a pattern. Writing it always really helped me. It was sort of my little way of being an emotional scientist and seeing how I was doing. So I took notes on everything my hands did. I literally was writing down like, I washed my hands. I did not wash my hands. I shook a hand. I did not shake a hand. I had no idea what I was doing. At the end of two weeks, I sat down to see if I could notice any patterns. And there were some, you know, not that interesting things. I realized all at once that I had not

had a panic attack in two weeks. It was like a random side effect, you know, of like glaucoma medication makes your eyelashes grow. It was like, what in the hell caused me to not have panic attacks for two weeks? Mindfulness wasn't even a term at the time, but I basically stumbled on presence. And it was the catalyst for a year of discovery that has still reaped tremendous rewards. I was able to get back in touch with I call the observer. You know, Descartes says, think therefore I am. I would adjust that ever so humbly to say, I perceive what I think, therefore I am, because we're not our thoughts. And if we over-identify with our thoughts, we're susceptible to the ups and downs of a very whimsical and often painful cycle.

You know, if I could observe I was sad, I was something other than sad. I was the observer of it. And if I could observe, I was happy. I was something other than happy. I was the observer of it. And I knew instantly that was a very powerful thing. And my writing put me in a position as an observer. I could definitely look back at my writing through a young age. And whenever I sat back and observed and grew curious, I saw patterns. I call it your greater sense of intelligence. I was able to tap into things or understand patterns that don't make sense to know. It suddenly dawned on me that thought of nature versus nurture. If I wanted to lift the psychological skin of nurture, you can do that through observation. through curiosity and develop a relationship with the observer, like a cocoon. Imagine like a

butterfly chrysalis. And we constantly are in a relationship with the wrapping, thinking that's who we are. It's like an orange thinking it's its peel. I realized that a lot of my obsession, hypervigilance, worry, fear, et cetera, was all just sort of me obsessing over a personality that I had begun to wrap myself in. But it wasn't actually who I was and that I needed to spend a lot more a time getting familiar with and exploring who I was inside of that. I realize like you can have a thought and then create a gap as you observe it, but it won't change your life. I realize meditation wouldn't change my life. You have to have action because we live in a world of action. It's sort of like my body was a car. My brain is not the driver, but it will go on autopilot.

It will act on a neurological autopilot and I will repeat all the stuff I don't want to repeat because I'm on the sort of neurological autopilot, getting present is like taking your car off of autopilot and becoming in neutral. The problem is neutral won't change your life. You have to put it in a gear and that's going to take new tools. It's going to be acting in a different way today than you did yesterday and then seeing what the result of that is. Did you like that result? If you didn't, how would you adjust that? Now can you act in a different way that day than you did the day? My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful.

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Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. Day before, our body only has two basic states of being dilated and contracted. I realized I could reduce every single thought, feeling, or action as to leading to my system being open, relaxed. I'll call that dilated. We're tight, anxious, and I'm going to call that contracted. Writing relaxed to me.

And I did not find that biochemically rewarding. And I was dicted to contracted states. All this stuff I did all day long was getting my system constantly stimulating these contracted anxious states. So for a month I began to write down. I had a header of dilation and a header of contraction. I had to cultivate a lot of presence. But every time I noticed my body was relaxed, I'd write down, what was I thinking, feeling, or doing? Every time I was tight and anxious, I would write down, what was I thinking?

feeling or doing. And after about a month, I had a roadmap to my nervous systems. I didn't know that at the time, but I knew I had a roadmap to these two states. The things that helped me relax and open were walking in nature, writing, reading, learning, exercise, sleep, thoughts like, I'll figure it out. The ones that contracted me were very predictable, not sleeping, isolating, being cruel to myself, very specific thoughts that I had on loop. And then I realized you can't be in two states at once. It's impossible. And so I started to learn how to hack my way out of a contracted state by participating on something off of my dilated list. And it was so fun and so exciting because I was seeing real changes in my life. I was having real effects on my, on my levels of happiness and my, I don't know,

my whole outlook. Music would be my number two career. My number one career would be learning how to be happy. As a musician, I decided my number one goal would be the artist. I would choose art over fame. And so I kept making decisions every day based on, is this good for art? Not necessarily what would make me rich or famous. And that's good, right? You need little North Stars to navigate and create a higher art goal decision making process. I had been approaching my healing from this vantage point of I'm broken and I need to fix myself. That's a terrible psychological stance because you actually think your nature's broken. Something's wrong with your nature. You're broken. A soul isn't a teacup. Like whatever this is, my observer can't be broken. It can only be buried. And what my life had done

was bury me under so many layers of heartbreak and trauma and betrayal and pain that I, again, forgot my own value. And so what if I started approaching my healing as something wasn't wrong with me, something was right with me. And when I learned to make anxiety my ally, I don't have anxiety because something's wrong with me. I have anxiety because my body is trying to communicate that I just participated in something that does not agree with me. I had had a lot of, I mean, I dare say brainwashing, right? So I had to figure out what were my thoughts and what were thoughts that I had learned to think were mine. And in a weird way, that's all anxiety and trauma is, right? We learned to have thoughts that make us sit.

We start to engage in activities that make us sick and our anxiety is our body's way like a car alarm of saying somebody's trying to break in. Anxiety was like my best friend. And when I learned to make it my best friend so that when I had it, I went, wait, what was I just thinking? And I would write it down. And I would go, am I willing to stop engaging in that thought? And what thought would I replace it with? I had my own map. I had my own map to my own healing, to my own authenticity, because my anxiety let me know.

when I was participating in something inauthentic, I had a really intense relationship with nature from a very young age that was, I would call it a parent that raised me. I really think nature saved my life on multiple occasions. I think had I not had the beauty of the nature that I was raised in, nature taught me almost everything I know. It was by being very observant and very quiet and watching nature that gave me a lot of my most profound insights and an experience of love.

If anybody listening is struggling, I would just really encourage you to find that fighting spirit. Refuse to die without figuring out how to be happy. It's absolutely within your ability to figure this out. There's a lot of great resources. When I look back at my life, I thought, I don't know, maybe my music might be my talent or the thing that might save me would be my hypervigilance or my curiosity. The thing that actually was my greatest asset was willingness. And I'm willing to keep going.

I'm willing to try. And if that's the only mantra you can cling to, it's a mighty one. Just continue to be willing. And things have to change because the entire universe culminates in change. So we're not the only things that live outside of that. We just keep going. Thank you for joining us for this very special Thursday episode of Mind Be Alex Breakdown, If you like what you hear, please rate us, review us,

and make sure to follow us on Instagram at Bialik Breakdown to tell us your favorite parts of this episode. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my Beialyx Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing more to. So now she's going to break down.

It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.