The One You Feed - From Overwhelm to Empowerment: Harnessing Tiny Shifts for Emotional Resilience with Elisha Goldstein

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

In this episode, Elisha Goldstein talks about how to go from overwhelm to empowerment by harnessing tiny shifts for emotional resilience. He explains how small, consistent changes, or “tiny shifts��, can break negative emotional loops and improve stress, relationships, and longevity. He shares personal stories, practical tools like the “four R’s” (Recognize, Release, Refocus, Reinforce), and emphasizes emotional awareness over willpower. The conversation offers accessible strategies for managing overwhelm and building resilience, encouraging listeners to make manageable changes that support emotional health in everyday life. Take our quick 2-minute survey and help us improve your listening experience: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠oneyoufeed.net/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: The concept of “tiny shifts” in emotional health and well-being. The impact of modern life on emotional loops and chronic stress responses. The importance of emotional awareness in breaking negative patterns. The biological and psychological effects of “bracing” in response to perceived threats. Strategies for interrupting emotional loops and fostering recovery. The “four R’s” framework: Recognize, Release, Refocus, and Reinforce. The role of self-compassion and supportive questioning in emotional management. The significance of reinforcing positive emotional experiences for lasting change. Practical applications and limitations of the discussed methods. The relationship between emotional health, stress management, and longevity. For full show notes:⁠⁠ ⁠click here⁠!⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Elisha Goldstein, check out these other episodes: Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D-Mindfulness and Depression Jonathan Rottenberg Florence Williams By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠Hello Fresh⁠ – Get 10 free meals + a FREE Zwilling Knife (a $144.99 value) on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. ⁠David Protein⁠ bars deliver up to 28g of protein for just 150 calories—without sacrificing taste! For a limited time, our listeners can receive this special deal: buy 4 cartons and get the 5th free when you go to ⁠www.davidprotein.com/FEED⁠ ⁠Shopify⁠ – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/feed. ⁠Pebl⁠ – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at ⁠hipebl.ai⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My mind's been so deeply entrenched with anxiety and self-loathing for so long or, like, catastrophes. Like, well, I need, you know, I need big things to fix me. No, it's in the moment, in the real time, and it's the smallest things when we weave them together consistently that actually really do make the biggest changes. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think. true, and yet for many of us our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Elisha Goldstein described a conversation he had not very long ago at a dinner party in Los Angeles.

A friend of his, a woman said, I'm not handling it all very well. None of my friends are either. The WhatsApp groups, the text, the emails, juggling the kids and family plans, the brutal news, all the be better advice, it never stops. I can't keep up. I hear a lot of the same things. Elish's answer to this is emotional health, and we achieve emotional health by learning to break what he calls emotional loops and construct better ones. He and I have come to the same conclusion.

It's not big insights that save us, but small, repeated ways of relating to ourselves and the world differently. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Elisha, welcome to the show. Eric, it's great to be back with you. Yes, I am happy to have you back on. And we're going to be discussing your book, which is called Tiny Shifts, how emotional health transforms stress, relationships, and longevity. And we will get into all that in a moment, but I want to start the way we always start, which is with the parable.

And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

To me, it's very direct that parable. there's a saying that wherever your focus goes, you invite an energy to flow. And some people in the neuroscience world would say, and that's the way the brain grows. And if you allow for your mind to drift in certain what I call emotional loops or certain patterns or habits, you're going to have a certain energy that follows. It's also going to influence what you do in your life. if you're aware of that, that that's a pattern. You might have learned it from your parents or your culture or just might be a mood that you fall into biochemically.

But if you're aware of it, then you can pause, create some space. And, you know, there's a way to do that physically too. And then you can do, you know, what I call a tiny shift to be able to feed the other wolf and to be able to support an opening to seeing maybe possibility. choices, opportunities, a different way of supporting yourself that might give you the energy to move in a direction that's going to serve you and serve your family and serve your friends and serve your community and serve the people around you. And it doesn't take willpower. That's not what I'm talking about here. It all starts with emotional awareness.

And that begins how we can kind of shift who we feed there. Yeah, I love the emotional loops. And we're going to get into that in a minute. want to start just by reading something that's pretty early in the book. It might even be at where the book starts. I sometimes forget by the time I get to the end of the book. But you said in November 2023 at a dinner party in Los Angeles, a close friend said to me, I don't know about men, but I can tell you this. I'm not handling it all very well. None of my friends are either. The WhatsApp group, the texts, the emails, juggling the kids and family plans, the brutal news, all the be better advice. It never stops. I can't.

can't keep up. I mean, just even hearing that, I feel overwhelmed. Like, and so, you know, and I remember that moment at the dinner party with my friend. And this is about the time that I was kicking around the concept of this book, too. And I was kind of asking her experience. And I mean, I experience it myself. I mean, the amount of the different forms of communication that we have, the amount of inputs that are happening, now I'm not even talking about the algorithm and how it's feeding negativity bias after negativity bias. you know and but just the amount of juggling like it's overwhelming it's taxing to our nervous system and overwhelm that feeling of overwhelm which is very real isn't just an emotion we can it's a

name of emotion but it's a loop it comes with certain thoughts it comes with certain physiological biological biological sensations that are involved with it and it typically leads to certain reactions and where do we go most of us to look for more information how do I solve this feeling that's here? And we don't need more information. We need an interruption. And, you know, that's one of the keys here, because when we are constantly fed this idea of optimizing everything,

optimizing our health, optimizing our knowledge and information, optimizing even our rest, optimizing our sleep, optimizing our way we eat, and I mean, how many different ways can we do all this stuff? and when we have too many ways, none of it sticks. Yeah, it is overwhelming. And I think you and I have thought a lot about this stuff. We both work with people where we both see what's happening. And I think we've landed in fairly similar places around this idea of, you know, tiny shifts or small steps or a way of doing that.

And one of the things that I really hit on a few years ago was just how little the average, person has bandwidth to make any big changes. Right. We all know we're overwhelmed and the answer, one answer to overwhelm would be just do way less. Turn off the WhatsApp, turn off the phone, don't have email, you know, make sure you have two hours a week to meditate, like do less. But for most people, my experience is that that's not going to happen. Those aren't the choices that people are generally going to make. And so then within that context of everything that we're describing, how do you make any sort of ongoing change that doesn't feel overwhelming?

And I think the conclusion that I came to, and it seems like you came to, is you've got to do it almost in the context, in the flow of day-to-day life. Like you can interrupt, but not for too long. Yeah. One of the moments that's really hit me. was, I had to write about this in tiny shifts too, but we have this area of our kitchen that I think probably a lot of people have, which we call the corner of crap. And it's just like where everything ends up. That made me laugh when you said that. I was like, yep, I got one of those. Yeah, we all got one of

those. Like, where does this go? Okay, it goes here. That's one of my Achilles heels in general growing up. I wasn't, I was never shown how, you know, how organization worked or anything like that. And I got lots of stories around that. But I was sitting there and I was, this speaks directly to that woman's that you mentioned a moment ago, too. I was sitting there and I was, I was flipping through my phone because what, what, if I could, if I could, if I could, if I could just get this, this Amazon return out of the way, you know, if I can just figure out how to transfer my airline mile, my credit card mile, whatever, to my airline miles. And, you know, and so I was sitting there and I was like juggling these two different tasks the same time. Meanwhile, my son had come to him as my youngest son,

and he had come to me and he was kind of like pulling out my shirt. He just wanted to kind of show me something or some basketball trick or you know something like that and i was just like one minute i got you know i'm almost there i'm almost there with his amazon return i'm almost there with this and then you know by the time i kind of woke up to that you know he was gone and i mean that that was a precious moment that i likely missed probably what what's more important than the meaningful moments of life i think the end of life that's what people look back and they say you know hey it's about who you love and how you love and the rest of it really never mattered what was more interesting to me was like like how I was so caught in a form of bracing, like biological bracing that was happening,

to get this thing done, this perception of urgency that I had, that, you know, if you tie the amount of urgent things that our mind perceives as urgent together, we're going to miss out on all kinds of moments of life. And likely what was happening too. I was also sort of, we could take this with a grain of salt when I say this, but if I allow myself to say, stay in that form of bracing, in that form of elevated stress, then I'm causing harm to my body physically, too. And that's going to impact my sleep patterns. That's going to impact all kinds of things.

And so, you know, that's when it really hit me. I'm like, wow, it would be really nice to create, even for myself, a psychologist, mindfulness teacher for decades, and to support my own emotional awareness so I can wake up to this and be more intentional about where I'm placing my attention on what really matters in the moment. Yeah. I think there's so many things in what you said there. The first that I want to hit on is that fallacy that we just need to get one more thing done because it never ends. And like quite literally for me, it never ends. I mean, I used to have these days where I was like, I'm going to get through my inbox. I'm going to get through my task list. I'm going to get, no, I'm not. I'm no sooner cross one off than three more go on. And there's a certain amount of learning to relax into that that I have found has been really important is when I just go,

okay, that's the way it is. Like, that's the nature of life. And that's the way we want it to be. Maybe someday I'll not have enough things on my task list or people won't send me enough email and I'll be like, I miss all that. But in this stage of my life, how do I relate to the fact that the demands both good and back? they're ongoing. There's no arrival. And if we don't have that awareness, what happens is, and I'm sure everyone who's listening or watching has this experience, but you pile on that false sense of urgency trying to get this done and that done and that done and answer this text and make sure to

respond to this personal person's birthday and, you know, and, you know, return this and and I better get this thing done in my house today. We literally walk around the day bracing. And we're wondering why we feel so exhausted. What do you mean by bracing? Bracing like literally, well, I'll give you an example of like what this actually is. So what's happening in the body during the day. We have these, we noted them earlier, these kind of like emotional loops. These are like this kind of reactions that we're in, typically unconsciously that include a certain collection of emotions and certain thought patterns and sensations, biological sensations happening our body and things that we're doing. doing. And what's happening is this sense of like urgency or needing to get things done or the moment we open our

phone and see the various threats that are possible for us or we see something happening with the economy or we see war somewhere or you know, get in a fight with somebody. Our brain interprets it as like something is threatening. There's some potential on a scale of 1 to 10 pick your in the continuum, some form of danger. And that could come. External, again, through those threats that we're seeing around the world or economy or whatever, or internal with our own thoughts and emotions that are there as sensations. And our body reacts biologically. So when you say what's bracing, our body reacts biologically because our amygdala gets kicked in.

We fall into a fight, flight, freeze response on a certain level. And that instantly changes what's happening in the body itself. And so for those who aren't familiar with this, What happens is stress hormones start to get kicked up. We get cortisol and adrenaline operating at a certain level, which is wonderful and short bursts, but not in longer bursts. Our heart rate starts to go up. Our blood pressure starts to go up.

It's just elevated a bit, right? Elevate, depending on the person, but it's elevated a bit. And then what happens is our muscles literally start to tense and brace. So our shoulders might be creeping up to our ears. We might be actually feeling like more tension around our arms or around. our buttocks or around our quads, particularly maybe in our face, the area between our eyes or our cheeks. And then, of course, digestion.

We're not hungry or we're too hungry. Our immune response goes down. And then like long-term healing in our body gets deprioritized. And imagine now for a second that because of all the inputs that you and I have been talking about, that, you know, whether it's with our phone or now our really trained, implicit sense of perceived urgency that we have or needing to check to smooth out some underlying anxiety that's there that's been embedded in us since probably 2007 or before when I'm just kind of noting the time that the iPhone came out. And the problem is that we're not really stuck in any

kind of danger. We're just caught in this loop. And so we can literally, if our body is having this kind of biological reaction, the moment we become aware of this loop, we say like, oh, overwhelm this here. I'm thinking about this or wait, there was something you said a moment ago, which I was like, oh, that would be a perfect thing just to remember. Not for me to remember, but in daily life to remember, I'll come back to it. But the moment we name it and we label it, we notice it, we realize we're in this thing, is something that in many worlds of wisdom traditions and in the field of science, we've known for a while now, that creates this moment of space. And that's when I said we don't need to look for more information or we don't need to solve the problem with more content.

We need an interrupt. And the interrupt is to interrupt the biological reaction that's happening in that moment. That's kind of harming us. And the first interrupt is really just recognizing the experience we're having, like literally as simple as noticing the shoulders tense up, where they are on your body, if they're up a little bit. And then, you know, we can try this right now. You know, anyone who's listening or watching, you can just kind of see if you can notice where your shoulders are

and see if you can just drop them like 5%, just a little bit. Or something I really love to do is I like to take a breath and on the exhalation, because you take a breath, your shoulders naturally rise because you're breathing in. When you breathe out, your shoulders naturally fall. And so you're noticing them fall and you're even maybe saying the word release a little bit, and you're creating a little space. You're creating that interrupt. You're creating a little bit more spaciousness. And I guess that's what I mean by

bracing and how we can begin to interrupt it. So let me ask you a question. What you've just described is let's assume we get caught in emotional loops and we've been getting caught in them for a while. Let's assume that the outer conditions are making it more likely that this happens. let's assume that our stress hormones have been higher than they should be for a while. How does a tiny shift address what seems to be a pretty big problem? So the tiny shift supports recovery. So we're never going to catch the reaction. We may have like years of conditioned reactivity that our brain now implicitly, you know, creates in our lives.

to relate to the family members around us in our workplace, how we relate to people in traffic. Before we even got on this call, we were talking about the idea with the comparing mind and writing and how we can get caught in that kind of place. But that also creates a lot of stress. And I was saying how that's very draining. That can lead us to not being motivated to complete the tasks that we're doing. So when we get caught up in that sympathetic arousal over time, especially if it's conditioned, we're typically not going to catch it in the exact moment.

But at some point we are. And we want to support now as recovery because emotional health is less about like feeling happy and positive all the time. It's more about like how quickly can we recover from the trained reactivity that we get hooked into here and there throughout the day. Because the more you can recover, consider this for a second. The more you can recover, the more your body is going to get better at repairing the cellular inflammation that's happening there, the less damage it's going to have on these protective caps in the end of your chromosomes that are called telomeres that are associated with

lifespan, the more your blood pressure and heart rate's going to go down. And if you're susceptible to heart disease, let's say, or you're going to be kind of potentially protecting your life while doing that. So it's really about the recovery and like how do we support ourselves in recovering from this type of reactivity and then putting ourselves back on a track that's going to be healthier for us. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led full-body checkup that provides a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer.

The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan. Live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. So let's talk about emotional loops because this is really important. You say these are the automatic mind-body patterns that pull us into worry at 3M, snapping at the people we care about, or suddenly dropping us into a, funk that we can't explain. Then you go on to say they have four interconnected parts. So walk us

through the different parts of an emotional loop. Okay. I'll walk you through it through a story. Okay. And this actually happened to me like while I was writing this book and it ended up being a huge gift because I put this story directly in tiny shifts. And you may have had this experience, Eric. I'm sure a lot of people here can relate to this where I was asked to be on a health panel. by some celebrity who was putting on like a health event, whatever, and her team reached out to me. And they were going to, you know, they're going to pay me. Here's the dates.

We've got to set up this tech call. So I set up a tech call with them. I'm kind of excited about it. I'm like, this is going to be really cool. I'm writing this new book and, you know, that's good exposure to. And I get on this tech call and something feels a little weird about it, but I overlook it because I'm kind of excited about this thing. And just to cut to the chase here, in the tech call,

it turns out what happened was they had me kind of go into my in my Facebook because they had, they wanted me to set up something because the event was going to be on a Facebook live type of whatever. And at the end of it, they said they couldn't do something, but I felt kind of weird about it. So I contacted the celebrity directly and they're like, this is a total scam. They've done this to a bunch of people. I'm like, oh my God, what kind of information have they gotten from me? What have they done? And before I knew it, they'd taken over my Facebook page and they'd been posting weird stuff. And I'm like, did they get financial details? and so I start kind of freaking up.

My nervous system's kind of a little bit on fire at that moment. It's still my identity, you know, catastrophizing in a lot of different ways. And the anxiety wasn't the worst part about it. I had my assistant kind of helping me. And I realized that, wow, I'm really kind of on fire right now. My body was bracing in a lot of different ways. And my heart rate was elevated. And I asked myself like, okay, so, you know, what's going to be most supportive to me right now?

and I decided to take a walk with my dogs. But what was most interesting on that walk was how loud the shame was. So with an emotional loop, we're talking about thoughts, emotions, sensations, and actions. So those are the four elements. I had these voices in my head that were telling me what an idiot I was. How could you possibly fall for something like this? You saw some signals that weren't there. Why didn't you pay attention to them?

you're a psychologist, your mindfulness teacher, you write about, talk about emotions all the time, what's wrong with you, like, you know, all of that. And so the shame was intense. And so I was walking there and I noticed it and I was able to recognize it. I was able to recognize the feeling that was there and saying, well, this is shame alive in a big way right now. I could feel up my body, you know, I can hear the voices. They were so loud. And I decided to kind of soften around it. It's a little bit of this method that we talk about and here this for our method where the first step is recognizing the emotion. We need that emotional awareness. Remember, we don't need so much more content. We need more emotional awareness. And so I was able to recognize it. That created an initial

interrupt and I was able to soften around it while I was walking. And that created a little bit more space. Then I asked myself the question, what would really, God, there's so much pain in here right now. Like, what would be supportive to me right now? I was able to redirect. You talked about that initial question about feeding the two wolves. I talked about wherever your emotions go, energy, or ever your attention goes, energy flows. And that allowed me to open up this window of saying, can I, can I be kinder to myself? God, my mind is so mean to me right now. Can I be kinder to my? Can I just open this window? Classic self-compassion question. But I got the ability to do that by interrupting

the emotional loop that was happening. Would that recognize and that release? That question squeaked out a little small voice inside of me that said, yes. Yes, you can. And what would that look like? Okay, so I did something. I continued walking. I put my hand on my heart for a second just to kind of just make contact.

I just need grounding. Like, and then as I did that, I noticed the shame turned into sadness. And because there was grief at being, you know, violated. you know, in some ways. And that eventually, as I allowed myself to kind of stay with that, that turned into anger also from that feeling. So I allowed that to be there as well. And within an hour after that, an hour change, whatever,

it had kind of washed through me. Now, the danger is if you don't allow yourself to walk through a process like that, we need things that are simple. Life is too overwhelming, too complex. So we need like a method that's really simple. And so I worked really hard to make this method super simple. And so with that ability to kind of move through this in this way, I wasn't hijacked the rest of the evening and the night and the day.

Turns out that we were able to go through Facebook and get it, you know, repaired within a few days. And not too much damage was done, fortunately. And but more importantly was the way I was able to move through the biological cognitive reaction that was happening through me and be able to create a bit more peace inside, even in the midst of the store. Yeah, that's a really good example of applying this. And I want to hit the four hours in a second, but I'm going to stay with emotional loops just for a second to give some examples, because I love the fact you're talking, they have thoughts, they have emotions, they have

sensations, they have actions. And one of the things that I think a lot about is the good thing when you when we can kind of recognize that those are the components is even by deconstructing those components from each other here's what i'm thinking here's what i'm feeling here's what's going on in my body here's what what i feel compelled to do right there's usually a some sort of action that it's it's it's pushing us towards even the deconstruction of those into their component parts helps me take the whole thing down a notch or two and i also think what's really interesting about a framing it that way is that we can then intervene in different ways. Sure, right?

We can intervene with our thoughts. We can try and take a different cognitive approach. We can intervene emotionally. We can try and intervene with the body, right? And we can also intervene with the behavior that we do or don't do. So I just love this concept of tying it up in an emotional loop. And I also love that you name some of these loops. You name, just a couple here.

the self-doubt loop, the should loop, the what-if loop. So talk to me a little bit about the should loop. Walk me through that one, how that one works, and how these things kind of feed on themselves, too, if we don't interrupt them. So I think I'll first say that, as you've been noting, there's a real value in naming the different loops. So we said there's this umbrella overwhelm loop we talked about before. And you named a few different types of loops, but I also want to give people permission. The value in this is in the recognizing the naming, right? And so if there's like a, I can't stand this particular friend loop, you know, you can kind of play with that. Like if there's a way to kind of bring a little humor to it, like, although this is, this is my 1130 p.m. urge to snack

loop, you know, right? Hey, friend, before we dive back in, I want you to take a second and think about what you've been listening to. What's one thing that really landed? And what's one tiny action you could take today to live it out? Those little moments of reflection, that's exactly why I started Good Wolf Reminders, short, free text messages that land in your phone once or twice a week. Nearly 5,000 people already get them and say the quick bursts of insight help them shift out of autopilot and stay intentional in their lives. If that sounds, like your kind of thing, head to one you feed.net slash SMS and sign up. It's free, no spam,

and easy to opt out of any time. Again, that's one you feed.com. Tiny nudges, real change. All right, back to the show. I have a loop. I'll share. This is a funny one. It doesn't sound funny at first. It's called the I wish I was dead loop. I'd be completely serious. That thought pops into my head. That's the cognitive aspect. And of course, then immediately there's there's emotion that goes with it and all the sensations. And by naming that loop, what I've realized for myself is that, A, just when I recognize it, I sort of laugh a little bit now because I'm like, that is such an extreme overreaction. Like on one level you could look at and go, well, that's sad that that is

set deep enough in me that it still fires off, you know, that I felt that that that, that way, but naming it does cause me mostly now to laugh because it's usually, usually happens when I don't know the answer to something. And it often happens with the stupidest things. Like, should I use conditioner today or not? And the next thing you know, my brain goes, I wish I was dead. I'm like, well, settle down. But so your point about humor is really important. I found like naming them in that way is often really helpful. Just that immediately diffuses it. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for the interrupt. We have to take to heart for a second that even though we've been trained and programmed to think that we need to do these big things to fix these things in

my own. My mind's been so deeply entrenched with anxiety and self-loathing for so long or like catastrophes like, well, I need, you know, I need big things to fix me. No, it's in the moment in the real time and it's the smallest things when we weave them together, consistently that actually really do make the biggest changes. The reason you're able to recognize the I Wish I Were Dead Loop and then you like immediately kind of turn to like eye rolling and laughing or something like that is because you have so much practiced experience with that and redressing it that that there's now an inner knowing inside of you that's top down, that processes, you know, from this experience and so that you

can kind of cut to it pretty quickly. Now, I'll say this as a caveat to the different ways we can interrupt the loop. And it's not that we can always just kind of shift our mind and reframe or we can just go to our body or something like that. It really depends on what's happening. So, for example, if you're really activated and you're really feeling anxious, let's say on a scale of 1 to 10, 7, 8, 9, something like that. reframing or just kind of trying on a different way of looking at things doesn't typically work very well. Right.

And the reason is is because our emotional center of our brain is far deeper and more primitive and faster than the more evolved area of our brain of the prefrontal region where we're trying to cognitive and reason and be rational about stuff. So we don't believe ourselves in that moment. Right. Right. It is the reality. And so we need a different type of entryway in there.

The recognition typically comes. something more somatic, that's more implicit. So it starts with the body typically versus the thoughts. If we're like bothered by something or we're really kind of being down on ourselves or we are just telling ourselves some just life, life's not going to, I'm never going to be successful or, you know, who knows. And and on a scale of one to 10, it's like, I don't know, four, five, six, three, something like that. We can recognize that. We can say, hold on a second. We could take a breath and say, what's another way I can look at this? Yes. And if you have a lot of experience like you do in that particular one, your mind can just cut right to the truth

because you know what the reality is. And so we just need that shortcut based on our inner knowing. There are times that the emotion part of the loop is so high, like the cognitive part of the loop, the thoughts are going crazy, but you're not going to rein them in to your point. So that might be a time that what we need to focus on is the sensation aspect of the loop, the body. The body aspect of the loop or you know sometimes i find with these things too is it's just recognizing like the fire is really burning right now and even being able to just give myself some grace to go this one's going to take longer to untangle right to have that awareness yeah and mine is sort of funny because it's so dramatic but it's oftentimes the ones that aren't so dramatic that are harder

That one is so absurd. Given the general state of my mind now, a thought like that is like it stands out. You're like, where did that come from? A time in my life, though, that might not have barely even registered as different. And it's those ones that we almost don't notice, but they're happening that I think can be so insidious. Yeah. Consistently in the background. Yep.

You know, we could be asking ourselves, you know, like I was with the Facebook scam story, you know, I could have been asking myself, how can I be so stupid a lot? Yeah. And, you know, the thing about shame is it's one of the fastest loops we fall into. Why is that, do you think? We're wired to belong. That's for our own security and evolution. And it's the greatest threat to not belong. And shame is basically saying, I don't belong.

we have to be quick to see where the dangers are in order to survive. And so it's been wired into us since the dawn of, before the dawn of humanity, however we believe the evolution of humanity is. So I think shame's like a little, a cousin to that, but more on a social level. And so if that was familiar to me,

and I was able to say like, oh, the how can I be so stupid loop? Oh, okay, there's that one again. You know, and I was able to take a breath. And I would say, what if I asked a different question? So what's the difference? I'll say anyone listening right now or watching, what's the difference? If you're asking yourself like unconsciously or semi-consciously, how can I be so stupid? How can I be so stupid? What kind of

answers are we going to get from that? Well, you can be so stupid because you're hopeless and, you know, you're really not as adept as you thought you were. And, you know, it's going to come with all the reasons like that, you know, that are going to back up that thing. But what if I was able to take a shift and make a tiny shift in that moment. I was able to recognize that thought pattern because I've had it before, this kind of like, how can I be so stupid loop? I was able to take a breath, just could create a little space, and I was able to shift to say something like, what is it that I'm really needing right now? What's going to be most supportive to me right now while this feeling is here? What kind of answers am I going to get? Well, just like I did. Well, maybe you can be a little

kinder to yourself. Maybe you need to take a walk outside. Maybe you want to talk with someone about, this. And which are going to be healthier, more adaptive? Which are going to get me on my feet quicker and which are going to be better for the relationships I have and for my health. And so it's all about like how quickly can we recover from these moments that we slip into these little insidious loops and the naming them like we're talking about in a variety of ways we can do it is just really the first step to be able to interrupt. Yeah, let's go through the four hours. So we have these emotional loops and your general point is that interrupting those as close as when they're happening and being able to do it in a very easy way that doesn't take a ton of time that we don't have

to go sit on a, and we don't need to go sit down in journal for 30 minutes, like that we can use in the moment. And so we come up with the four R's. So walk me through those. We've already talked about the first one. Okay. So again, baseline idea here is we don't need to do more about anything. We just need to be able to do something that allows us to shift in the moment with the life we're already living, the things we're already doing. That's the key.

And we want to make it simple and repeatable because small, consistent actions like you and I are both talking about with your book and my book, small consistent actions lead to big changes. And so four hours, recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. That's what it is. Recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. That's what it is. So we recognize, we talked about that. The important part of the release is understanding that emotions are biological. And so when we get caught in an emotional loop, we're having a biological reaction like we ran through before, the impact of the sympathetic nervous system being aroused, going into the fight-flight freeze response, how that impacts our muscles, our blood pressure, our heart rate, cortisol, adrenaline, interrupting sleep, messing with how we eat, you know, all the different longevity factors that most people focus on eating, sleeping, exercise, and messes with all those things because in order to do those things, exercise, sleep, and nutrition, we typically need some form of body battery to be able to drum up the energy to engage those types of things.

And when we get emotionally depleted through these emotional loops, we're draining our body battery. And so it makes it harder to actually follow through on the habits we're trying to follow through it. So we release to be able to move into recovery, to move to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and to be able to move the body into recovery. Also, we release because what you do notice is from a psychological point of view, I always say like recognizes stepping into that space between stimulus and response. Releasing is widening that space. So now we have a little, we have more wherewithal to recognize the choices and the perspectives, bringing more blood flow

to the prefrontal region, which is about emotion regulation and impulse control. And so now we have the ability to refocus. So what people typically do is they skip the second R. They just go to like, I'm recognizing this. What do I need to do differently? But the reason that doesn't work as well is because we typically need a little bit more space in order for that refocus to land. And so for it to become more fertilized, let's say, as an example.

So we refocus, and one of my favorite ways of refocusing is some of the things we've been talking about here is by accessing what I call our natural intelligence. What's natural intelligence? I'm kind of playing off of the big hoopla around artificial intelligence right now. And accessing our natural intelligence says when we ask our brain questions, it searches for answers. And so let's ask it a different question and see if it comes up with a different answer. So instead of, you know, why am I so stupid? what's going to be supportive to me instead of the world's going to hell in the handbasket

what are some examples of things that are going well right now or moments of kindness like we were talking about earlier before we started our episode together here or this is all there is nothing's going to work out for me and no one can help me and I can't help myself okay hold on a second is there another way that I can see this are there other things that I haven't uncovered you know so those are just some different ways of asking questions

another way of refocusing is what we had sort of mentioned here before is by reframing a situation. And that's sometimes really helpful to be able to expand perspective from there. And for example, there was a hiccup with the layout of my book. And it turned out that it kind of delayed the time I'm going to actually like get my physical books to be able to give to people, which I was like, at first I was like, oh, I'm going to disappoint people. And then I realized I was sick last week in another way that I could see that while, this gives me a little bit more space and time to recover now so I can present in the best way that I could do. Different ways of kind of reframing, which allows for a little bit more relaxation.

Another way is by accessing your inner knowing, just like you did, Eric, when your mind was able to go back and say, what did it say? What did it access in that example? Oh, it just recognizes like, okay, settle down. That is a dramatic overreaction. Because again, it's something, it's almost always something really small about not knowing the answer. Yeah. So you have that inner knowing based on your practice. So we can, another way of refocusing is by accessing our inner knowing based on our own experience. I call our own wisdom.

I know for me, that idea of can I be kind to myself or that idea of noticing when I'm activated and taking a moment to lower my shoulders or put my hand on my heart for a second is something that helps me deactivate. I know this about myself. because I've done it a thousand times. So I can kind of shortcut my refocus to that because I know that that's something that I need. I don't really need to ask myself a question. I don't need to reframe anything. I just know what I need because I have a lot of experience with it.

So we all have things like that. Another way of refocusing sometimes is to do something that I call taking a joy break. Sometimes we just need to do something different. And so one of my favorite examples of this is when a client of mine in one of my programs, She's like, you know what, when I feel overwhelmed, the first thing I do is I just even know I recognize that. I'm able to kind of take a beat with it. And then I go straight to my garden and put my hands in the dirt. And for her, that's just accessing something that gives her joy, which joy, humor, play.

These things can flip our emotional experience. So the fourth are, so we got recognized release, refocus, a variety of ways of refocusing. There's other ways of releasing too, because we can release certain beliefs and mindsets as well. is this last piece that most people miss. And this is what makes change really hard for a lot of people. The last R is called reinforce. And what do we need to reinforce? Well, if we believe that neurons that fire together wire together,

and we believe that our perception of any given moment is based on memory. So I know this is a phone right here. I'm holding up my phone for these you're just listening. and I know that because someone showed me that at one point and they said that's a phone, the phone appends, same thing, right? So that helps me see that and I have to question it and I know exactly what needs to do with it. We have experiences all the time where we help ourselves, we activate our parasympathetic nervous system, we relax our shoulders, we have a good conversation with someone.

We think of a new insider idea that really helped us out. Generosity sure that felt good, you know, that kind of thing. But we don't do something that in the field of neuroscience is. called emotional tagging. Emotional tagging supports memory. We want to support the memories that work for us. And so one thing to consider doing is when you notice a new insight or you notice your shoulders dropping or you notice a moment of relief or calm or some way you did a tiny shift that supported you in the moment, then you want to take a moment just kind of close your eyes or keep them open and literally see yourself take a mental snapshot of the moment.

A snapshot of how you're feeling, a snapshot of what you did, a snapshot of yourself in this present moment. Our brain loves to work off pictures and images. I was talking with someone earlier today, and she was like, I wanted to remember my daughter's wedding. And so I took a moment, and I just kind of paused and breathed and I looked at the stones on the wall. I looked at the people all around. I paid attention for a moment. I took a mental snapshot in my mind of this experience. This was years ago and she goes, to this day, I could tell you the

exact colors of those stones, each one of them. I could tell you who was there and what their facial expression was because she intentionally paused and took a mental snapshot. This is the exact same thing. When something works for us from a tiny shift that we make, we want to reinforce it by taking a mental snapshot in our mind and reminding ourselves that this moment matters. And that's how we reinforce it. So recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. Those are the four hours that help us interrupt, recover, and get back on track. I have a few questions within each of those. So I think with the reinforce, I think that's a really important point to be able to tag something. I find myself more and more relying on an ability to look back at a challenging situation and say, oh, that's how I handled it. Oh,

that's what I did there. Oh, that's, right. And that's sort of the reinforcement process is I not only try to encode it in the moment, but I can then call on it and go, oh, I know what, I know what helps me in this situation. I know what will work here. And so I think your whole book is filled with these. there's all these tiny shifts you can do, right? I even feel like cataloging them sometimes is somewhat helpful for me to know, like, here's my little library of things that I can turn to and do that help. Yeah. An example I often give is it's with music.

I know that when I get depressed, that music is helpful. The problem is that when I'm depressed, no music sounds good to me. Like I'll just flip through my library, but nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope. Right. So I just created a playlist of like, just go click on this when you feel that way. And I think we can create a similar playlist of the tiny shifts that help. That's a great idea. I mean, reinforcing, writing it down as a form of reinforcing, talking about your experience as a form of reinforcing. We're looking to reinforce a memory. If you want to make a list of the tiny shifts that have been really helpful, that's another way of recommitting it to memory.

You know, they've been saying in school for so long that, like, taking notes is so important for memory. Writing things down physically is what they mean by that. These are great examples. Yeah. So let's talk about putting all of this kind of into practice. In what situations, you work with clients a lot, so you've been obviously teaching these ideas. Who does this not work for or what happens when people don't get benefit out of this? Like, what goes wrong with this approach, if anything?

You know, if someone is severely emotionally disabled, you want to work with somebody anyway, or not even severely emotionally disabled. Sorry, it's going to be hard to work with anything if that's happening. But if you're really emotionally impacted, I'm just going to support the notion of how important it is to speak with somebody. And by the way, that could be a tiny shift all in its own, meaning like the idea of what's the one decision I need to make that's going to support me? I'm going to reach out to someone and talk to them, a professional. So I don't actually see this really not working for somebody because it's so personalized and contextualized. It's not a model where it's giving a specific directive that's the same for everyone. It's more of an architecture that someone's personal experience can fit into.

So, you know, we can all get better at recognizing how we're feeling. And typically, like, you know, you and me, we didn't grow up learning about emotions or how our body's reacting to things or, you know, being present to really anything but our thoughts. I mean, you know, for the most part, and even then, not in that way. But I think anyone can really do that. And anyone can get better at it. And anyone can get better at noticing the connection with their mind and body, noticing how emotions are biology. and being able to just do something to slightly redress a little bit more ease in the reactivity. Now, where this could go wrong, I'll say, is if somebody confuses the second R with relaxation,

because that's not what that's meant to be. And so what that means is they recognize it and they try and relax their body, but they won't relax, and they say, this isn't working for me, this is not for me. What it's really meant to do is it's a leaning in toward easing. It's more of a verb of releasing tension, not that you arrive at a state of relaxation. That's not what that's about. So it could go wrong if there's a misinterpretation of the step. And I think refocusing at that point could support anybody.

I'll add a caveat to that. Depending on how impacted you are emotionally in the moment, could be really helpful to do it with another person, whether it's a trained professional or a good friend. that you feel really comfortable and safe with, that's where that could be done in partnership. It can be really helpful. And even reinforcing, I think, could be supportive in partnership. The more people we have around us that, you know, can support our good moments.

That gives us a boost. But being able to do what you're saying, even write down physically, like the moments that were the tiny shifts that were supportive to you and put them down to support your memory because also when we're really impacting, we're really depressed or highly anxious, our memory like, gone. Yeah, that's the part of our brain that's like, I'm going offline now. Yeah. You know, I've got a method that I teach called still points, which are similar to tiny shifts.

They're more something not that we do in response to something, but something that we more try and insert into lots of different points in our day. And I think the things that I see make an approach like this not work. for people or a couple. One is we just don't remember, right? It's just hard for us to remember, like, here's a loop, I'm in it, to recognize it, to do it. I mean, I think that's one of the big ones. The other one that I think is really important also is that a lot of times the tiny shift or the still point that I'm describing, it's mildly helpful, but oftentimes very mild. And we, We want more help than that.

We want like, I'm just going to do this thing and I'm suddenly going to feel better. And my experience is that the thing about these sort of small interventions or small approaches or small moments is that any one of them on their own isn't really that big of a thing. It's when they accumulate that all of a sudden things really start to shift. been my experience. So if I give somebody a practice of doing still points, a still point of like, we set your alarm to go off four times a day and each time you just spend a minute noticing five things you can see, five things you can feel, five things you can hear. Any one of those, okay, great, that was a lovely little 10 second exercise. But if you do those day after day after

day, all of a sudden your ability to be more present does start to shift. And I think that's the challenge that a lot of people face with this sort of small approach to anything is that we want results way faster and when we don't get them we then go well this thing doesn't work i'm going to push back slightly on that please what i've actually found is that first just acknowledging what you said and and also saying yes to that too when the expectation is that when when there's a sense of i need to fix it all with this moment you know right now our expectation is whenever we don't meet an expectation, a hidden expectation, we get deflated, and we can be demotivating. But the simple interruption sometimes, that's why we want to really keep it simple.

We want to keep it, we want to kind of back up and say, all you need to know for now is just be aware, see if you can be curious in naming how you're feeling. And that's it. You need to do nothing more. And then just allowing that to be without giving a whole method or a formula all at once, all you need to do now is notice where you're, where in the day your shoulders are bunching up towards your ears and softening. And a simple thing like that, the feedback I've gotten has been game-changing. Like just being able to notice where tension is in your body and begin to soften it changes the person's level of presence.

And it's something so simple and so small all in its own that it can create a big aha or kind of a big shift. Now, I think the danger is, and what you're noting is there needs to be some level of consistency. And if there's not consistency, well, then you forget about it and you slide back. That aha moment wasn't enough to get that one moment, wasn't enough in the field of the decades of your life that you've had of conditioning, right? Yeah. Right. So what's going to support you in being able to be consistent. And so that's why you probably noticed when I, in tiny shifts, one of the things that I was so intentional of doing was I wanted to say,

I want this to be so low of a lift for people because the whole premise, the chapter one is called the culture of overwhelm. The whole premise is like, guys, we're all like living in this state of overwhelm right now. I'm not going to ask you to lift anything heavy here because that's not going to work, that I sprinkled these tiny insights and tiny shifts in action in the book where just by reading the book, you're experiencing these shifts with repetition. Just by reading the book alone, you'll experience these shifts with the consistency and repetition that will create an experience as you go through the entire book without you needing to lift

anything really that heavy. That was the intentional design within the book. Not telling people to go out and go do all these practices. and do these meditations or go do this 20-minute exercise, like, nothing like that. Because look, the reality is when you're holding a book, I don't know. I don't know what the follow-through on that really is if you're asking someone to do heavy lifts, you know, in the book. Yeah.

Because I've done that before in other books. So that's my hope. So to just acknowledge what you're saying and weave in a strategy that can support the consistency that can move through that initial like, well, I don't know if I felt enough or I don't know if I can continue doing this on my own type of thing. As we wrap up, take one thing from today and ask yourself, how will I practice this before the end of the day? For another gentle nudge, join Good Wolf Reminders text list.

It's a short message or two each week, packed with guest wisdom and a soft push towards action. Nearly 5,000 listeners are already loving it. Sign up free at one you feed.net slash SMS. No noise, no spam, just steady encouragement to feed your good wolf. Well, thank you so much for coming back on. I really enjoyed the book. It makes a lot of sense to me, obviously. Yeah, we've seen a lot of things similar. And thank you. Always a pleasure. Yeah, that's great. I'll just let everyone know as we go. Like, if you remember nothing else from this time with me and Eric, it's that if we can kind of keep it simple, one tiny shone. shift and how you relate to your emotions and noticing what you're feeling and how you're relating them can change the trajectory of your day. And if there's repetition and consistency of that

can change the trajectory of your life. Proof is in the eating of the pudding. Try it on. See what you notice. Beautiful way to end. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it.

Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.