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What if I told you the very things you're trying so hard to fix about yourself, you know, the patterns, the stuckness, and the old stubborn habits that you secretly judge yourself for, what if they aren't actually problems, but proof that your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do? You're listening to Relish, the podcast for people ready to stop chasing self-improvement and start savoring their lives. If you're tired of the hamster wheel of healing and hungry for more joy, presence, and meaning, you're in the right place. Hello and welcome back to the Relish Podcast. I am your host, Alysia, and I'm particularly stoked today because two of my special interests are colliding in this conversation, and those are one, what it means to be human, and two,
neuroscience. So, what I am about to unfold for you has fundamentally shifted my relationship to personal growth for the better. It's made me feel freer and lighter and more accepting and grateful for my human brain patterns and all. And my hope is that it offers you a meaningful shift, too. So, if you haven't already, please follow and subscribe. And if today's episode resonates, drop a quick rating, share it with someone. I appreciate it. Okay. So, today is about validating that you are not broken, you're wired. A quick acknowledgement. I am not a neuroscientist. I am a neuro nerd with a passionate interest um and also a certification in applied neuroscience and brain health. And I hold that with a lot of care. You know, there is a
studied phenomenon called the sane effect. It's uh stands for snee stands for seduct seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. And this is where people tend to trust ideas more if they are wrapped up in neuroscience terminology even if it's inaccurate or irrelevant information. Okay. Now, unfortunately, I see a lot of people online misusing neuroscience in this way and it's hindering critical thinking of the listener, the viewer. So I want you to know that when I talk about neuroscience, I commit to doing it accurately and responsibly and only, you know, when it's meaningfully supporting your understanding. My goal is not to impress you or convince you of anything.
It's to empower your own critical thinking and agency. Okay? I just love understanding why something is the way it is. So um know that I believe this complex organ of your brain deserves nuance and respect. And with that, we will dive in together. We're going to go back to the beginning or back to your beginning, rather. We're going to go back to when you were born. So, to some people, this might seem a bit of a reach for neuroscience. But as a science lover, I believe we are more than a body. And I imagine if you're listening to this, you probably do too. You know, I believe that you and all of us came into this world as some kind of pure, you know, soul. let's say or imagine,
you know, uh some call it a true self, a higher self, an essence, a capital S self. There are a lot of names for it, but essentially this bright whole unconditioned aspect of self. But your soul landed in a human body and that body has a brain whose single non-negotiable job is survival. Okay? And your brain learns through conditioning. It's adapting constantly. And as a child, you and all of us developed patterns to navigate your environment. So you might have taken on patterns like peopleleasing or perfectionism or um suppressing your emotions. Hundreds of others, all these adaptive behaviors that at one time did keep you safe. And they went on to wire your neural pathways into your powerful autopilot mode, your fixed mode, as we
discussed previously. Now, here's the amazing part. Your brain doesn't just react. It predicts. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, I love her work, she calls this body budgeting or allostasis. So, imagine your brain as kind of like your body's CFO. Okay, it's constantly forecasting the internal resource needs, you know, your glucose, your oxygen, your water. And this is brilliant because then you don't need to consciously manage the systems like breathing and digestion and heart rate. Thank goodness. But the brain's objective is survival, not joy, not authenticity, not uh, you know, self-expression. No, it's to keep you alive. Neuroscientists talk about an important mechanism called predictive processing. And this means that your
brain is almost continuously guessing what your experience is going to be. And that includes your internal states like heartbeat or hunger. And then the brain goes on to interpret them and often to interpret them as emotions. So a flutter in your stomach for instance could feel like anxiety or it could feel like excitement. The sensations are almost the same but your brain will translate it differently based on your past experiences and context. So in other words, your brain actively creates your present reality based on predictions stemming from the past. Now there are farreaching implications here about emotions especially that we have to talk about at some point um because essentially this suggests that
our emotions are not just happening to us we are constructing them and that means we have some agency over them and that you know doesn't necessarily align with our felt sense experience or the way that a lot of people in this kind of self-help world talk about emotions but I'm digressing a little bit okay so we'll save that for another time. So anyway, this predictive processing explains clearly why willpower rarely is going to lead to lasting transformation. Change, think about this word change. By definition, change is doing something differently than you do it now. Changing your habits is actually really costly to the brain. You're asking the brain to expend energy on something uncertain. And the brain loves
certainty. It loves predictability. It loves efficiency. Now your soul, your spirit on the other hand, that you know core of you, um that part of you craves freedom and growth and possibility. It's it's pulling you into the unknown, the fluid mode. The magic that you're after um happens not in choosing, you know, mind over your heart or safety over possibility. It's about embracing the integration of both. So, we're going to explore this more in the future, but for now, what's key is wholeness isn't choosing one or the other. It's embracing safety and possibility, mind and heart. Now, I'm not suggesting we aim to never react again either, okay? Instead, this is about cultivating a conscious capacity to choose that fluid mode often.
Let's talk brain networks. I'm going to introduce three main brain networks, and I have an analogy to help get the complexity across. So imagine that your brain is a bustling newsroom with three main desks. So the first desk, let's call it your anchor desk. This is representative of the executive control network in your brain. And the anchor desk, think about a newsroom, they handle, you know, the main tasks and decisions and actions. And that's true for this network as well. It's um handling your present focused mind. This network is actively processing information. Um, sometimes I might also refer to it as the task positive network, the TPN. The second desk is your features desk. Okay, this is what's
representing the default mode network, the DMN. And the features desk, think about it, in a newsroom. They're dreaming up future scenarios. They're reflecting on what's worked in the past and kind of weaving stories together. And your default mode network is doing this to give your life meaning. The DMN is also associated with thoughts about yourself, self-referential processing. This is where mind wandering and meaning making happens. And the third desk is the assignment desk. This is what is representing your salience network. And this desk, this network is deciding what's important right now. What are you
going to direct your attention between? Which desk, you know, or network is going to get is going to get airtime, if you will. So the salience network is kind of like a switchboard to help you toggle between the other two networks. Now neuroscience once viewed the brain structurally. Uh there was a sense that you know this part of the brain this structural part of the brain does that function and now we know that's a little bit dated and it's recognized you know more as a functional organ. It's a much more complex fluid um organ where different structures and networks can fire together in various ways to create divergent or similar outcomes. And that's why I like the newsroom analogy.
It's more in integrity with what neuroscientists currently understand the nature of the brain to be. Those networks don't just turn on and off like light switches. And a lot of people online kind of talk about them like they do. You know, same goes for sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So people will say, you know, um they turn on their sympathetic or turn off the parasympathetic and get stuck in fight or flight. This is not neurologically technically correct. All right. Another more helpful analogy that my teacher neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay shared with me is these divisions of the autonomic nervous system or these three brain networks for instance they're
really more like volume dials than light switches. So they're constantly kind of adjusting up and down between each other. Now when the DMN dominates you're caught in rumination. It's the fixed mode. But remember the DMN is not bad. Without it, you would have no meaningful narrative of your life. People with dementia, for example, have significantly dialed down DMN activity, which makes it hard for them to maintain a coherent sense of self and story. They basically struggle to stay connected to what's given their life meaning. So, the goal isn't eliminating your DMN or your conditioned patterns. You can't anyway.
I believe it's about integrating them consciously. You can't turn the DMN off. Mindfulness and meditation train your salience network to be more discerning about toggling. So it can toggle more gracefully, let's say, between the meaning we make, the stories we tell about something, the narratives, that's the DMN. Toggle between that and presence and action, the executive control network. So before I go on, pause here and just think about how this idea of volume dials rather than on andoff switches might feel more aligned with maybe your own experiences of patterns or habits or reactions. And does it potentially offer a gentler, kinder way of relating to yourself and your patterns? For me, it's helped me
acknowledge my inevitable humanity. It's helped me embrace fluidity and really find self-acceptance for being a human with a brain. Because here's what I deeply want you to know that I don't think is implicitly clear in most or many current models which tend to be dualistic. Having patterns doesn't make you broken. It makes you human. Often when we awaken to our conditioning, we kind of unintentionally create a binary. You know, conditioning equals bad, spirit equals good. And this inadvertently fuels a sense of shame. And I know that this podcast is about joy, but you are going to hear me talk a lot about shame. It's another interest that I could ramble on about all day.
Shame is the belief that something is inherently wrong with me. And I have seen in myself and in helping others. There can be a sentiment that I am bad if you know I'm in my conditioning if I'm reacting in my patterns or if I'm not doing good enough at my personal work. And so that means that to be good, you know, the other side of that to be good, I have to be authentic and only make choices that are aligned with my highest self. And that's a trap. It can trap us in this cycle of striving to heal enough in order to one day be enough, to be whole. No, we got to dismantle that. Clearly, you are already whole. Even if you never changed another thing about yourself, you'd still be enough. authenticity, at least
what I'm believing and going to share in this podcast, it's not about escaping your conditioning. Um, you know, getting away from the patterns and becoming your true self. No, it's about holding that conditioning compassionately alongside with your truth, your spirit. And I believe we have to hold these binaries loosely, fluidly, honoring both the spirit and the conditioning as meaningful parts of us. There's going to be more on this coming down the line, but for today, the takeaway, you are a human. You have a brain, which is a conditioned organ, and there's no getting away from it. And that's okay. And in fact, it's beautiful, this is another important takeaway. What if being human and having a brain wired for patterns and meaning making and
survival, what if that isn't actually something to transcend, but something to cherish? You might have heard the quote um you're a spiritual being having a human experience. It's a great quote. A lot of teachings kind of emphasize the spiritual part and I want to emphasize and celebrate the human part. You know, your spirit also, I believe, chose this life to experience joy and ice cream and sunsets and love and heartbreak. All of it. Having a default mode network isn't a flaw. It's an incredible gift. Without your DMN, you couldn't remember past experiences. You couldn't plan for future ones. You couldn't have any life narrative or any meaning from your story. You would you might be able to
have fleeting you know sensory pleasure hadonic pleasure but no deep joy no udemonia or purpose as we talked about previously okay so your conditioning isn't a problem it's a part of being human and being human is the true spiritual adventure I think so this subtle shift has allowed me to engage with personal growth not from a place of feeling inadequate but actually from abundance and excitement and curiosity. so that I can really relish and savor this precious human life and live with more presence and more joy. You are already whole again even if you act out all your conditioning for the rest of your life. And your brain is neuroplastic. It's capable of profound change if you want to do that work. But even if you never
rewired another pathway, you would still be beautifully, perfectly whole. So before we close, gently repeat this to yourself. I'm wired for survival. I'm born for freedom. I am already whole exactly as I am. Okay? I'm serious. Say it out loud. Say it. Say it and start believing it. Okay? I already see it in you. No doubt about it. I'm so grateful for you joining this conversation. I can't believe we are 2 weeks in on the Relish Podcast. This has been months in the making. So, I can't express how special it is to have you alongside the first few episodes here with me from the beginning. Thank you for your support. If this episode resonated or offered you
something, please follow, rate, um, you know, five stars would be great. Share it with someone you care about. Come find me on socials, tag me at Alysia Shake on Instagram. I absolutely love connecting with you. I hope you have an amazing weekend. Next week, we uh I'm hoping we're going to launch on Monday. We're going to talk more about being human. And until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate, and relish the beautiful human life that you are wired to experience.
