When Thought Work Isn’t Working

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 107, When Thought Work Isn’t Working.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As an eating psychology practitioner, a certified life coach, and a weight loss expert, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Welcome to the podcast.

Today, I want to talk about why thought work might not be working.

I know for me, I have been here a lot of times, and I know a lot of my clients are here too.

They are trying so hard to be the boss of their brain, so hard to create the results that they want, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

It’s not getting them the result that they want.

Now, y’all know that I’m a big believer in thought work, and if you’re new around here, you’re probably like, what in the heck is thought work?

Well, thought work is just looking at what you’re currently thinking or believing and seeing what kind of a result it’s creating, or we can also use thought work to create a result.

And to do that, we decide what result we want or what outcome we want, what actions will get us there, what feeling we will need to feel in order to take those actions, and then what thought or beliefs we will need to think in order to generate that feeling.

That’s thought work, okay?

We talk a lot about thought work here on the podcast.

So what happens when you’re trying really, really hard to create a result?

You want it, but for some reason, you just can’t get there.

You just can’t get yourself to accomplish it.

For example, I coached a mom the other day who really wants to stop yelling at her kids.

But for some reason, in the heat of the moment, she always ends up just shouting at them.

And she told me that she’s practiced writing.

I’m a mom who speaks softly and kindly to her kids.

She says she writes this 20 times every day.

I coached another client who really wants to stop binge eating, but she just can’t seem to break the cycle.

And another client who finds herself over thinking everything.

She seems to be stuck in the same worry thoughts.

So, why do we do?

I’m gonna quote Paul here.

I think it’s Romans 7 something.

I don’t understand why I act the way I do.

I don’t do what I know is right.

I do the thing I hate.

Do you ever feel like that?

I know I do.

I’m like, oh my gosh, I know I don’t want to be doing this.

I don’t understand why I keep doing this.

I keep telling myself we’re not doing this, or I keep telling myself we’re going to do this.

I want to do this, but I keep doing the thing that I don’t want to be doing.

So, what isn’t working and why isn’t it working?

Now, it took me a long time to figure this out.

I had some goals that I was working on, and I just couldn’t seem to get the success that I wanted despite coaching and tons and tons of thought work.

I kept finding myself stuck in the same patterns, the same thought loops, the same victim mentality, the same woe is me over and over and over again.

Even though I knew better, I knew well aware what was going on.

And I was beginning to think that I was broken.

It was super frustrating to not be able to figure it out.

So I went on the search for why thought work was not working.

And after a long time, I found the answer.

Do you want to know what it is?

Of course you do.

That’s why you’re here.

I’m gonna tell you.

The answer to why thought work isn’t working is because we have something that has a greater power than thought work going on.

It pulls rank every single time.

And that is our nervous system.

Our nervous system will biologically, okay, this isn’t something we can control.

It’s biological.

It’s just something that our body automatically does.

Our nervous system will biologically hijack our thinking whenever we enter a stress response.

So essentially, thought work isn’t working because our nervous system is running the entire show.

It’s ruling all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, all of our actions, and all of our results.

So really fast, what is our nervous system?

Our nervous system is basically just a bunch of nerves that send messages from the body to the brain and the brain to the body, okay?

It is how the mind and the body communicate with each other.

And each of us has a unique nervous system.

Did you know that?

Our nervous systems are not all the same.

Each of us has a unique nervous system, and that nervous system is constantly scanning for safety and danger.

And it does this by picking up on cues all around us.

And then it compares those cues to past learning, past experiences, past history, past traumas, past everything, okay?

It bases all of these things on what it picks up, and then it will decide if we are safe or if we are in danger, and then it will react.

And when our nervous system senses danger, it’s activated.

And when it’s activated, we cannot access that wise part of our brain.

That wise part of our brain is the part that is logical.

It thinks logically.

It’s capable of reminding us of our new belief.

It’s capable of thinking ahead to the future.

It’s capable of working towards the goal that we want and taking the action and believing the things that we need to believe to get there.

And instead, what it does is when it is triggered or when it’s stressed or activated, it will automatically go into survival mode and just take over.

We biologically can’t stop to think.

We just react.

We just do whatever our nervous system tells us to do.

Interesting, right?

When I teach my clients about the nervous system, I like to use the analogy of a thermostat.

So in my home, we have a nest thermostat, and we can set the temperature to be, let’s say, 75 degrees.

And when it’s at 75 degrees, let’s call this home base.

Home base is where we experience safety and connection.

It’s where we feel comfortable.

Okay?

Now, what happens is if the temperature rises above 75 degrees, my air conditioner is going to kick on, and it’s going to bring it back to home base.

If it dips below, my furnace is going to kick on, and it’s going to bring it back up.

This is how a resilient nervous system should work.

This is emotional resiliency.

Some of you might have taken an emotional resiliency class at church.

This is emotional resilience.

This is how an emotional resilient nervous system works.

But because we are human beings living in a fallen world, we are going to experience stress and overwhelm.

We can’t stay at home base all of the time.

Sorry, not sorry.

Every now and then, maybe even daily, something’s going to trigger us, and it’s going to bring us out of home base.

But if we have a resilient nervous system, it’s going to eventually return back to home base, right?

Our furnace is going to kick on, our air conditioner is going to kick on, and we’ll end up back at home base, where there’s safety and connection, and we’re able to use the cognitive functions of our wise brain.

But what happens is sometimes we get so stressed out, or something really emotional or traumatic happens, and we rise above home base, and we stay there.

And when we’re in this state, our nervous system is completely running the show.

We cannot thought work ourselves out of it.

We have to do some other things in order to bring it back down to home base.

Now, if we stay in this hyper state too long, our body knows that it’s way too much on our system.

That stress, we can’t keep living in that stress.

And so what it does is it will kick us down into a hypo state.

And in this hypo state, we feel unmotivated, we feel depressed, we feel apathetic, we feel kind of Eeyore-isc, right?

From Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore-isc.

All those kinds of things.

And again, thought work doesn’t work because it only works from home base.

We cannot access the cognitive functions of our brain when we are in these dysregulated states.

So I also want to throw out a little side note here.

When we are in either of these dysregulated states, hyper or hypo, we will usually use food and eating to try to self-regulate.

And we do, we get a dopamine hit whenever we eat, which helps us to feel better for a little bit.

The thing is, we will continue to eat because eating works.

It works.

It is a solution to regulate us.

But it comes with the price.

We pay for it in our weight.

We pay for it in our health.

We pay for it in a foggy brain.

We pay for it in achy joints.

We pay for it in not being able to live the kind of life that we really want to live.

Now, the other thing that you might find interesting is that physiologically, now that’s a big word, right?

Physiologically, when we are in a dysregulated state, our digestion and metabolism slow down.

We are not assimilating food as well.

And the other thing is that our liver is dumping tons of sugar into our bloodstreams so that we have energy to fight or to run away or to play dead.

But we’re not actually physically doing any of those things.

So we’re not using up any of this sugar, and it just ends up in our body being stored on our body as excess fat.

Our nervous system really does run the show.

So if you are struggling with feeling out of control around food, if you are struggling with yelling at your kids and not being able to stop, or you’re struggling with wanting to work out, but you’re not working out, if you are not getting the result that you want, even though you are practicing thought work, you are trying to take action, you are doing all the things, I promise you, it isn’t that you’re doing something wrong.

It’s just your nervous system.

And you need to help bring it back to home base.

If you feel like you might be struggling with some of this, reach out to me.

Schedule a call with me.

Let’s talk about this.

Let’s see if we can’t get your nervous system back to home base, so that you can get the results that you want to get.

All right, friends, that’s all I have for you today.

I will see you next week.