Episode 271 Minisode: Your Power Is In The Pause
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You know those out-of-body moments when some other version of you takes over? You lose your shit with one of your kids. Or make a scene in the restaurant like some bitter old woman. Or you completely drop the ball on something like you never even had any intention of following through in the first place. These make funny stories, but in the moment, it feels like you’ve undergone a permanent personality shift.
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And you can’t even imagine how you’re ever going to get back to normal. And that’s where we all forget that feelings aren’t facts. And what I want to share with you today is when and why your biology hijacks your mind and the exact steps that you need to take to regain control. As simple as it sounds, once you stop believing every thought in your head, you’ll realize that you always have more power than you think. And your power
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lives in the pause, the space between the stimulus and the response. And in this episode, I’m going to show you how to find it.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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I wanna do a quick lesson on the nervous system because the state of your nervous system determines what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling and then of course what you’re doing. And we can be very bipolar in our self-awareness. We laugh about the drunk version of ourself that did that or the bitchy version of ourself that did that or the overzealous overachiever version of ourself that.
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joined a CSA and committed to working a table at the farmer’s market every Saturday. But when we are in any particular mood, especially a negative emotional mood, we are very attached to the ideas that we are having as though they are permanent and forever. We will never change our mind because this is how it is, always has been, and always will be. And so the most important skill that you need
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is an awareness that the way you are feeling and thinking in any given moment can change in any given moment. And the skill that you are in this program to learn is how to recognize the thinking patterns and the emotions that go with different states of your nervous system so that instead of allowing them to control you, you’re able to navigate to the thinking and feeling patterns that will cause
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happiness for yourself in the future, which sounds super simple and easy, right? But unfortunately, the states of your nervous system where you need that perspective, that big picture zoomed out perspective the most are exactly the states where biologically you simply don’t have it. And that is where mindfulness becomes such a powerful tool because the ability to shift your attention and shift your focus
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is a skill. Like you have to practice that. You have to practice disengaging from the thoughts and feelings as being like part of your identity into the observer, the seat of the observer. And you’re just witnessing the thoughts and feelings as they move through and affect your body. And the reason this is so important is because in our modern life, the source of our stress is
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literally our own thoughts. It is a story we’re telling ourselves about what is happening in the outside world. And many of us have come to live in a chronic state of stress as though it is normal. We are not mindful of the fact that how our bodies respond and react to the world and the thoughts that are running through our head and the emotions that we are experiencing. We are not mindful that that is a product of our
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own bodies, our own physiology. Your nervous system has basically two modes. You’ve got your sympathetic nervous system, which is your stress response, and then your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your calming down response. And it is the sympathetic nervous system’s job to ensure your physical survival. And it evolved to respond to real life and death situations in nature.
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actual predators and threats that if you did not avoid, you would die. And so there is a biological mismatch in terms of our physiological response and our environmental stressors and problems. So we find ourselves living with the fight, flight, freeze, flock, fawn, and flop response of our sympathetic nervous system when the threat or the predator is a funny look from somebody at the grocery store.
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or an email with a passive aggressive undertone or a number on a paper that says we owe more money than we thought we did. And because the sympathetic nervous system is designed to keep you alive, it responds very quickly. It is not a conscious process, but your sympathetic nervous system has the power to completely control your physical and emotional resources. Take over in a split second.
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and fill your body with stress hormones like cortisol and tensing your muscles for action. And you cannot control or stop that from happening. Now, over time, you condition yourself to respond to things differently. But in terms of where you are at right now, that response is going to happen. Your challenge is to notice when it happens and then put some space between.
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your knee jerk reaction and your response. When you are physically safe, then the only real threat is your own stress response. And recognizing when you’re experiencing that and consciously choosing to shift your focus to the real problem, which is the reaction in your body, and take actions to return your body
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to a state of calm and composure and connection and safety, because that is the only way you can reclaim your own power of focus and intention. Because as long as you exist in a state of stress, you’re not actually in control of your attention and focus. And so understanding that your primary problem always is to
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deal with your body so that your blood pressure goes down and your heart rate goes down and your muscles relax and you feel balanced and harmonious inside your body. That is the only way you can access higher level thinking skills and executive function with abstract planning and creativity and logical reasoning and big picture perspective. Slowing yourself down enough.
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to where you can recognize when you’re having a physiological response, which may just mean you notice your mind is racing and really busy up there. It’s real busy and loud and noisy up there. Just noticing that is what allows you to choose an alternate path, is what allows you to disengage that stress response so that you can reclaim control over your brain.
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There’s a quote by Viktor Frankl, who is a Holocaust survivor, famous author, super inspiring story. And his quote is, between stimulus and response, there is space. And it is in that space that we have the power to choose our response. So that’s where I kind of talk about the difference between reaction and response. They’re just words. But when you’re just reacting,
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you are reacting subconsciously, you are reacting in that stress response. When you put space and pause and regulate your nervous system, you reclaim control, you reclaim your power. Your power is in the pause.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80%, so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.