How to Repattern Your Brain

0:06Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you're trying to dominate your goals, go to goals2025.com. I just released a brand new 17-page ebook to help you plan, set, and accomplish your goals. So if you wanna get it, you can get absolutely free at goalswithanS2025.com. Today, we're gonna be talking about how to repattern your brain, how to change and repattern your feelings, and how to change and repattern your actions as well. And I'm going to teach you a behavioral technique from psychology to help you actually repattern yourself.

0:50And so this is really important, what we're going to talk about today. And this is a really important part of everything we're going to discuss, okay? In life, we often take actions that line up with how we feel. That just tends to be natural for a human. You feel a certain way, you take actions that line up with how you feel. That's all good and well when you've had a great day. Like when you have a good day, you have a great cup of coffee, you got a whole lot of sleep, you wake up and you watch the sunrise, you put your children on the school bus and they kiss you goodbye. Papa, I love you. And you're like, this is a great fucking day, right?

1:32All of that is good. But what about the days when you aren't feeling it? when you just feel like crap. Maybe you got crappy sleep. Maybe you just don't feel as upbeat as you like to. Maybe you don't feel like talking to anyone. You want to be a recluse and just not go see anybody. Maybe you want to, you know, not answer the phone when someone, I'm just going to send it to voicemail when it rings. Maybe you have a friend that you're supposed to do dinner with tonight. You say, I don't really feel it. I'm going to decide to cancel dinner tonight. What do you do on those days? You just, I'm going to, I'm going to cancel it.

2:09I'm going to, you know, just go ahead and leave work. I'm not really feeling it today. And it's like a little teeny tiny thing. Like it's tiny and it's probably unnoticeable the way that you feel. It's just like, yeah, I'm not really feeling it, but you cancel things and you don't show up a hundred percent and you don't, you know, you're not as fully present with your children and you're not working as hard at growing your own business. And you do all these little teeny tiny things all day long. And unconsciously what you're doing is you're making these small decisions, which add up over time based off of how you feel.

2:44What happens when you don't feel really good and you bring it into work? You know, you don't, you don't take that extra meeting with that person who's on your team. You don't do that, that one-on-one with your most important team member today. What happens when you feel this way and you don't feel a hundred percent and then you go and you bring it into your fitness routine? Uh, you know what? I'm just not, not really feeling it today. and you decide to skip the gym today because you're not feeling it. Today was just too long. I had such a long day. I'll go to the gym tomorrow. And so it's like what happens is we don't really pay attention to, and it's a tiny thing, we don't really pay attention to how we feel and how that changes our thoughts and our actions throughout the course of the day.

3:27And unless you're consciously paying attention, our feelings will almost always influence our actions. And that's once again, unless we consciously step in. Because your thoughts influence your feelings, and your feelings influence your actions, and your actions influence your results, and your results make up your entire life. And so if you have, you know, two or three of these days a week where you're not really feeling it, let's say it's two days a week. Over the course of an entire year, that's 104 days of quote unquote not really feeling it. that's a third of the year almost. How different is your life if you're able to take different actions on a third of your days to actually keep stepping in the right direction for your life?

4:15It can even be something as like having a bad day at work, which influences how you feel. And then you take that and you bring it home to your family. And now you blow up on your children on accident and your spouse and your children get the bad end of your emotions. so a lot of people aren't really taught how to deal with their emotions and then what happens is after you blow up on your family and you calm down you're like damn i really regret how i acted the problem with all of this is when you act consistent with how you feel now i want you understand and i want this to be a big piece of today i'm not saying ignore your feelings i'm not saying ignore your emotions, but we're going to talk deeper into that today.

4:59The problem with what we're talking about is when you act unconsciously and then those actions are consistent with how you feel. Those actions and those feelings become more hardwired into you as a pattern. And clearly that is not a pattern that you want. So like for instance, if you feel sad or in a low state and you decide to isolate yourself and stay in. Most times, psychologists will tell you this, most times that isolation leads you to feeling more sadness. And if you're staying in your room or you're staying in your house, your message to your brain might be, I am sad, which makes you more likely to stay in another day.

5:47And that can increase the sadness that you feel. So it perpetuates over and over and over again. When being around someone that you really care about and cares about you might be the best thing to get you out of your sadness. Being with your friends when you feel sad might be the best thing to get you out of it. Or maybe you can tell them about what's going on. You can vent to them and you can feel seen. You can feel heard and you can get that out of you. See, when we take actions that line up with how we feel, oftentimes what we're doing is we're adding fuel to the fire. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that's really a hard loop to get out of.

6:24This is how a lot of people find themselves in deep, dark states is because it slowly and slowly and slowly gets worse because they continue to keep taking actions that line up with how they feel. So then what do we do? What is it? What's the solution? Well, there's something that's really interesting in psychology that's called behavioral activation, which basically means this. when we identify how we feel, we do the opposite of how we feel. Because normally what happens when you normally feel something, you act the way that you're feeling. So when we act in ways that are opposite of how we feel, the feedback to your brain does not confirm the emotion, which is really key.

7:12And in most cases, because it does not confirm the emotion, it eases the emotion. It can even change the way that you're feeling completely. So this is important for you to understand. When we are acting how we feel, we are confirming that feeling. Okay? When we are acting how we feel, we are confirming that feeling, which then turns into this self-fulfilling prophecy. It becomes, we get momentum in the wrong direction. but by acting the opposite of how you feel you are not confirming it which in turn makes it easier for us to change that feeling now disclaimer like i said just a minute ago i'm not saying ignore your feelings i'm not saying ignore your emotions there is time for that there is space for that but understand if there is something that you are trying not to repattern within yourself this is something that you need to try and we will be right back and now back to the show when you start to notice and this is what's really important is that most people don't really notice their emotions most people from being truly transparent what i found over the 19 years of working with people are not really high with emotional intelligence like for me i was never taught emotional intelligence life just kind of happened and we just kept you know trucking on it's kind of the way that it was.

8:36And then one day I woke up and I was like, I don't really understand how I am or how I feel or why I am this way. And so whenever I would feel an emotion and I noticed my body shift, I noticed my state shift. I was like, hold on, what's going on inside of me? And a lot of times at the very beginning, I was like, I don't, why do I feel this way? I don't know why I feel this way. And then what happens is you start to build more self-awareness. And so what you want to do is you want to start noticing, okay, I feel something inside of me. I feel kind of like low energy. I feel like, I guess a little bit sad.

9:10I feel like isolating myself. No, no, no. When you feel something, do something different. So if you feel like isolating yourself, call a friend just to come over a chat. Do a FaceTime with your best friend. If you feel lethargic, go for a walk. Get your body moving in some sort of way. If you don't feel motivated to do anything, take a small step in the right direction. You don't have to make a huge step, just take a small step in the right direction. If you feel negative, take a second and look around and say, what am I grateful for? Like, can I practice gratitude in this moment? If you feel, you know, judgmental, compliment that person.

9:53If you notice yourself starting to feel really anxious, slow down do deep breathing and tell yourself i'm safe if you want to eat junk food fast if you're pissed off smile anyways if you're feeling really pessimistic find something to be positive about if you feel like a little negative nancy and you're all up in your feelings boo booby doo watch a comedy if you feel worthless help somebody else the reason why this works is a couple different things you have to understand about your body okay the first thing you need to understand about your body is endorphins for instance if you feel like staying in bed but you decide you know what i don't care how i feel i'm gonna go for a run instead and you just even though you freaking hate putting on your shoes and those fucking socks and you get dressed and you don't want to do this, and you just decide, I'm going to go for a run.

10:51I'm going to put on my favorite song in my headphones and I can be as pissed off as I want to be, but I'm just going to go for a run. You go for a run instead, eventually your body's going to start releasing endorphins. Endorphins are feel-good chemicals, which make you, yes, ding, ding, ding, feel better. But also your brain and your body will want to do it again next time that you find yourself feeling like staying in bed because your brain's going, well, hold on, last time we were in bed and we didn't want to leave, we did go for a run. And then we felt good after we got done with that run.

11:25And so it's like, you notice yourself wanting to stay in bed, go for a run, see what happens. And you can be as pissed off as you want to be. You can be, you can be mad at me. That fucking podcaster told me to do this. I don't know if this is going to work, but I'll just do it just because he said it. I'll, I'll prove him wrong. And you can get pissed off the whole time you're getting dressed and be pissed off the whole time you're going for a run and you come back and be like, damn, I actually feel way better. Perfect. Why? Because you acted differently than you felt. You didn't continue down that dire, you know, this is how the downward spirals happen.

11:57So that's the first thing is endorphins are a very important part of this. The next thing is dopamine rewards. When you don't feel good, but you do something that will make you feel good, your brain and your body release dopamine. And dopamine is the chemical of motivation. Dopamine is a feel-good chemical, but is also the chemical of motivation. So if you're sitting there and you don't feel really good, you don't really want to, and you're just like, oh, damn it. Being a little negative Nancy, maybe? Watch a comedy. Put on something. Who's your favorite comedian? What's your favorite movie? Make yourself laugh a little bit.

12:34It releases is dopamine. And dopamine is the chemical that makes you feel good, but it's also the chemical of motivation. So when you start to get more dopamine in your system, you start to feel a little bit different, start to feel a little bit better. Also, another thing that's really interesting about dopamine that a lot of people know about is that if you're stressed or you're pissed off, you have cortisol that's running through your brain. It's the chemical that's running through your brain. You're kind of pissed off. You got the cortisol. It's the stress hormone. The interesting thing about dopamine is that dopamine buffers against cortisol.

13:07And so if you have a lot of cortisol because of just the way that you're feeling, when you have dopamine come in, it lowers your cortisol. So if you're really pissed, watch something that's funny. Put on a comedy, whatever it is. Put in, you know, go to YouTube, type in SNL skits. Watch some of the, you know, the most played ones on there because clearly they must be funny if they're the most played. And that's what you start to do is you're starting to actually change the chemicals inside of your brain by taking the driver's seat. And then the next piece of this is something that's called neuroplasticity.

13:37So neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change itself. But if you don't change anything, nothing changes. So if you continue to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, and it's not what you want, you're deepening the wiring of what you don't want. But if you decide, I'm going to make a change, even though the change hardest at the very beginning, the first time that you do it. It becomes easier and easier and easier. When you start doing it over and over and over again, you're re-patterning and rewiring your brain to be different. And over time, the new pattern becomes stronger than the old one, which means you're more likely to do the new one, which is the one that you want.

14:16I don't feel good. I'm going for a run. I'm not going to let's do it. I'm going to act differently than how I feel. And it becomes easier to just keep doing it over and over again. It doesn't change just FYI. It doesn't change from just doing it one time. It's over and over and over again. A repatterning is something that you have to do for a while. You know, like I'm a perfect example. I was a negative little Nancy, a negative little shit. I could find the bad in anything. I was like the type of person when I was younger that was like, oh, you won the lottery. Oh my God, you know how much you have to pay in taxes?

14:47Like, fuck that guy. That guy sucks, right? Like, but the thing about him was I was like, I don't want to be this way. I don't want to be this way. I'm going to start to find the silver lining in every single thing that happens. And now for me, now that it's been, you know, 19 years of working on myself, it's almost like to a fault. I can almost always find the positive in anything because I just wanted to repattern myself. The point is to repattern yourself. Things in life, in your life will not change unless you change. The first thing is the awareness. How do I feel? What am I feeling inside of my body.

15:19Is this how I want to feel? Not really. Okay. What's the opposite action that I can take to repattern myself? You don't have to be who you've always been. You can change. You can get up and be completely different. You're not a tree. You're not stuck there forever. So how do you want to change? Who do you want to be? How do you want to feel? What actions can you take right now? Or when you find yourself in those deep, darker emotions, that would re-pattern yourself. Because ultimately it goes back to what we were saying. You know, if you look at it, what you want to do is not confirm to your brain the emotion.

16:00So you act the opposite of the way that you feel. And so when we act the way that we feel, we're confirming the feeling. By acting the opposite of how we feel, we are not confirming it. And in turn, it makes it easier for us to change the feeling. If you do this, if you use behavioral activation, you can start to repattern yourself, your brain, and your wiring. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at RobDialJr. The only way this podcast grows is from you guys sharing it. So if you would do it, I would greatly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart because ultimately, it's all I want to do.

16:38I just want to help more people and try to help people's lives become better. So if you would share it, you're being a part of letting it grow and helping us help more people's lives. And once again, if you want to get the free ebook on how to dominate your goals for 2025, go to goals2025.com. That is goals with an S, 2025.com. Download it. And I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.