"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." - Jung

In order to master your mind, you've got to read the manual on how it works. In this episode, I synthesize everything I've learned about neuroscience as it pertains to mental health. I explore the dopamine cycle and how it relates to mental health struggles and addiction, as well as offer insights on how to heal and leverage the dopamine cycle. I also discuss how childhood dopamine wiring affects our brain, body, and behavior in adulthood, and just because something was wired as "safe" or "good" in childhood, doesn't mean its optimal for adulthood. Using various Huberman podcasts as a framework and guide, I provide a succinct version of all his protocols that relate to mental health. By putting together these protocols with complementary mindsets, my hope is to bring you a synergetic dose of healing at the brain and body level.

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be happy for getting ghosted, but here we are. It's almost like the only way to truly get over your fear of rejection and abandonment is to get repeatedly rejected and abandoned. In other words, the only way out is through, and this is me finally getting to the other side of my breakup. The deep pain it caused pushed me to learn more about attachment styles, not just from how they behave in their adult life, but where that behavior comes from. By finally coming to a deeper understanding, do I really see that people's coping mechanisms have a lot more to do with them than they have to do with you. We can be so quick to internalize people's rejections as indications that we are inadequate, but sometimes it can be because we're so impactful that we leave a mark they don't know what to do with. In any case, this is me leaving shame and blame behind and finally owning the skills I always needed to be healthy in relationships. If ghosting got me more stable self-worth, honed emotional regulation skills, healthier communication understanding, deeper wisdom on attachment, the ability to recognize my own and others' cognitive distortions and emotional reasoning impacting their logic when in a triggered state, greater discernment to be stronger than my need, diversifying my needs, and finally come back to myself in a way that I'll never abandon myself again - then I guess it was a win. Sometimes painful consequences are necessary to shake you out from behaviors that are out of balance so you will finally be motivated to make the necessary changes - and that was definitely the case for me. Now that I have really felt and processed and learned the lessons from this breakup, I'm finally ready to move on and let it all go. Hope it helps you do the same.

In the beginning of me learning emotional regulation, I didn’t really know how to “feel my feelings” - like what did that even mean or look like? I put together this short little audio guide to give you a real time example of how I emotionally regulated today - putting blueprint for the anxiously attached overview into a real life practicum. When we get more into interrupting the cycle, I’ll have different situations to work off of, but since this was relevant now, wanted to give you an example of what emotional regulation really looks like in your day to day life in practice - not just theory. Hope this helps!