Hey! Welcome to Lessons from a Quitter where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.
Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. How are you all doing today? I'm doing great. I actually just came back from viewing a beach house that we might rent for a couple of weeks in the summer and I'm so excited about it and I constantly just think about like, what is my life? And the only reason that, not the only reason, but one of the reasons me and my husband can do that I realized is because we're entrepreneurs, because like we can both work from anywhere, um, really at any time and we can set our own schedules and I feel like that is not as possible in corporate America. And because of that we have a lot more freedom in deciding what we're gonna do. And we have a lot of bucket list items and one of 'em was renting a beach house for a couple of weeks in the summer to get to unplug with our kids.
And, um, experience with that must be like, and so I'm super excited about it. So that's what's going on in the very exciting world. Um, now I'm back at my desk recording this podcast. So all the things, the 50 50, but if you are interested, this is my smooth transition into entrepreneurship. Um, I am currently in the middle of my first cohort of the Beginning Business bootcamp. And what that is is a 12 week bootcamp where I help you actually get your business up and running. So for people who have thought about starting a business, for people who have started a business but don't really have consistent income, it the kick in the pants that you kind of need, um, in order to figure out what you need to do, what you need to not do, which is more important, and get you actually up and running.
So you're selling and you're not spending all of your time spinning about what your website should look like or who you're actually helping or can you really help someone? We spend 12 weeks really figuring out exactly what your niche is, what your offer is, what your pricing is, who you're helping, how you help them, what the process is. Um, and then we work on all of the thoughts that are gonna get in your way that are gonna stop you. And I've been having the best time in this group. I love coaching on this stuff. And there's so many things that I think so many people that I think want to do this work and should do this work and have these brilliant gifts that they need to put out into the world. And I'm so excited to watch them do that. So I say all that to say that I'm gearing up to open up the next cohort of that group.
I'm gonna open that up in March, uh, towards, yeah, middle of March. So if you're interested, if you've thought about business, if you are, if you know you wanna be a coach or a consultant, you wanna start an online business and you want like actual guidance and help. And I say actual, what I mean is there's a lot of courses out there which I actually very highly recommend. There's courses that will teach you about online business. But what I see happen all too often is people join these courses that may have thousands of people in there and they'll tell you what to do. They'll say like, you know, you should pick a niche that you know, this is how you pick a niche, let's say. And then when you go to pick it, you're constantly left with questions of like, but is this good enough?
Is this narrow enough? Do I really help these people? How can I help these people? And I think that sometimes it just is a lot more helpful to have someone that can look at it and tell you like, this isn't narrow enough. You can't really target people like that. You should target this. This is how you should sell it. This is the messaging. And that's what we do. That's why I deliberately keep these small. So if you're interested in getting your business up in three months instead of spinning about it for the next 12 months and not actually doing anything, um, join me. But you have to sign up for the wait list 'cause I'm only going to open it to the wait list. You gotta go to quitter club.com/business and sign up and you will be notified when we open doors. Okay, now talking about numbing up, actually it really does relate to this because I've been really thinking a lot about, um, why so many of us don't do the things that we know we want to do for so many people.
And so many people in my group, they want to sell, they know the offer, they know the thing they wanna do, but they just don't do it every time. They have to deal with, let's say the discomfort of putting themselves out there, of making an offer. It's so uncomfortable that they do something else. They procrastinate, they, um, start organizing their house, they need a snack, they scroll Instagram for hours. And a lot of us get really frustrated when we do this. And so I figured it's something that we should talk about on the podcast because all of us do it and it affects all of our lives. It's something I coach on a lot in the quitter club in my membership and in my business program. And it, I've realized we hadn't really talked about it on the podcast.
So I want you to know what it is to numb out to buffer and how to think about it differently and how to approach changing it if that's what you wanna do. So that's what we're gonna talk about.
What do I mean by numbing out? What I mean is there are feelings you don't wanna feel and so you go to do something else in order to not feel those feelings. That's what's happening When you're numbing out, what happens is there's a project I have to do at work. There's a task that has, is coming up that I dread. There is, you know, I don't wanna do the laundry, whatever it is that is gonna create some negative emotion for me and maybe it creates frustration or boredom or inadequacy, stress, anxiety, embarrassment. You get the point, right? It's like bringing up a lot of this discomfort. And we don't like to feel uncomfortable and we're not taught how to feel uncomfortable. We're not taught how to feel the emotions that so many of us have all the time. And so the only thing we can do is try to escape those emotions. For a lot of us, those feelings are so uncomfortable and we don't know what to do with it, that we just think like, I gotta get away from this. And so what we tend to do is we engage in things that numb those emotions for us, okay? That literally it's
Like a um, release valve, right? We wanna release some of the pressure. And so you might find yourself scrolling Instagram for hours and you didn't even realize you were doing it, right? You might find yourself eating an entire bag of chips, but you didn't really taste any of it. You weren't really present, you know, or like conscious for the actual eating. Um, maybe you realize every time you sit down you don't, you're not really choosing to, but you just start cleaning, you start organizing, you start like, oh, lemme just do this next thing. You're moving yourself through something that gives you a hit of dopamine that gives you a feel good feeling that helps lower that negative feeling that you're feeling. So that's all it is buffering you. A lot of people call it buffering. Some people call it numbing. There's a lot of different terms that you can use for it, but the, it's the same thing.
It's simply finding an escape to the negative emotion that you're feeling. And you can buffer or numb with anything. And I mean anything, okay? You can have, it could be from, um, like we said scroll, like, you know, we know that we know the regular culprits watching Netflix, eating, drinking, um, all that stuff. But it could also be, and it could be like over exercising, but it could be overworking, right? It could be, like I said, organizing. It could be things that society has deemed quote unquote good moral. I don't know. Okay. It could be beneficial, it could be productivity, it could be things that you're like, this is actually a good thing I'm doing it, but I'm overdoing it in an attempt to escape feeling something somewhere else, right? Like if I feel super uncomfortable resting or if I feel super uncomfortable because I feel like a bad mom, I might start working more because that's where I feel better.
That's where I feel like, okay, at least I got this under control. At least I am, you know, a superstar when it comes to this. And so I'm going to spend more time, more and more and more and more time doing that thing that makes me feel a little bit better, right? That gives me thoughts that make me feel better. And so you can buffer or numb out with anything. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a negative quote unquote negative thing, but it turns negative because you do it so much. If you guys have been, um, listeners for a while, then you saw, you know, that I did an episode about my like new obsession with romance novels and my like reading obsession now, uh, turns out you can numb out with that too. I was laughing at myself 'cause I'm like this thing that was, you know, my goal was to become a reader has now become a problem, has now become something that I numb out with.
Like, I don't go on social media anymore, which is great, but I've just replaced it with something else that like, as soon as I'm feeling a ton of negative emotion, I'm like, I should just read for a little bit and then a little bit becomes an hour or two hours and I'm like, what the hell am I doing? So that's all to say that it's not the thing really. It's, you know, what is the result that it's happen having in my life? How, why am I doing it? How much am I doing it for? So I wanna talk about why we do it first. Like I told you, you know, that you, you're doing it to escape some negative emotion, but I want you to truly understand how your brain works, okay? At the basic level, your, the entire point of your brain is to keep you alive.
And the way that it keeps you alive in a very basic way is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It's like the number one goal of your, um, brain. Because that is what is learned through, you know, evolution is like you seek pleasure, you avoid pain, you stay alive. And so we have to know like where we're gonna get pain, where things are like not, um, gonna be healthy for us. Let's say they're gonna maybe lead to death or whatnot. And so we try to avoid those things. In the grand scheme of things, it's a very wonderful concept. Like your brain doesn't care if you're happy, it wants you to be alive. And the way that you are alive generally is if you're doing things that feel good, um, and not doing a lot of things that cause you a lot of pain. And so for the vast majority of human history, and, and not to say it wasn't a problem, I don't know what problems other humans have had, it likely was a problem.
But when you look at like the release of dopamine and the access to dopamine that we had, it was much less than what is available in our current society, right? So it was like, you know, you are maybe seeking pleasure would lead you to go hunt, uh, gather, right? Would lead you to look around for food. And when you found a bush of berries, you got a bunch of dopamine, right? Like you ate some berries and that released dopamine and that felt really good. But like how much were you doing that? Like how many berries could you actually eat? How often was this happening, right? Um, the, the things in which you could engage in for pleasure were much less and the level of dopamine that was released and a lot of, tons of studies that they've done was less than a lot of the artificial pleasures that we have today, right?
When you look at social media and they've done, I guess like, you know, tons of studies that say the release is just like the release that you'd get from like cocaine or whatnot, or we look at like certain types of pleasures like gambling and stuff and how it floods our brain with, um, these, these hormones, these chemicals. It's, it's a combination where your, your brain is seeking that and yet it, and it's so prevalent, it's everywhere, right? You can seek pleasure by food. Like food is not scarce anymore. It's at anything you want at any time. Even the food that we're eating is, uh, processed to be more, to release more of the addictive kind of cravings and dopamine. So the amount of sugar that's in it, the amount of sodium, all of that stuff, the taste of 'em, the um, like it's not just, if you think about whole foods, like eating vegetables isn't as fun as eating a bag of Doritos.
And there's a reason for that. And so we have this combination where dopamine is available everywhere. Whether you grab your phone, you watch Netflix, you, you know, um, eat whatever foods you have access to all this, drugs, alcohol, all of the things all of the time. And we have really primitive brains and our brain is just like, I don't wanna feel like crap. I'm gonna look for something, right? And so we are flooded with dopamine, we are flooded with things and we're, and then it becomes this addiction of like, I need more and more and more. So what felt really good the first time or the first a hundred times or the first, you know, year of it doesn't feel as good. Like eating that Doritos maybe for the first time felt a lot better then having that bag of Doritos every single day. It's sort of, you become numb to it, right?
And so you need more and more and more. Now, I wanna caveat when I, the reason I wanted to talk about this is that this like numbing out learning to go and find dopamine to relieve a lot of the negative features or negative emotions that you're feeling is actually a very beautiful feature of your brain, okay? It is self-soothing. It is something that all humans do and all humans should do, okay? I want you to really hear me on this. There is nothing morally wrong with soothing yourself or numbing yourself out even there is nothing wrong with that. And in fact, it is also a, um, feature of your brain that is meant to keep you alive. And if you look at humans from when we are born, one of the first things we know how to do, we don't know how to do anything else.
We don't know how to walk, we can't hold our head up, we can't do anything. And yet we can self-soothe. If you think about babies and sucking their thumbs, a lot of babies find their thumbs very early on and it becomes a self-soothing kind of ritual because your brain has to figure out a way to calm yourself down with all of the like, um, stimulus that is around you constantly. And being able to do that is a very beautiful thing when I, I'm, I'm so in awe of the human brain and I think it's the most like magical machine. Like the fact that we have evolved to be able to do these things. And when you look at even other defense mechanisms that our brain has created, uh, it's really awe-inspiring. Like if you think about let's say di these are just other ones. This isn't numbing out, but let's say disa disassociating, like if you're in a very traumatic situation, your brain will disassociate in order to protect you so that you are not in your body anymore.
So that you cannot experience whatever that trauma is, right? Let's say the numbness that you feel after intense grief where you sort of feel like you're walking through a dream, like you can't really comprehend what's happening another way that your brain sort of dulls things down for you because the pain is too much, right? Or if you think about physical pain, the reason you pass out from pain is your brain shutting everything down in order to keep you alive because the pain receptors in your brain are going, it's too much to handle. Your brain will literally shut you down and be like, Nope, can't handle this anymore. And it does that to keep you alive. And when you look at this, when we look at on a day-to-day basis numbing out as being one of those things that our brain does to keep us alive, it becomes easier to not shame ourselves for doing it.
One of the problems with all this, as we talk through how you can change it, there are ways to change things. But if you've listened to the podcast for a while and you know me, one of my biggest goals is to uns shame your humanity is to make you see even the things that you're doing are not a problem. And you can do it from a place of self. You can change it, you can look at it, you can learn from about yourself, from a place of self love, not from a place of what is wrong with me? Why can't I just finish this assignment? What is wrong with me? Why can't I just put my phone down? What is wrong with me? Why can't I just insert, right? I know I wanna do this. Why can't I just, and I want to explain to you why you can't just because your brain has been evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to not just do that to then to have the craving to go after the thing that is going the urge, the desire to get dopamine so you can stay alive. So that's what's happening. And I think when you can notice that and when you can know like, oh, it's coming from a place of like, hey, we're flooded with cortisol right now, we got a lot of stress going on. And my brain is like, we need to slow this the F down. And so maybe we go, remember that thing that we did yesterday that gave us all that dopamine? Let's do that again. So let me like trigger the desire and the urge to go do that because this feels terrible and we might die.
The other thing that I should mention about your brain is that your brain doesn't really understand what the source of a stress is, right? Like if you have a bunch of cortisol flowing through your body, your brain doesn't understand that. It's like from an email that got sent to you and that's really not threatening. Versus like if you got a bunch of stress from being chased by animals, right? Or not knowing where your next meal comes from or whatnot, your brain doesn't know the difference. I want you to think about like, one of the ways that I constantly think about my brain is like, let's say you're watching the horror film, right? Like you intellectually your prefrontal cortex understands that this isn't real. That you're sitting in your house and you're safe and there's a flat screen that is showing some kind of image and none of it is real.
Your body does not, your body does not know that it is not real. It doesn't matter how much intellectual you understand, your heart rate starts going up, right? You start sweating like when you are scared, when you scream, when you think that this thing is going to get you and you are pumped full of anxiety and your body's screaming to get you to run, it's because it thinks you're gonna die. And now, I mean some of us find that fun, I don't really quite understand that, but, but I want you to truly understand like how much our own emotions and our pre our um, primitive brain doesn't really understand the difference between real and fake or you know, actual danger versus is not not danger. So your body sees like, hey, I am flooded with negative emotion, with stress hormones, with adrenaline. I need to bring our nervous system back down.
I need to bring us back to a place where we're gonna survive this. And so I'm gonna constantly get myself to do something that makes me feel good so I can stay alive so I can stop doing this thing that stresses me out. And so the reason I want you to know that is I just want you to know there's nothing wrong with you. You're not just a procrastinator. There's nothing that makes you special and unique and terrible and everybody else not. We all do it. And I also want you to know that it's actually a really important part of life. And the reason I want you all to know this is because you should be numbing at some point. You should be self-soothing, right? For most of us, we live in a really, you know, we made it in this made up society where it's a constant go, go, go, go.
There is no break. It's like, hey, eight hours of work, 10 hours of work, then we're gonna come home and there's laundry and kids are screaming and they have to do their homework and I got to make dinner and we gotta get everything you know together and then I have to volunteer for the school PTA or whatever it is. It's just constant, constant, constant. I have to work out and then I have to feel bad about working out and not working out and all of this stuff. And so for most of us, we never give ourselves the time to numb out. We never give ourselves the time without guilt to just decompress. I always say this with people that are like looking for like productivity hacks to do more and more and more work. Like your brain is not meant to focus as long as we think it's supposed to focus.
Like not only are we doing eight hours now people are like, why can't I get back home and jump back on? It's like, well your brain is exhausted. It was never built for this. It was never built to sit and think in like concentrated thought focused work for hours upon hours a day. It is exhausted. And so of course it's going to self-soothe. Of course it's going to numb because it just wants to slow everything down a little bit and give you time to recuperate. And yet none of us do this right? We're not actually ever resting, especially 'cause we have social media and um, Netflix and all these things that actually like are terrible for us for other reasons that don't actually give us the rest that we need. And so our brain is just constantly going, constantly wired. And so I say this to say like one that it's completely normal and two that like there needs to be time for self-soothing.
Like I realized when I really made this shift and realized I used to feel so guilty of like numbing out and just watching, you know, mindless TV. And then when I was realizing like, what if that is exactly what my brain needs to not think anymore? 'cause I would always think like, well it's nighttime now I can work on this other project, or I should plan the vacation or I should do X, Y and Z. And I was like, no, what if it was truly that? Like I cannot handle another thought. I don't wanna think anymore. I don't wanna think about all my problems. I don't wanna think about tomorrow. I don't wanna think about the presentation I have to do, I don't wanna think about what else I didn't do. That's why I'm watching this show. And what if that was okay? Right? And so I say all of this, this entire thing to say that like for the most part, what if a lot of this buffering is not a problem?
What if you accepted that you are the, the point is not to be all or nothing. The point is not to be like, okay, I have to stick with this tight schedule of, I only get to go on social media for 30 minutes, right? Maybe there's times where my brain needs more of a break. Maybe there's days where I'm just more burned out and I just need time to buffer, right? Can I be with myself in those times? Can I accept myself? Can I be compassionate with myself? And then I can start to really understand like, when is it becoming a problem? When is it that I do wanna change it? Why am I not willing to feel those feelings? Because I don't mean to say that like you just let yourself do, you know, buffer your life away and you just constantly numb out.
That's also not, not only like something you don't wanna do, it's just not a way to actually experience life. And so I do think it becomes a problem because I think that there's a difference when it's like, Hey, my brain is done for the day and I need a break and I can have like clean rest and I can do it without guilt. And versus I need to escape this feeling because I don't wanna feel bad. And so a lot of times when we are numbing, it's because the thing that we are doing, the project, the new business, um, you know, the meaning like the never ending tasks to-do lists at our homes. It brings up negative emotion and a lot of us don't know how to feel those. And it is worthwhile learning how to feel negative emotions so that you can decide like, hey, this is a time where I could just feel, I could feel bored, I could feel frustrated, I could feel stress and I can still do this.
I can show my brain with my prefrontal cortex that like even if I, my body thinks I'm gonna die, I know I'm not gonna die. I can get myself to be like, huh, this is what overwhelm feels like and I'm still gonna do it. I'm still gonna do this assignment, right? It's a really important skill to have to know The difference between those two is to know and the way that I look at it, like numbing, um, again, I look at why I am numbing. Like am I numbing because I'm exhausted or am I numbing? 'cause I'm trying to escape a feeling. And usually if it's a escape a feeling, I just try to lean into like, can I feel that discomfort and do it anyway? Because I think it's just worthy exercise of learning how to feel your feelings. Like knowing even that like that feeling isn't gonna kill me.
That feeling is simply a vibration in my body. And so oftentimes I get really curious about why am I numbing? Have I given myself proper rest? Have I given myself the time to just self-soothe because I need it because I want to decompress? And if I realize like no, 'cause there's times where like I'll be numbing, you know, all day long I haven't even done any work, but it's just that I just don't wanna deal with this like really big project that I don't wanna deal with. Then I know that it's the feelings that I'm avoiding. Another way that I think about it is like, what is the result that it's creating, right? Oftentimes, if it's not really hindering my life that much, if it's not creating, if I'm getting my work done, but you know, I'm doing it in a little bit of a slower pace or I take some time off in the middle of the day instead of like doing everything all at once, I'm okay with that.
I've actually like done a lot of work of looking at like, what, you know, the only reason I think this is a problem is because other people tell me like, I should be going eight hours a day, but like, maybe that's not the way my brain works. Maybe that's not the way I want to work and so I become okay with it. But when you start realizing that you're creating results in your life that you don't want, which means you don't get to the work, you miss deadlines, you um, don't ever get that business up and running. You never put yourself out there. You constantly procrastinate and, um, beat yourself up. You're constantly in the cycle. Or let's say when we're talking about it depends on what you're buffering with. Let's say if you're buffering with over exercising, if you're getting, if you're hurting your body, if you're realizing like, Hey, I'm this, while it's maybe a release of negative emotion, I'm doing it to a point where I'm punishing myself and I'm punishing my body and it's not loving anymore and it's a way to escape having hard conversations or feeling hard things.
When you start realizing the result is not what you want anymore in your life, then it's time to make a bit of a change, right? It's not to say that you can never do it again. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, but it's simply how can I lessen it a little bit? How can I reduce it? How can I feel the negative feeling a little bit more? And I, this is what I really want you to understand. The point is not to completely get rid of the whatever habit it is that you've created, right? If you're on social media for four hours a day, the point is not to detox because you're gonna go back to it. 'cause you're eventually gonna feel negative emotions and you're gonna want the thing that's gonna soothe you. What I want you to do is learn how to feel the negative feeling for shorter for just really short periods of time.
It's like, if I wanna get on social media, can I put it off for five minutes? Can I sit and think like, what is the feeling I have when I'm, when I have to do this presentation? Instead of getting on social media, can I describe that feeling to myself? Can I see what it feels like in my body? Like what frustration feels like, what overwhelm feels like? Can I describe it to myself? Can I watch how it moves through my body? Can I see if it dissipates? And if it doesn't in five minutes, fine, I'm gonna pick up my phone and I sat with it for five minutes and then maybe the next day I can sit with it for six minutes or 10 minutes. Then can I sit with it for 15 minutes and can I see like, hey, it kind of goes away.
I actually didn't need my phone and maybe I do it only one time a day when I was gonna grab my phone as opposed to the other 10 that I still grab it. That's okay, that's still a win. Can I buffer one time less today so that tomorrow maybe I buffer two times less, right? And it's gonna be back and forth. Sometimes I'm gonna buffer more. Again, nobody needs to be perfect about this. It's simply knowing like when I know this has become a problem, and I know that the reason I'm buffering is because I wanna avoid my negative emotions, the solution is to feel those negative emotions and do it anyways. I want you to really understand this concept that kind of blew my mind when I, the first time I heard it. Your primitive brain can send up urges all day long. It can send you the urge to eat that cookie.
It could be screaming it at the top of its lungs. You have to decide with your prefrontal cortex to pick up that cookie and eat it so you can have urges all day long and not, um, act on 'em. In fact, all of us do this all day long. Most of us has tons of urges to just walk out of our job or quit every day. We don't wanna be there and yet we continue to do the things we're supposed to do, right? We all do this. And so you have this ability, you just have to channel it towards things that you're buffering with. You have to realize that you have that ability. So like you have to understand like, I'm gonna have the urge to pick up my phone and scroll Instagram. I'm gonna have the urge to get up and go get that snack.
So what I need to do is just take one beat. Like know when I'm gonna get up. Like ask myself what is the feeling that I'm feeling right now that's making me wanna go out and get that right? Not the urge, but what is the feeling like? What does the feeling that I of this task that I don't wanna do, what feeling is that bringing up? Can I feel that for a little bit more today? The more you learn how to feel those feelings and you realize that those feelings can never harm you, you realize that those feelings are just vibrations and they'll pass, and that you can still do the task you wanna do, even if you don't feel like it. Um, it starts losing so much control because for so many of us, we're so terrified of the feeling, we're so scared of it.
That's why we numb. It's like, I can't even stand to be in my body for 10 seconds. And the solution to that is to learn to be in your body. Because the more you feel it, the more you let it pass through you, the more you realize that it can't harm you and that you're okay, and that you can feel all of these feelings, frustration, stress, anxiety, overwhelm, all of it, and you can breathe through it and it will dissipate. And like any other feelings, it comes and goes. And when it, by the time it comes and goes, you can continue doing the thing that you wanna do. So as homework, I want you to at first, just notice when you're numbing out, just become conscious to that. The first step is notice. What do you numb out with? Most of you already know, like we all have our kind of preferred things.
When are you numbing out? Try to catch yourself in the middle of it. Like, huh, what was I trying to avoid? Right? The second step is figuring out what feeling was I trying to avoid? What was I feeling when I was doing this task that was hard for me that made me want to numb out? And then the next time you feel that, I want you to just try for a minute, can I sit with this feeling? Make it two minutes, stick it two minutes for like a week. If you need to, then go to three minutes. Just make it a little bit longer each time and you'll be fascinated at how much power you have to feel these feelings and not grab for the thing that you think you need in order to feel better. You'll be amazed at how much this, these feelings that you are so scared of that you think overpower, you really have no power over you.
And that feeling is not that big of a deal and it will open you up to being able to do the things that you need to do. Now again, this is not to be utilized so that you work 12 hours a day, 15 hours a day, and you never need to stop. You still need rest. And you can do that without guilt. When you've learned the other times of your day when you really wanna push through and you wanna feel those negative emotions, you don't numb out. So give that a try and come and let me know how it works. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful and I will see you next week for another episode.