I want to spend the first episode of 2023 sharing an individual story from over the holiday. Sharing such stories can help people see elements of themselves in them and give people hope which is what I am hoping will happen for those of you who need it.

On today’s episode I speak with Dr. Brian Wu, a psychiatrist who has a special interest in helping people get unstuck from symptoms that are blocking their full alignment. He has been a supporter of my work and has some refreshing ideas about what is needed in the mental health space.

With this podcast episode being published close to the very end of 2022, I want to encourage you to think about the year ahead and how you can decide to make 2023 a year in which you step into a more peaceful version of yourself.

Listen in today as I share some questions that were submitted for coaching to a group that I am part of, including a question from a person who doesn’t like living alone, how to improve on a difficult relationship with a family member, and how to make new thoughts stick when you’re using Thought Work.

Do you know much about the primitive brain (also known as the lizard brain)? I have found that many of my clients don’t fully understand how the primitive brain not only serves them in many ways but also holds them back. It can be so helpful to understand this.

We have pain, physical or emotional, and then we have thoughts about our pain. Our thoughts are like volume knobs that allow us to turn up the volume on our pain or turn down the volume.

Some of us consider ourselves people pleasers by nature, wanting to please people at our own expense by saying yes when what we really want to say is no. Why do we do this? It’s human nature to want to be liked and accepted. However, when we identify something as wrong, our frequent go-to is to do the polar opposite, but that isn’t always the answer, nor does it always work.

There are facts of life that can be proven that no one can reasonably disagree with, but we often don’t talk about our lives strictly via facts. We don’t always get to choose these facts, but we do get to choose what we think, and our brain often confuses facts and thoughts.

Many of my clients struggle with the intense fear of making the wrong decision. Why do so many of us struggle with this fear, and why is it so intense? Listen in as I walk you through all of this, including how your childhood is linked to this fear and why women tend to struggle with this intense fear more often than men do.

How can we know whether or not we have excellent emotional health? We often think that not feeling good is a symptom of being emotionally unhealthy, but listen in as I argue that that is a dangerous mindset and explain why.

Today’s episode is dedicated to those of you who worry about others. One of the biggest challenges of being human is wanting to help others who are in pain, especially people who are the closest to our inner orbit.

Getting overwhelmed and exhausted is something to which a lot of us can probably relate, and many of us also likely feel that it’s necessary, especially if we want to meet our goals and succeed. I am here to tell you, however, that overwhelm is something that needs to be solved, not tolerated.

So many of us seem to do things or not do things in response to the fear of what other people might think about us, and we’re working toward solving that problem today.

Who gets to decide what beauty is and who is beautiful and who isn’t? It is arbitrary, and women have been trained to validate themselves via external metrics. Culture tells us what to think about ourselves, causing us to compare ourselves to others, and we believe what we are told because of confirmation bias.

One of the things that I do as a behavioral specialist is to help people understand why they do what they do, and one of those things is overeating. Statistics from nutritionists can be helpful, but they don’t work for everyone because of the conflict between math and the mind.

Letting things go can be easier said than done, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Listen in as I share how to let go of parts of our pasts that might be causing us pain, starting with letting go of small things to practice getting rid of larger things.

One of several things that I teach is how to stop buffering. Buffering includes overeating, overdrinking, overshopping, overscrolling on social media, etc. - really anything that is done in excess that ultimately has a negative impact on us.

We are talking about all things confirmation bias today, and while you might think that you already understand this topic, this podcast episode will likely help you see it in a different way.

The last two episodes of Our Modern Emotional Lives have covered how to feel better, and I welcome you to part three. In the last episode, I covered the quantity of our thoughts about the past, and I am now moving into discussing the quality of those thoughts.

Do you spend a lot of time thinking about your past, especially parts of your past that bother you? You might feel as if you could feel better if only the past would loosen its grip on you. I am here to offer you an alternate way of thinking about that so that you have a path forward.