Why Your Brain Talks You Out of Big Goals (And What to Do About It)
I found myself the morning before going to the TV station sitting in front of my computer trying to figure out any possible way to jam any more information into my head. I wanted to sound credible, confident, and appear relaxed. At that moment I felt anything but that.
My palms were sweating and my heart was racing. I started thinking “I am a therapist who teaches this exact thing for a living and I can’t get my body to listen.” What happened next is exactly what I spend my days helping athletes understand.
Your brain isn't broken. It's protecting you.
My amygdala, the part of my brain that helps prepare for fight, flight or freeze, had taken over. The part of my brain responsible for logical thinking and problem solving, the prefrontal cortex, was offline. My brain wasn’t broken, in fact, it was doing exactly what it has been evolved to do. Our ancestors needed to avoid threats to survive.
Our brains are primed to assess a threat and take action, fight, flight, or freeze. The difference today is that my brain was seeing the TV interview as a physical threat telling my body to get ready to run. The brain can’t tell the difference between a lion (actual physical threat) and a big life decision.
This is when our excuses for not taking on big goals start to sound pretty logical. Things like “I don’t have the time to train for a marathon” or in my case “there was a big snow storm and the roads to the station will be bad, it’s safer to stay home.” They feel really reasonable but they’re not logic — they’re protection. The brain would rather guarantee safety than risk a chance at something good.
What overwhelm actually is…
Cortisol and adrenaline are flooding your brain. When that happens the prefrontal cortex goes offline. A everyday example is when I am trying to get two toddlers in the car to make it to preschool on time.
As they begin to stall as preschoolers do, my amygdala starts to wake up and send out adrenaline and cortisol. My prefrontal cortex, the part of my brain that knows this is normal toddler behavior starts to shut down. All of a sudden getting them in the car becomes hurried. In this moment I can’t just think myself out of the overwhelm.
I have to calm my body down first and for me the verbal reframe of “this is not an emergency” is often enough for my brain to hear and the overwhelm to fall away.
The story underneath the fear
We gather data about ourselves our entire lives. We unconsciously create these stories about who we are. These are based on experiences we have had, feedback from others, and our life circumstances. When we take on a big goal, for example, running a marathon it is like our brains see a processing error because it does not match the story we have created of ourself.
In therapy we call this, self-limiting beliefs, and they are some of the hardest things to catch because it happens so subconsciously. Your brain rejects the idea before you are even aware it is happening.
When I was 16, I had a big dream of playing D1 hockey. I had the skill and I had the dream. Somewhere along the way the story I was telling myself was that I was not as good as the girls I saw playing at that level. I didn’t see that is what was happening.
It took me years of studying human behavior to look back and actually understand what was happening was not about skill but about the limiting self-belief that I was not as good as the girls who were playing D1.
What I needed was such a simple reframe, one that feels so simple that it often makes the athletes I work with laugh when I present it to them. And that reframe is the word “yet.” I did not believe I was as good as the girls playing D1…yet. This changes your relationship to the goal it moves from something fixed to something possible. I became a therapist to be the person I needed at 16.
Fear as signal, not stop sign
The fear of failure is very rarely about failure. It is almost always about what failure would me about our worth as a person, it’s about judgement, and about the fear that you’re actually enough.
The work then becomes to separate ourselves from failure being a verdict of our worth as a human to being data or feedback on our journey to accomplishing our goal. Fear means this is something that is important to you and because it is, you need to do it scared.
I walked into the TV studio with sweaty palms. I did it scared. It turned out to be kind of fun.
If you are someone who is sitting with a big goal, whether it be some sort of athletic goal, personal, or professional goal or even if you have been waiting for the right moment. It might be time to consider that you may have to go for that thing while still feeling scared. Not because you might fail but because it is important to you.
If you're sitting with a big goal — athletic, personal, or professional — and you've been waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Not because the fear goes away. Because it's important to you.
I'd love to connect. Reach out for a free consult at insideedgehq.com.