All right, here we go. It's time for the guy who wrote the book, fuck your feelings to talk about feelings. So pull up your seat on the couch, get your box of tissues, and we're off. If you've read the book, you know the number 95% of our decisions throughout life at any given moment are made based on how we feel in that moment. And if you're anything like me, that's a scary, scary thought. The larger our goal, the longer it's going to take us to get there.

And then the longer it's going to take us to get there, the more of those intermediate and micro decisions that can can jump up and bite us if we make a decision based on how we feel rather than what our stated values are. Right. So, for a minute, let's talk about something that I call The nowhere between two somewheres right and this is really about transitions. And we all go through transitions in life. And if you zoom out or zoom in, we are all usually in some sort of transition phase. And so we can think about this on a long timeline very zoomed out.

We can also look at a very acute example like a backflip or apply a push up or think about a jump. The The example I use when I teach this is the trapeze artist, right. So you have a trapeze artists up here on a platform, and they grab this Trapeze and they swing and they let go. And in that moment of being in midair, this is the nowhere between two somewheres. Right? And for this brief period, half a second one second.

There's nothing they have no support. All they can do Rely on everything that they did up until the point that they let go and hope that that was enough, or the right stuff to get them to where they need to be too late. And in this analogy of the trapeze artist, we all know the worst thing that that trapeze artist can do at this point in midair is to freak out to flit to flail. Any of those actions that are a result of fear or anxiety. reduce their odds of landing at that second trap ease successfully. Right?

And so again, analogous to anything that we do in life. The moment that we commit, the moment that we dive in that we go, it's going to get uncomfortable because we're in that nowhere between two somewhere. So I want you to keep this in mind. And again, like I said before, the bigger article, write a book, start a business Be a VC to be an Olympic athlete. Those are not things that we just decide and achieve the next day. So the longer the goal, right, the trapeze artists, the backflip, the junk, the plyo push up, that's half a second, right that nowhere between two summers lasts half a second, can you not freak out for one second?

That's a lot easier to not freak out then six months or six years or 20 years, right? The bigger the goal, the longer the timeline, the more opportunities we have for our feelings to lead us astray. Because we've made a decision based on how we felt. I didn't feel like getting up. I didn't feel like training. I felt like eating doughnuts.

I felt like you know, eating ice cream and cookies or whatever the things are that lead us astray. These are the distractions, these are the interferences, right, think back to section one. All the things that prevent us that lower level thinking, the distractions, the things that prevent us from being a version of ourselves. That we want to be, right. And so what we're really talking about here is dysfunctional feelings, okay? And I don't want you or anybody to think that.

I'm saying feelings are bad feelings have survived evolution for a reason. There is obviously an evolutionary advantage to us having feelings, and having the limbic system and the amygdala that works the way it works. Otherwise it would not have evolved and stayed with us through our evolution. And so from a functional standpoint, these feelings serve to direct our attention. The limbic system, where this portion of our brain lives and operates is so much faster than the prefrontal cortex and in just a second, we'll talk about the difference between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex. But the important thing here is to realize the speed is so much greater Within the limbic system, so the feelings that we have these, these are meant to be red flags, they're meant to be, hey, this is an alert, pay attention to this thing.

They help us to differentiate the signal from the noise. It's meant to guide us and help us focus our attention. We've always had so many things competing for our attention. Even in the Paleolithic era, when we were out hunting for food, you know, those feelings were, hey, pay attention, focus on this thing. And in today's world, we even have more and more and more things grabbing for our attention. So it's, it's more important, I would argue now than ever, to have an awareness of our feelings and an awareness of what our body is trying to communicate to us.

You know, this machine, this body that we live in is, is an incredible organism. And it's a shame that we don't get a user's manual. For how to operate with it when we're in grade school or or even high school or college, right? So let's go all the way back feelings are mental experiences of physiological states, right? And so physiological just means our body state. So from neck down, this is our body state.

Whatever state this is, creates a mental experience, that mental experience is a feeling. It's different from emotions, right? emotions and feelings are not the same thing. So emotions are the meaning that we kind of assign to these things into words that we use to connotates certain judgments or perspectives. And so, what we need to keep in mind here is that if, if we can change our physiology, we can change our mental experience, we can change our feelings. All right, we'll get to that at a later point in section two here.

But for now, we're wired like this. This is this is physiology, it's biology, we cannot change it. Okay. And we talked about sort of the evolutionary advantage to being wired this way, right? So, so let's go back to the limbic system in the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system is the portion of our brain that houses that it's made up of one of the components is the amygdala.

And that is the thing that sort of assigns meaning and attaches the emotion or the feeling of any given state to the memory, the fact that happens in that moment. So if you think about any memory that you have, there's usually an emotional component to that. Right. So you have the fact you have the emotional component, it's the amygdala that marries those and then they get stored. Okay. So we'll have in the bonus section here for you.

One of our better human project short podcasts, that is Wisdom is memory minus emotion. So there are lessons that we can all learn from our memories if we're able to detach or separate the emotional aspect of it from, you know, the actual memory itself, right? There's wisdom buried in there. So that's a tangent, but that's a bonus thing for you to listen to. So the prefrontal cortex is the newer, more evolved portion of our brain, it is capable of abstract thought it is capable of thinking beyond the now it's creative. It has language and communication.

It's sort of in the cartoons, it's the angel on our shoulder, right? It's the wise old sage. And on the other hand, we have the limbic system. It is much older, it's more primitive, it's much faster, it is incapable of thinking beyond the now. So for that reason, we call it the ego driven teenager right? can't even comprehend the consequences of doing what I Right now, okay.

And in cartoons, that's the devil on our shoulder. So at all times, we have these parallel universes playing tug of war to see who's going to be in control in our mind. And as we said, in the top 95% of our decisions are made based on how we feel in any given moment. So if we were to become the highest version of ourselves, the high performer, the person who created the successful business, or made it to the Olympics, or wrote the book or whatever, we have to operate out of the prefrontal cortex out of the higher level of our brain and act according to our values, not feelings, right? So let me give you an example of the limbic system in action. If you've ever walked past a pizza place and smelled the pizza, or you walk past a bakery at Whole Foods, oh, man, those cookies smell amazing, man.

I'd love to have some cookies, and then a few milliseconds You have that thought of Oh, but I'm on a diet. Oh, but I don't eat gluten. I shouldn't do that, right? So many times we beat ourselves up for having that initial thought we immediately attach guilt or shame to having that initial thought we shouldn't want these things, right. And this is what we're talking about in the beginning in section one of letting go of these things that don't serve us. And part of what will make it easier to let go is understanding that that reaction is normal.

It's natural. It is biologically wired into us. That is the limbic system. There's nothing wrong with you for having that thought. So understanding that there's nothing wrong with you that it is natural allows you then to remove the judgment that we place on ourselves the guilt and the shame for having that thought. Right.

Another way that the limbic system can help us from an evolutionary standpoint is that you and I are walking through the woods and we're on a path and we see a snake First thing I would do if I saw that snake, right? The arm goes out. It's the Seinfeld stop short. I can do that so much faster than I can say, Hey, Ryan, stop, there's a snake up there. I don't know what your name is. So we'll use my name.

But this is the limbic system. And it happens faster than I can communicate verbally through the prefrontal cortex. Hey, there's a threat. There's a snake, you shouldn't stop there. Right? So the limbic system is displaying one of its evolutionary biological adaptations and advantages, okay?

It's faster than the prefrontal cortex. When it functions properly and within its bounds. It is great and it can help us the problem is when it gets to being dysfunctional when it overstepped its bounds, and it's actually a self regulating system. That's the problem. What self regulating system stops itself at its own boundary. not think of anything self regulating system in the world that will stop itself from overstepping its bounds.

They don't do that. That's why 95% of our decisions are made based on how we feel. So it's up to us to recognize this to bring an awareness to this. We'll talk about awareness in the next video. And to then make a choice that is aligned with our values. So I knew I just do a lot of stuff at you.

If you have any questions on feelings, decisions, limbic system, any of that type of stuff, you know, drop a comment down below in the discussion or shoot me an email. I'm happy to help you work through this. If you have any questions on this. If not, we'll see you in the next video where we talk about awareness, creating choice.