Transcription
I realized that every time I would drive into my driveway, I would start feeling panic. Everything in life is a loop. But we have good loops and we have not so good loops.
Someone looks at us and we start sweating. That's a loop. What does it mean? Nothing. Why are you responding that way? Why can't you breathe? You're responding in a loop.
Nothing's easy. Nothing's simple. Everything's complex except for the brain has figured out how to chunk and it puts these complicated systems into extremely efficient blocks so that instead of it having to go, okay, Jeremy's getting in his car, check the seat belt, buckle the seat belt, look at the mirrors adjusted, do all this stuff, it just says reverse.
What does the mind prioritize above everything else? Safety, yes. But how does it get to safety? Avoiding danger in a way that's hard or easy. Easy. Because energy is, as you're experiencing right now, energy is not a limitless resource. You can all feel it. Here we go. Another one. Running out of energy a little bit. Are we more tired now than we were yesterday morning? This because energy is finite. So it can multiply. I can re regroup, but you do run out of it.
You want a secret to not running out of energy. Want one? Close your eyes. Put your hand on your head. Ready? God, please give me the joy of the Lord. Right now, I receive all the joy of the Lord. Let it fill up my body. Let it fill up my mind. Let it overflow. Amen. Amen. It's hard to get tired when you're filled up with the joy of the Lord.
I told you guys a story about how I uh on the deep end I told the story about how I discovered the joy of the Lord. We don't have time for it, but it was trippy. Trippy like psychedelics, but safe.
So, the brain prioritizes things that are easy. It wants to make things easy. It wants to conserve energy. It does not want to work hard. And thank God for that because if it prioritized anything else, we would not survive as a species. We had to have this programming written into our code to make difficult things easy. This is called learning.
Do you remember the first time you drove a car and how stressful it was to keep everything in order? So, we used to oversimplify this. We're like, "Yeah, you just learned how to drive a car." Well, what do you have to do to drive the car out of your driveway? Too simple. First, you have to open the door. Then, you have to get into the car. You got to put the seat belt on. You got to start the thing. Unless it's a Tesla. If the mirrors don't work, you got to adjust them. You got to look in the mirrors. Then, you have to go into the right gear. Then, you've got a foot on a brake. Yes. Hopefully, unless you're Ryan. Then you slowly let off the brake, but not too much too soon because then what would happen? Yeah. And then if something comes in front of the back, you see it. You got to put your foot back on the brake. It's extremely complicated. Like extremely, you know, the thing you were talk sharing about yesterday, 100,000 neurons have to fire at the same time for your eyes to blink.
Nothing's easy, nothing's simple, everything's complex except for the brain has figured out how to chunk. And it puts these complicated systems into extremely efficient blocks so that instead of it having to go like, "Okay, Jeremy's getting in his car, check the seat belt, buckle the seat belt, look at the mirrors, adjust it, do all this stuff," it just says reverse chunk. And all of those things are happening at the same time, but you're not aware of them because if you had to be aware of them, how many details would you miss out of the 126 bits a second that you're processing? You would miss way too much. So, it makes it autonomous and it makes it subconscious. Does this theory and this idea make sense? It's a good thing, right? We love chunking.
The brain loves to make things that are very complex feel very easy unless it chunks them in a way that has no utility. It's bad for you. And this is where we're always looping. Everything in life is a loop. But we have good loops and we have not so good loops.
So here's the science of of of like a loop. When you look at it clinically, you have an event. Somebody say event or a trigger. Some people will call this a trigger. What you're supposed to have after this is something called appraisal. Appraisal means you sort of define what it what what it what it means. You appraise right now that I'm getting closer. What does it mean? What does it mean? Oh, sorry. But that is not a meaning. So, I let you off the hook. What does it mean? We appraise something. From that appraisal comes arousal. Arousal just means that something's activated. A response is activated. And then from that arousal, we have an action. Is this how it's supposed to work?
When we get too deep into the looping mechanism, what happens is we don't want to spend the time to appraise before we arouse. And I'm using like science geek language, but we don't want to have time to ask what does this mean before we activate a physiological response and then respond to it. And this is a great thing because do you always have time to think what does this mean when a car swerves in front of you in traffic? Sometimes you don't have time to appraise it. And so we have a loop that just says this is how he responds. Immediately respond. It will save your life. But in the context of business, in the context of growth and relationships, we get into a lot of trouble when we respond through an arousal before we can appraise it or if we skip the appraisal altogether. And this is how a loop gets stronger. We don't even think about what it means. It's just that someone looks at us and we start sweating. That's a loop. Well, what does it mean? There's nothing. Why are you responding that way? Why can't you breathe? You're you're responding in in a loop.
And so we have to go into these things so that we can first of all fix them and second of all so that we can prevent one of the most dangerous byproducts of looping in history which is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the brain will get so used to a particular chunk that it will begin to expect it and then it will read the ingredients or create the ingredients necessary for that loop to fire that you don't want in the first place. This really really sucks when you're in this when you realize that this is how it's happening. But it's it's not all bad news bears. It's good news because we were a part of the original chunking. So we can be a part of the the undoing and reappraising through consistency and intensity.
So here's how I learned some of this. I was coming um through the middle of the FTC. We had just moved into our new house in 2022 and we moved into the house at the worst time in history. Um when we broke ground on the house, I was drowning in money. It was easier for me to get rid of it than to make it. And when we moved into the house, by the time that it was done, I was bankrolling a business with the money that I should have been using to build it. Got all confusing. And I didn't realize that this was the case until like November, December. So like 10, 11 months went by. And I realized that every time I would drive into my driveway, I would start feeling panic. I don't know why. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't understand it. Then a couple weeks would go by and every time that I would literally drive onto the road that our house was on, I would feel the same thing. And then it just got worse and worse and worse to the point where as soon as I would get off the highway, I would start feeling panic. It's almost like this began to expand because I was paying attention to it. Maybe uh maybe it was just beginning to preheat everywhere.
But I give you an example of this. How many of you have been stuck in traffic? Think about an important moment where you've been stuck in traffic. You're going to be late. You got it. Depending on the intensity and severity of that, there's rewriting capabilities because your brain doesn't just recognize I'm stuck in traffic. The brain is going to have to pay attention to all of it. Because if you feel like you could die, it's going to start scanning. And let's say that it's a Monday that you're stuck in traffic, okay? And you're on the way to a very important business meeting. We got to raise some money. We have some investors. We're stuck in traffic. It's a Monday. We're going to miss that meeting. So, it becomes existential, very severe, high intensity. And the meaning that we pull from this situation is a range of different things. But let's say that the meaning we pull from this is that we're going to lose our business because we're stuck in traffic. Now, first of all, you're going to act like a kamicazi. If that's the thing that you define it as. These are the people on the highway who are like losing their ever loving minds trying. If there's any way that they can squeeze by you, they're going to squeeze by you. There's all been out of shape. A lot of this is looping. Something happened at a certain point that primed and programmed them that if you are ever behind or late, you lose your life. And so they don't know how to deal with it. So it's Monday, we're going to miss the meeting. Super intense. What if the next Monday you're on your way to a date and there's also traffic? This is a very silly example to show you how this works. Now we have not one example, but two. And then the next Monday you're picking up your kids from school. There's also traffic. Three examples is all the brain needs. Now we're going to preheat for this thing because you're going to have to expend resources. We don't like expending resources. So Sunday night rolls around and we know it's coming. What's coming? Traffic and existential loss. Depending on how bad it gets because we're not just looping. We're actually creating a prophecy that will come true because we are so expectant that this thing is going to happen that we're like an oven preheating. It's like getting ready. You know, in a Tesla, you can set it to preheat or precool based on the time of day that it's used to you leaving. So, this thing's got AI and it's incredibly intelligent. Does anybody have a Tesla? Do you use this feature? So it'll pre it it knows your patterns. It'll start learning. Anybody have a Nest thermostat where if you change it one time, it just thinks that it's going to change it every single day and it tries to learn your behavior. Well, nothing is trying to learn behavior like our own brains. And so now it's preheating itself up and we end up causing so much damage when there was no real risk in the situation. But because we were expecting to deal with risk, we've now created the very ingredients that it needed for it to hurt us. Does this make sense? Yes or no?
All right. So, looping, looping, looping, looping, looping, looping. Um, it eventually got so bad that, you know, I couldn't every time I would go home, I would just be like in a state of a bit of like panic. And I'm talking like I'm I'm not a crazy person. I feel like I'm well adjusted, grew up well, like I my my parents taught me well. I'm I'm I read books, but I was like, I am crazy. I'm going crazy. Every time I get to my house, I'm like losing my mind. Every time I just drive to my house, I'm losing something's broken in my psychology.
So, I I reached out to someone. She's brutal. And she said, "Tell me what's going on." And I told her my past. I told her my history. And I was like, "Yeah, every time I drive home, I'm really nervous. Uh, when I open my email, I'm I get panicked. When I I guess when I open my phone, I get panicked. And I, as I'm talking, I'm literally You ever have that moment where you're like, "What's coming out of my mouth is she's going to fire me as a client. I'm pretty sure." And I almost felt the need to say like, "I promise I'm not crazy and defend myself, but I just didn't. I was like, I just have to be honest with one person. Just if I can have one person to be honest with, then maybe she can help me." So, I'm not going to tell her that I'm not crazy because what if I am and that's what she's supposed to help fix. Like, I'm just going to be quiet. And she said, "Got it. We can fix that. It's going to take about 6 weeks. Here's the price. Wired money. Let's fix it."
And we went through a whole bunch of stuff, but the main thing that we went through and she was like ruthless about every time you feel panicked, find the trigger and write out what do you want it to mean. She gave me this homework. She said, "I'll see you next week." I said, "Okay, cool. I can do that." First time I started feeling a little bit of that panic. I wrote down what I wanted it to mean and I was like this is stupid. This is not what it means. I'm never do this is not even effective. I am burying my head in the sand. That's bad. Didn't do it again. Did it one time. Got back on the phone on Monday. Said, "How'd it go?" "Not very good." I wrote down some like hogwash about what it what I wanted it to mean, but that's not what it means. It doesn't mean that. And she said, "Okay, yeah, this is just the brain going through like a detox process. It's going to you're going to have to make it stick. You're going to feel like you're burying your head in the sand by saying this. Her words, not mine." And I said, "Well, what do I do when I feel like I'm burying my head in the sand by doing this?" She said, "Well, you just bury your head in the sand and you reloop it and it's going to feel like it's not real until one day you realize that it stuck." This is consistency.
So, I did this over and over and over. Do you remember doing this over and over and over? So, be like, "I'm pulling into my driveway. What does it mean?" It doesn't mean that I'm going to lose this house. What it means is I just pulled into my driveway, exercise done. Next day, pull into the driveway. It doesn't mean that I'm going to lose my house. I'm not panicked. What does it mean? It means that I got home on time. Started making stuff up. And this is probably not the most efficient way to do it, but this is how I had to learn how to do it. Got back on the call. She How did it go? Not good. I still feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm literally wasting my time making up dumb answers. She said, "Great. So, reloop it about a hundred times a day." I don't know how to I was like, "I don't know how to reloop something 100 times a day." She says, "Start in the morning, write it out like 50 times, and then whenever you feel it coming up, rewrite it again. Just try to hit 100 times a day." And we did this for about 6 weeks where I was just relooping. And there was a point when I drove into my driveway and I forgot to reloop it because I wasn't triggered. And I remembered it the next day and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have to go loop it. I forgot. I'm going to fail the thing." But the brain slowly started being like, "Okay, okay." Like this is not what it means. I had to give it a new meaning. I had to reappraise the meeting and I had to give it enough consistency that it stuck. It sounds too easy, doesn't it?
Dr. Claire Weekes uh said, "Nerves are conditioned to react to stress in an exaggerated way, bringing unusually intense feelings when under stressed. So when you're stuck in this position, your response will usually not match the stimuli because they're condition to keep you alive. There's not a lot of risk in overreacting. If we're 4,000 years ago, there is a lot of risk in underreacting. This is why this is the case. If you see a bear running at you, which by the way, bears are the most dangerous creatures in the world. If you don't believe that, you've never read a book. They are terrifying. A bear would rip a shark in half. Dude, hippos are dangerous, but they're not vindictive like a bear is. Bears. A bear's running at you. Your life extension is tangible when you overreact to that. Run away as quickly as possible. You hear something that could sound like a bear. Run away as quickly as possible. The same thing happens in starvation. We were not incentivized in old times to just be like, well, yeah, sure, we have enough food. We were incentivized to be like, we have to overeat, overprepare because you never know when you're not going to eat again. These are old ancient programming pathways. The risk is in underreacting back then, but today it's like our we haven't adapted to modern society. What what was old is we would only experience a threat if it was right in front of us. We weren't designed to experience the threat coming from the Middle East constantly on social media. We were not programmed to handle this level of triggering it. It wasn't designed this way. And so now we're running an ancient code that's responding to a million triggers that don't even affect us anymore and things break when this happens.
So we'll practice relooping in a second. Any questions so far? Two types of loops. One is going to be a reactive loop. One is going to be a predictive loop. We need to understand the difference between these two things. And you need to know which one you want to fix first. Because a reactive loop is something where it's like something simple happens to you and you lose your marbles because the last time something similar happened to you, you lost a lot. So now we're we're reacting in a way that is printed from the past and it's not appropriate for the situation. Is this good or bad? It's good. It's a good thing. You don't want to change the human brain. If you change it too much, you might die. This is good. But we want to make sure that our loops are pushing us in the right direction, not the wrong direction.
A predictive loop is when we have been so conditioned to something meaning something or happening that we begin to supply our own ingredients into that equation to make it happen. Is this good or bad? Good. It's good because if we did not have the ability to do that, we wouldn't have creative potential. So, we couldn't step into a room and decide to change it. We would be looking for data on everything before we have certainty. Both of these things are good, but we do need to learn how to remap them. How do we remap them? Consistency. Consistency and intensity. Yeah. Change the meeting but with consistency and intensity. So if you're in a room like this and you stand up and share something that is meaningful and vulnerable and you change the meaning of something and because you're in front of people, you begin to cry. How intense is that moment? Extremely intense. Therefore, it will compress down the amount of time you have to invest to change that meaning. It's why one of my favorite things to do is work on these loops with Holy Spirit. I love it because I can't just make myself cry on on like I can't I'm not an actor so I can't just like at will solitary tear but when Holy Spirit shows up I almost always cry. It's just a sematic release of like this thing is too wonderful for me. And so I begin to cry. And then if I remap there with Holy Spirit, the it just forces a speed up of time. It's like time compression. You don't have to do this with Holy Spirit. You could remap it a 100 times a day like I did, but it's a lot better to just be like, "Okay, God, let's reloop this thing and let him show up." And then you begin to feel this somatic expression which all that does is raise the intensity of it. Does this make sense? Anything to add scientists on looping? No. I'll give you the mic if you want it.
And I don't know if anybody studied neural linguistic programming, but there are three things that we can do to to sort of mess with what's happening with us and and miscatategorize it. You have number one, deletion. You just straight up delete certain things. You have distortion, which can tilt and mess with the meaning and change and distort what you can see. And then you have something that's the worst, which is generalization. Generalization widens it and applies it to everything. It's very general. Ernest, we were talking about this yesterday. Are there more than three? Okay. Um, so the reason I'm asking is not as I haven't studied it deep enough, but I think it's the best way to answer this question. So feel free to chime in uh when I'm done with this because you've studied it deeply.
When you have a reactive loop happening, then that means that the the meaning is being skipped. It's being skipped. You just No, it's it's being skipped. You've just gone straight to what does this mean? So when this happens, I re respond this way and I have really no control over whether that's the right response or the wrong response. Which again is good because if you have if your life is in danger, it's usually going to do that. But it's bad if you're in a business meeting and somebody disagrees with you. We don't we don't have time to appraise that. The last time somebody disagreed with us, it was my father and I lost a bunch of privileges. And now in the interest of defending my privileges that I've won over time, I'm just going to ruthlessly shut this person down. We didn't even appraise it. We just responded to it. So we're looping around.
A predictive loop is usually when something becomes so generalized that we create our own triggers. We apply it to everything and it's now it's now in our in our expectation. So the the action at the end feeds our belief system which is finding triggers in our life. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Most things don't need to be fixed. They literally don't. Most things don't need to be fixed. It's a it's a promotion that feels like a prison and I don't want to break out of the prison before I get promoted. Why would you spend six years in prison and then not get what you paid for? what we talked about yesterday. So, there are definitely times I'm like, "God, would you heal this thing? Would you do this?" And most of my time though, I'm like, "What do you want me to know about this?" And what I get is data on like, "Oh, yeah. This is what you need to know about it. You're good, bro. Don't change a thing. Wait till you see what's on the other side." And this is the I don't want to mess up the the catalyst of the problem that was strategically inserted so that I could grow above it. What I do need to do is remap what I think it means. This business failed. It's not doing really well. What do you want me to know about this business? What do you want me to know about what's happening in this business? What do you want me to know about me on the other side of this business? What do you want me to know about what this feeling means? This is where you get all of the data. And if you have the data from heaven, it's super easy to then install it and retrofit your beliefs to heaven's beliefs. It's a lot easier to do it this way than it is to be like, "Hey, God, just smash that thing." He's like, "Okay, I'll smash the thing." But you're like not going to move forward. You can't get promoted that way. Does this make sense?
You want to practice? Who can think of a of a loop that's happening right now? Kristen's hand went up really fast. Well, no, she's not going to share yet. We're going to do an exercise. Um, think about a loop that's happening right now. And here's how you find it. I'm behaving in a way I don't want to behave. That's how you find it. I don't do what I want to do. I want to do things that I don't do. And this is giant loop. This is what he's talking about. Find the area in your life where you're behaving in a way you do not want to behave or you're feeling in a way that is harmful for yourself. I want you to write it down and then I want you to find the trigger or the event that is paired up with that thing. This should be the easy part. Does everybody understand the two first two parts? Any questions on the first two questions? Say that again. Number one, what's the loop? What's the area where you're behaving in a way you don't want to behave or responding in a way you don't want to respond? And what's the trigger? See if you can find the trigger for that. So, usually it's going to be a person, a situation, a time of day. It's you're going to be able to find something that is that is causing that loop to activate. Then the third question is I want you to ask God, would you tell me what that trigger really means? And then write it down.