How your brain may be holding you back and what you can do about it

Do you ever get the feeling you’re not living your best life? Yes, life can have challenging moments, but surely we deserve to feel we are thriving rather than just surviving? 

During our social media scroll, we see others apparently ‘living their best lives’. Of course, whether they are or not is debatable, however, the social scroll does show us a vision of how we could be living our lives if we chose. 

So what stops us? 

There are lots of beliefs that may hold us back, ranging from uncertainty that we don’t have the right skills or knowledge, all the way through to that awful anxiety that we may not fit in because we believe we don’t have the right clothes or know what to talk about.  There’s rarely evidence to back these reasons up; they are just part of an unhelpful and, sometimes destructive, internal narrative. 

In reality, it is our brain that is holding us back. 

You may wonder why our brain wants to stop us from doing the things that may make our lives amazing… 

Our brain is designed to keep us safe, specifically the part of our brain called the amygdala which is within the limbic system. This is the fight, flight or freeze part, sometimes known as our monkey brain or our inner chimp. It is happiest when we spend time doing things we know. Things that have been done before and are thought to be low-risk, safe, and comfortable.  Things that don’t take us anywhere close to a fight or flight situation, hence trying to keep us in the safe place known as our comfort zone.

We can think of our comfort zone as a partially blown-up balloon, inside are the comfortable experiences of our life so far, and outside of the balloon are the new experiences we may or may not enjoy. Whilst we may want to expand our balloon to include these new experiences, our brain may make it very uncomfortable to do so, making us feel uncertain and anxious, therefore holding us back. The greater the ‘stretch’ in our comfort zone ‘balloon’, the greater the discomfort.

So what can we do? Sit back and stay comfortable?

Of course we can, that is a choice! However, if we want to expand our horizons to live a fuller life, we have to push through that discomfort and step outside of our comfort zone.

Our tolerance for discomfort shapes on how big we should make that first step… Smaller steps are usually more effective in expanding our comfort zone as they create less panic in our brain and, therefore are more likely to be successful. 

What is often a great first step is taking a little time to understand ourselves better. A common starting point is to understand our values (DM @kingstonecoaching on Instagram for a free Values worksheet). Our values give us a unique roadmap that can help us understand which experiences or activities may suit us more than others. For example, if one of your values is a community, then finding a community to experience new activities with will feel more comfortable and aligned than going solo. 

Once you know your personal values, you may understand why certain things in your life have felt clunky or, why certain people, or situations, have triggered you. Our values can be a real guiding light in so many choices we make in our lives. 

Now it’s one thing knowing we’d like to try a new experience or activity, now we have to educate our amygdala or monkey brain, not to panic, and to build the trust that what we are doing is safe, so that our monkey brain doesn’t fight us causing uncertain and anxious feelings. 

The list of tips, tricks and tools we can use to educate and retrain our brain is huge.  Which tools work for you can be quite personal, so below are the top three my clients would call their favourites!

  • Write a list of all the things you do frequently that you did once for the first time and now love.
  • It can be anything, the first time you drove a car, went for a solo walk, went clay shooting etc. Literally anything and everything. This is to prove to your brain that trying new things can be a positive experience.  Make this list as long as you can.
  • Review this list with a sense of gratitude, highlighting your favourite things.
  • When we show gratitude, it rewires our brain to seek out more things to be grateful for. It is also contagious, so feel free to share gratitude in your daily life, others will thank you for it.
  • Find three people you know, or follow, on social media and have a scroll.  You are NOT scrolling to compare yourself to them! You are scrolling to see what they do with their time that you’d love to do. Write down one thing per person. I want you to think about how they started that activity, what it must have been like for them as a beginner, the steps they took and the barriers they had to work through.  
  • This is to highlight that everyone is a beginner at everything they do, we often only see the best bits. This is going to get you thinking about their start point and the behind-the-scenes challenges they have overcome to get to where they are.

Once you have worked through these, you are well on your way to testing yourself by trying something new. This is the exciting bit! Remember, try something small to start with, making sure it’s aligned with your values and, using the three tools above to support you, stretch that comfort zone! If things start to wobble, go back to the three tools at any time to give you the confidence boost to make those first steps to living your best life! 

Remember, you’re not on your own, there are many of us striving to thrive, often the bravest thing is to reach out and find others who are in the same situation, stretching that comfort zone becomes more fun when we do it together!

Written by Jessica Peace,

Founder of Kingstone Coaching and Training Consultancy @kingstonecoaching

ICF Trained Transformational Coach and Certified Business Strategist