Whole Brain Living with Dr Jill Bolte Taylor

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host Castunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, a mindfulness meditation teacher, and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Today, I am thrilled to bring you a conversation with doctor Jill Balti Taylor. Doctor Taylor is a Harvard trained neuroscientist who one morning back in nineteen ninety six, suffered a stroke. The hemorrhage was in the left hemisphere of her brain, and it caused her to lose her ability to walk, talk, read, or write, and she spent eight years recovering from the stroke. But as a brain scientist, what happened over the course of four hours that morning was that she was able to witness in real time what was happening in her brain and how it was affecting her experience. Without the left brain online, she had no concept of time, which means she could only experience life in the present moment and without the left brain's ability to distinguish boundaries between herself and the world. She had a sense of herself as vast and expansive and limitless. She gave a ted talk about her experience which you may have seen, called My Stroke of Insight. It has since been viewed almost thirty million times. It is really worth watching if you haven't

1:35 seen it, and she also wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight. More recently, though, she has written a new book called Whole Brain Living. And in Whole Brain. Living, she explains how we don't actually only have a left and a right half of our brain. We have four brain quadrants, and each of them has its own function. So there's left thinking and feeling and right thinking and feeling. And when you can understan stand and relate to each of these four characters that live inside your own head, you're able to understand what's driving your own behaviors. And also you're able to more consciously direct your awareness to the areas that are more likely to give you an experience of life that is more calm and present and joyful.

2:20 So, without further ado, I am thrilled to bring you doctor Jill Balty Taylor, Doctor Jill Bolty Taylor. It is such an honor to have you join us on the Crappy to Happy Podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. You're WelCom I'm excited. Who doesn't want to go from Crappy to Happy? Exactly? I'm in, Exactly, I'm in. Yeah, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. No, it is. It's a great concept and hence, while we have a very loyal listenership, so Jill and I did ask you if you don't mind me calling you Jill, So thank you for that. I always feel like everybody knows who you are, but for those who may not. You essentially gave the Ted talk that was the first Ted tok to ever go viral, and essentially was the Ted talk that made Ted famous?

3:13 Am I right that? Really? Yeah? I'm a Jill. I always thought I was looking for a Jack. I was really looking for Ted. Ted and I exploded into the world together in two thousand and eight, and it was bam. I mean it was amazing. Prior to that, there were only five or six talks on the website, and they were over the last twenty first twenty years of Ted and then it was our conference, and they told us, you know, there's fifty to fifty chance you'll get put on the internet. And it was like, well, if you do a you know, if you're bomb, you don't have to worry. You won't go up. But I got up and I went boom into the world. It was amazing. The Ted talk was brilliant.

3:56 There's a good reason why it just went as it was popular as it was. And obviously the topic was about the stroke that you had, your experience of having a stroke as a brain scientist, So would you mind just giving us kind of the in a nuteal version of what you experienced that day that you had this. Yes. Well, I studied the brain because I have a brother diagnosed with schizophrenia, and so I grew up thinking about the brain and wondering what is the difference between my brother's brain and my brain, because it had to be biological. He's the closest thing to me that exists in the universe. So I began to study the brain. And so I was teaching and performing research at Harvard Medical School, and I woke up one day in the area of my specialty was how does our brain create our perception of reality.

4:48 And it's kind of like, be careful what you ask for, because the universe is going to say, okay, little girl, you want to know how your brain creates reality. Let's unravel your perception of reality, your ability to process information in a normal way. So it was a profound experience. On the morning of the stroke, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I became completely shifted out of the natural abilities of the left hemisphere, that is the portion of our brain that connects us to language, to me the individual, to I can remember a history and my relationship with the external world. So that was all gone. But in the absence of that left hemisphere was this experience of the present moment, untethered, uninhibited by a past and a future. And even though everybody else was freaking out because oh my gosh, Jill's now in a vegetative condition, I felt that I was fine and that everybody else was experiencing all of this pain and all of this judgment, and it was fascinating. I mean, through the eyes of a scientist, losing half your mind was literally a very interesting and exciting and profound experience.

6:07 And I think that's what you described so beautifully in the Ted talk was the what was going on in real time for you, Oh, I'm having a stroke. Wow, cool, I'm having a stroke. Like I get to know to experience this and then obviously report back to all of us what that was like. And Jill, what you described was this like as you just said, this dissolving of boundaries between you and everything, like between you and the universe and no past or or future, just the present, and that that was really kind of like a blissful like it was amazing.

6:47 Yes, it is when when you consider the you know, the brain is made up of this magnificent collection of cells, and cells communicate with other cells in circuits with chemicals, the neurotransmitters, and every ability that we have, be it language or the ability to move my hands or to see visually, every ability we have is dependent on a specific group of cells performing their function. So the cells in the left hemisphere when they went offline, that's where my language is, so my ability to say, I I am Jill Bolty Taylor, I am an individual, I and everything related to me, the colors I like to wear, my likes and dislikes, what my definition of right and wrong and good and bad. How do I take the experience of the present moment and break it up into different pieces so that I can communicate about it, measure it, use it. And there's also a group of cells in the left parietal region that is where all the sensory systems come together, and it creates a holographic image of my body in space. And so the left hemisphere defines the boundaries of where I begin and where I end as me Gibralti Taylor, the individual, and everything gets processed that comes in through my sensory systems, through that filter of me and mine. What is mine? What is my job?

8:19 What is my address? What is my phone number? Who are my friends? What team am I jeering for? What is my political affiliation? What is my country? All of that me me, me individual, left hemisphere. Those are simply artificial boundaries. So without the stress of what is right and what is wrong, and what is good and what is bad? And where do I begin and where do I end? I shifted into just the experience of the present moment. I became open and expansive. There was no molecular differentiation or boundary between me and you or anyone else around me or anything else around me. Everything just broke down to the particulate matter of what the universe is made of, and that's how that right brain processes.

9:07 So there is no me and mine. There's just the we and the us and the life and the energy of that life, and just the right and the left perceptions of ourselves as individuals versus a part of a collective whole. Would you describe it as because what you're describing, you're describing it in times of cellular function and brain biology. But would you describe it as a spiritual experience because that's what it sounds like. Well, that's the language that people who use that language would use. I don't use that language. Well, for me, it was not a near death experience, even though I was as disconnected from my body and brain as a person could be and still be alive. But I didn't have the typical light white light and seeing a others and I didn't see any of that. I didn't have that experience, So don't use that language as a scientist, as a brain scientist, as a lover of the anatomy.

10:10 I'm more comfortable actually talking about it through my scholastic academic educational perspective. Yes, other people would say, oh, absolutely, Jombalti Taylor had a spiritual experience. She had the experience of enlightenment. You know all that language, But I don't study that, so I'm not an expert in that. I am a scientist. I was trained as a scientist, and I think at a cellular level. And even though I lost my academics and my languaging and what I learned in the books, half of my learning is the experiential processing of the right hemisphere. So as a gross anatomist, a body could ever lab anatomist, I could have sculpted for you the abdomen because that's what the right brain would know experience in the three dimension of it all.

11:02 But my left hemisphere went offline, so I could not have named for you the different parts of a stomach. So I had to go back to school to put the language in the terminology and the things that the left brain does. On my education, I think anybody in who's comfortable with the language of spirituality would definitely say this was a spiritual experience. I had an experience of enlightenment, but enlightenment, the true definition of enlightenment is presence. I became present, and we have this choice moment by moment, am I in my past? Many of us spend most of our lives somewhere in the past, or projecting off into the future, or in some philosophical idea that isn't here at all. Right, very few of us spend very much time in the right here, right now, present moment.

11:57 And if you and I are to truly connect with one another there as human beings, we do that in the present moment. We pray in the present, we laugh in the present, we love in the present, we share in the present. And it's particularly hard at this point in time because we live in a world of distraction, with billions of bits of data trying to get our attention, and it's even harder than it was before to actually stay present and be in connection with another exactly exactly. And I ask that question because obviously, I mean, I teach, and I practice meditation and mindfulness. You know, have an interest in Buddhism and Buddhist psychology, and it just strikes me that a lot of what people are striving for with these practices, these contemplative traditions, is like just what you experienced them and.

12:51 Isn't it interesting that we've been doing these practices mindfulness and meditation for centuries. People have found it necessary to use these practices to bring our minds back into the present moment because we are biologically programmed to not be in the present with this left brain. And as our society has accelerated itself in speed because of technology and because of the ways that we communicate with one another, that left brain just runs wild. It just goes goes at a speed and a pace. And we're all so busy, and we're doing this, and we're doing that, and we're all over the place, and we're all over the map, and we're all over and then there are these enormous problems that are happening because we're playing catch up to the things that we're creating that are so interesting and innovative and keeping us busy, busy, busy. But that busy busyness has had a profound impact on the speed at which we're functioning and our quality of life, which hence is why you have a podcast called From Crappy to Happy because we need it because we're inundated. So how do we get out of that left brain stress and busy, busy processing and the acceleration of self into the peaceful experience of the present moment, because in the present moment there is no right and wrong and good and bad and judgment coming at me. It's I can breathe so true.

14:24 And you know, the name of your ted talk and the book that came out following that experience was my stroke of insight? What was the greatest insight? And I guess you know, how did your life change as a result, How did the way you live your life change as a result of which the stroke of the the stroke and. Side and the subsequents. Yeah, well I lost the left hemisphere, and so I lost me the individual. And so you know here I was Harvard trained, climbing the Harvard Ladder. I lost my job. I lost climbing the ladder. I lost my edge. I lost everything that I was climbing the ladder to attain as a societal norm. But what I gained was this incredible sense of peace and this awareness that there is this incredible sense of peace at the core of who I am. And what that means is there's this incredible sense of peace at the core of who we are. And so for me, you know, meditation, If we meditate. To me, meditation is quieting the left brain enough so that the right brain circuits can become dominant.

15:33 And there was all kinds of beautiful research done, some by Andy Neuberg in particular, who wrote a book, a great book called Why God Won't Go Away, And he did beautiful research, and they were looking for if we quiet the left brain and we find God, is there a god center of peace that we want to hook into and turn on? And what it was was, no, what you have to do is quiet the noise. So it's kind of like a radio station. If you really want quiet, you got to turn the left brain off. You got to turn all those channels, all that chatter, all that busyness, all those fears of the future and angers from the past and all that. You got to quiet that down in order to really experience the peaceful, quiet nature of the present moment. The beauty of the human brain is that we can consciously choose to focus on something of choice, and I can focus my attention on my senses and on my breath and bring myself to the right here, right now, and I can choose to stay there as long as I want except then there's that left brain going, hey, we're busy. We got three things we need to get done before lunch is out, and we're behind, and da da da da, And then we got to do this, and then we got to pick up the kids, and damn, I didn't pick up the laundry this morning. And no, da da da da da da, you know, and it's like no, And I'm just going to bring my mind back to this moment of peacefulness. And we all know what this tug of war on flick feels like inside of our head.

17:02 Yeah, we do. And you talk a lot about left brain right brain, and I think we as a society talk a lot about left. Brain right brain. And you mentioned it in your newest book, The Whole Brain Living, that there was this real emphasis on, you know, drawing on the right side of the brain and accessing the right side of the brain. You have taken that one step further. And I find this so interesting and suggest that in fact, there are four quadrants in our brain and that really what we need to be doing is understanding all those four functions, not as this left right duality. Can you please describe the. Four Yes, So the myth has been you know, what we've all been trained to believe is that the right brain is creative. It's open and expansive, it is artistic, it's innovative, it's all these thinking out of the box, right, But it's emotional. And then the left brain is right.

18:00 It's our analytical thinking, it's our language, it's our organizational skills, it's our control. Control details, details, more details about those details. So forty years ago, I would go out and I'd talk about the brain, and people would like look around and look down. It's like, oh my god, you know brain, you know, right brain. Well people now like to talk about the brain, so that's good. But so people know about the amygdala. But I realized that one of my presentations was I said, but the fact of the matter is we have two amygdala, one in each hemisphere. And there was literally an audible gasp in the room and I thought, oh my gosh, that's the key. People think we have a amigdala, a emotional system. Well we don't.

18:44 We have two emotional systems that are complete mirror images of one another in each of those hemispheres. So that means we have an emotional system in the right brain, and we also in the left brain, and we also have thinking tissue that gets added on top of that emotional inside of the human And when new tissue gets added on top of old tissue, it's designed to refine and help differentiate what is below it. So we have these thinking brains. So what that means is we have four groups of cells that are completely intra connected to themselves. They have independent functions and skill sets, and they actually feel different inside of our body. So and there's four of them, the too emotional and the two thinking. So what's the basic difference between the right brain and the left brain. The left brain's all about me, so it's about my past, it's about my future. So the emotions in the left hemisphere are about me the individual, and my past in my future. So all of my pain, all of my joys, all of my memories of emotional are in that emotional system of the left. And then the left thinking tissue is all about me in relationship to the external world. So in the left right I call these characters one and characters two. Character one is that left thinking tissue. It is our a type personality,

20:17 It has language, it has me, my identity. Everything gets processed analytically. Through that, it defines what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. It is all about organizing the external world. In my relationship with the external world, it likes to control people, places, and things. It likes to get its own way. It likes to be the boss. Do you know that part of yourself reasonably well? Yet we are, we are acquainted. We are acquainted again. Yeah, So I encourage people to give that part of yourself a name. I call mine Helen. It's short for hell on wheels. She gets it done. She's busy, right, and if I need to get stuff done, I'm not gonna pull out my right brain characters to like go organize the office. Helen needs to go to work, right, So Helen wants to get on the calendar. So character one is that type a get it done personality. Character two is my pain from the past. It's all the emotion, all the trauma, all the joys, all the laughters, all the relationships, everything. It's it's a craving. It's my craving.

21:30 It's my addiction to anything. It's happiness is determined and dependent on external circumstances. So let's I'm gonna have a picnic with you. We're gonna go for a picnic, but it's raining out, and so my little character too now is not very happy because I don't want that picnic in the rain, right, because so I'm not happy based on the external or I am happy because the sun is shining and we're gonna go have a picnic. So character one and character two about me the individual. It has linearity across time and characters want and characters two do you know your unhappy little self? Yeah do? Yeah?

22:11 Yeah, I think we all do, don't we Yeah. Character three and four are in the right brain. Well, they're not about me the individual. They're about the collective whole. They don't even process me as an individual. They're about the emotional experience of the present moment. So character three is the emotional tissue of the present moment, which really isn't emotional at all. It's experiential. What does it feel like to have this sweatshirt on my skin? What does it feel like to have glasses on my face? What is the temperature of the air, What is the humidity of the air. How does it feel for me to position myself in this chair? All that the experience of the present moment. It's also an adrenaline junkie, because you know, it doesn't want to get bored. It wants excitement. Right, So it's going to say, cas, let's go like jump off some cliffs and let's go hang gliding, and let's go play, and let's go get into trouble. And it's all right here, right now, and it's spontaneous. And so so let's say a snake goes by and I have a fit, Well, I have the fit in the present moment because of that potential danger. Or let's say, let's say a really wild one. Let's say I come home and I find my spouse is cheating on me, and I kill them right in the present moment. So a lot of the character threes. It is this joyful, happy, wild acceptance of what is in the present moment. But

23:42 also our jails are filled with people who made very bad decisions in the present moment. Cha, right, So it's not all good, but it's not all bad. But it's right here, right now, and it's not defined by right and wrong and good and bad. It's about my reactivity to the experience of the present moment. And it's very playful and it's very curious, and it's very innovative, and it thinks out of the box because the box is defined by the left brain. So that's character three. Do you know your low, playful self? Yeah, yeah, you and I will probably play together as little threes. And then character four is going to be the thinking tissue of the present moment. And this is the place we pray to get to. It is the piece. It is the acceptance, the nurturing, the supportive, the compassionate nature of ourselves. Oh my gosh, I'm alive. Whatever's happening in characters one, two, and three, that's what they'll own wild circuitry. But my character four is at peace and at bliss with the fact that I exist at all. I am this amazing collection of some fifty trillion beautiful molecular genius is capable of speaking and seeing and communicating with another person. Oh my gosh, and you're on the other side of the place.

25:00 And what a blessing it is that we exist at all. And it is that sense of gratitude that I can totally embody and be enveloped as, oh my gosh, I'm alive. Do you know that part of your self cast. Yeah, that's the pot that we don't spend anywhere near enough time in. We don't know how to find it. That's the only thing we think we have to do. Meditation. Well, I don't know. I can't meditate. You're not going to get me to sit down and meditate. You're gonna get me in a natural meditation. As I walk through the woods and I just explore, and I meet the creatures with gratitude, and I just admire, and I respect, and I let love come into me. And I feel open and expansive on the top of a mountain, or I feel open and expansive at the ocean. This is this feeling that we get. And if we're using our left brain and saying, okay, my character for has to feel just like this and this is ABCDEFG I have to go through in order to get to that. It's like, well, that's way too much left brain work. Right, you cannot use your left brain to get to your right brain. You have to set down and say to your left brain, you're here, You're on, You're always on. I'm good with you. I'm grateful that you're here. But in this moment, I'm bringing myself to the present moment, and I'm going to feel this enormous sense of gratitude for the fact that I

26:31 am a living being. Oh my god. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you epsdrop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. So, Jill, you talk about you mentioned you've got Helen and so giving you and you suggest, you know, we give these characters the names so we learn to relate to these different aspects of ourselves in our own brains. I'm just curious to know, like, is that just because that's fun to do, or is it because there is some scientific kind of reason why that is helpful to give them names and treat them as separate kind of characters.

27:31 They are separate characters, and when we acknowledge them, they relax such they exist. It's like, you know, I'm not a natural character. One, Well, I really am, but I'm more of a character. Three. I want to be playful, I want to be open I'm more of a character four. I let things come to me. I'm not gonna go boom boom boom, chase, Chase, Chase. So we all have all four of these characters. We all have all four of these parts of our brain. And the ultimate goal in my opinion, as for the evolution of humanity, and that's what we're talking about here, is how do I evolve myself into my best self? Well, my best self is going to be all of me. I don't want to get rid of my pain from the past. I learned lessons from that part of who I am, and when that part comes out I need to use the other three parts of me to love and support that part of me. The character one will come in and say, how do I fix it? What do you need? Are we in danger?

28:31 No? Character two is just miserable because the sun's not shining and you can't make the sunshine. Now about that picnic. But character one's going to come in and says, say, you know, offer other options, like, well, maybe we can hold the picnic indoors, and we could do this and that and the other, and we can make it fun or whatever. Character four is going to come in and just love that little character too as self soothing. When I'm unhappy, when I'm stressed, when I'm miserable, when I'm caught up in my character two. It's not anyone's job in the external world to soothe me. It is my responsibility of me as a whole brain, to take responsibility from my own hostility. Character two is a really important part of who we are because it shows us one that doesn't feel right, that's not good. I need to scream and get loud. I need the attention brought to this subject. But it's not going to rationalize. After it has done its explosion and brought our attention to the fact that we're not happy about something, then it's time to settle that one down and shift into the other parts of ourselves to be able to negotiate rationally with the world around us. Because the world around us is filled with characters one, twos, threes, and fours. And if each of us has four characters, then that means just me and you. We got eight of us in here together.

29:56 And maybe our character ones get along well, and maybe our character three get along well. And maybe I'm hyper sensitive to certain things that you do, and so I spend more time in my character too, and you're looking at me, going, well, you know, Jill spends a lot of time in our character too, not being very happy, and that's really kind of a dragon. So I don't want to hang out with Jill anymore. And you know, and this is what happens in marriage, right, There's four of us, some of us fall in love with one another, and then the little twos up roar their heads and then it's like, well, honey, I can't manage you when you go into your two, and that makes the two even worse because the two just needs to be loved by your four or by my four, you know. So these are tools and how to interact with ourselves and then in relationship with others.

30:46 I really like this idea of giving them names and relating to them as full characters, because I think the thing that what most people experience is all of these, like you said before, all of these contradicting ideas back and forth and noise in our own heads. And I want to do this, but I want to do that. I feel like I should do this, but what I really want is that, But if we can actually step back, and it is essentially mindfulness, but like to observe what's happening and be able to relate to that and go, oh, I see what's happening here. This is this part of me. He wants that, and this is why. Yeah, and this is why it's Character three wants one thing because of what it values. Character three, let's say, wants to go to a party, wants to go play, and it wants to go to a party and play because it wants to connect with others because the right brain is connected to all that is, and so it likes to be in relationship with other people. Well, maybe I ought to stay home and study instead, Right, I got a test tomorrow, and so character one is going, you know, we have a test tomorrow and we need to get some work done. And so we go, we in, so they negotiate, right, and they say, Character three says, well, I really want to go to the party. And it's like, okay, we'll go to the party, but we're not going to drink any alcohol because we got to come home and we've got to be home by nine because we need to get a couple of hours of study in for the test tomorrow. And then character three says, well, Okay, I'm okay with that, and character one can relax because it's going to get the study done. And by naming

32:18 these characters and actually recognizing that they want what they want because of what they value, then we realize all parts of us has value. And when it comes to a conflict or an internal negotiation, and that process is essentially what I call the brain huddle. That's bringing all four characters into a conversation with one another and making decisions so that everybody's on board. And I can guarantee you as soon as you do a brain huddle and you get character four into the game, you're going to make your best choice because that's the best part of who you are as love and and okwardness and calm.

33:04 Yeah, we're pretty left brain dominant right in the world that we live in. And I'm just curious to know. I mean, I probably shouldn't have this. I'm psychologists, but but we come and ask who said that? Who said that? Oh, who said that? Who just said that? Somebody said that about your character? What you know, it's like judgment, we're gonna make judgment. I should have known about that. It's so interesting how much I've been observing. Your character too, and then your character too got to decide if you were really going to get down on yourself or if you were going to let it go. So true, I have been observing myself in terms of characters, and it is really fascinating.

33:45 But some people are naturally more left or right brain. I mean, I know, the world we live on really prioritizes and values productivity and busy in achievement and status, and we're all influenced by that, but some of us are naturally more inclined one way or the other. Right. There are people who are naturally more right brain. But the good news from what you're saying is that it is available to all of us. And thank you to what we know about neuroplasticity. You know that we can consciously choose to spend more time and to cultivate kind of the qualities of all of these. For exact characters.

34:26 Exactly because ultimately, you know, as a human brain, you know, why wouldn't we use our whole brain? I mean, that's what we're doing. We're in this process of working the kinks out between the new tissue, the thinking in the right and left hemispheres, with the emotional tissue below. And we're also working the kinks out between our two thinking centers and our two emotional centers as a collective whole. So the ultimate goal of the evolution of humanity is going to be whole brain living. Will we get yet there on time, we'll see, but at least we're in the game. Yeah. I wanted to come back to the emotional the two of MiG de La because I think that is so critical.

35:12 So just to be clear, So for somebody listening, the left emotional character TiO, it's being anxious about the future, ruminating about the past, causing ourselves emotional distress or happiness, you know, thinking about the past, thinking about the future. It's not in the present moment. The character three, the right brain emotional, which you said, is more of a feeling. That's the experience of what is happening in the present moment. So that is the distinction between for example, anxiety and fear, well anxiety. When we have anxiety, normally anxiety is associated with a thought yes, and the following of that secretary with the emotion.

35:59 So I have test anxiety because even if I studied, I'm taking a test all of a sudden, I'm going to have to regurgitate answers against a clock, right, And so to me that concept becomes anxiety inducing, and we know what that feels like inside of our body. And the thing about the amigdalay is that when they get turned on, they block the hippocampuses, and the hippocampus is the learning and memory highway to what we've learned and memorized. Let's go back to that other scenario. There's a party going on and character three saying, well, I want to go to the party. You know, I haven't seen my pals in a while. I want to go play. And character one comes online and says, well, we still have to come home, so we can party until nine, and we can't have any alcohol because we need two more hours of study and if we can do that, and then character three says, okay, I'm good with that, and so they say, so we go to the party. So we go to the party, and we obey the rules of our brain and we leave at nine, and character one goes home and she studies and she packs all that stuff into her head and then we wake up in the morning and we miss the alarm, so we miss the alarm, we wake up, We're an alarm, alarm alert alert. Oh my god, we're late, right, we got twenty minutes to get to school. It's gonna I'm gonna be at least ten to fifteen minutes late for the exam.

37:28 I'm in panic mode. This is character three in the present moment fear, but character two is saying, oh my god, if I don't do well on this test, I'm gonna I'm gonna fail this class. I'm gonna ruin my gpa, I'm gonna my mom's gonna kill me there. Everybody's gonna blame it that I went on the party last night, and you know, and so character twos in all this anxiety now. And so then I get there and I'm sweaty, and I'm I'm just like and I sit down and the teacher responds to me, right, And so if the teacher looks at me like it's such a dummy, you know, you can't do anything. You know, they get in there too, and they ridicule me, and I just feel and then it's like, well, I can't access anything. I just I'm in my own funk and I can't get to all that stuff that Helen learned. So I need to in that moment if I want to access Helen. I need to close my eyes. I need to sit still, I need to breathe. I need to bring everybody in. I need to come to the present moment, and I need to say we are okay. Allow ninety seconds to pass from the moment you think of thought. It stimulates an emotional reactivity. You run that emotional loop from the beginning to the end of that being in your bloodstream takes less than ninety seconds. I can calm myself and self soothe myself because I got that beautiful character for saying, you know, we're going to be okay no matter what happens, Sarah, it really is okay. And so I allow all that

38:59 to go away. And then I come in with my clear mind, which is my character one, and I read the questions and I go through my test and I do the best that I can. So just in that little scenario, boom, everybody's there, right. It's like the explosion inside of the head. But when anxiety hits us, when fear hits us, and fear there's different kinds of fear. You know. I can look at a dog and that kind of dog bit me, you know, five years ago when I was riding a bike down the street. And now every time I say a dog like that, I move into my fear of that kind of a dog. Or I might have just a fear of a snake just goes by and I'm going, whoa freak out.

39:41 Yeah, that was really good life advice. Just rut there. Just that if anybody listening takes nothing else away from this that you know takes ninety seconds for your body to. Run that emotional circuitry and that to leave right. And you can feel it. How long does it take? And it's not that just negative emotions, but time it the next time you feel your anxiety. The thing about cells and circuitry is that cells run in circuits, and the more you run a circuit, the stronger that circuit becomes, and the stronger it becomes, the more it will run on automatic. So this becomes our automatic reactivity. And that's what the a magdala is dependent on in order to save our lives. It is a circuit design. To I see something it feels unfamiliar, I don't feel safe, alarm alarm or word alert for ninety seconds, I need to be completely alert right at the same time, How long does a belly laugh? The last time you had a belly laugh, it is almost impossible to have a belly laugh for longer than ninety seconds. Now, it's really intense, but it comes and it goes. You know, you see someone you haven't seen in a long time, and especially in a pandemic, and we haven't hugged one another, right, and so now we finally get together and my heart just opens and their hearts is so and we just hold one another. Doesn't generally last for longer than ninety seconds.

41:06 These emotions flow through us through these less than ninety second emotional circuits. Now that doesn't mean I can't stay angry for longer than ninety seconds, but that's because I'm rethinking the thought that's restimulating the emotion and then the reactivity. Right right, uh exactly, Jill, you mentioned the brain huddle. This is golden. Can you talk us through, yeah, brain huddle. This is the process of bringing us back on line, right, like to bring out whole brain together. Exactly, brain huddle. Once we understand these four characters, and we give them names, and we recognize them in ourselves, and we can come to recognize them. Give your four characters a name that is meaningful to you. That's why I didn't name Everybody's is going to be called Helen. Mine's hell on wheel.

41:57 She gets it done. That's what it feels like in my bad. My little Abby is my little character two, and that's short for a band end. I think the moment I came flying out of my mother's womb, it was a shocking experience, you know, just that separation, the temperature, the pain, the light, the overstimulation. I call my little character to Abby. Character three is pig Pin because she's playful. She's constantly functioning in a state of chaos and mess. And that's the little Peanuts character of Snoopy and the Crew. I'm a little pig Pin. And then my character four, I call her Queen Toad. Queen because if you're female probably male two, you got a queen inside of you.

42:42 And toad because I live on a lily pad, I live on the water, I live on a boat six months a year. I at a queen Toad. She's a little goofy. Anyway, once you have your four characters and you really learn to recognize them, then you know Let's say your husband or your kid comes home and you're feeling you interact with them like a character one, and you can say, yeah, that was very character one of me, or for some reason, you know, my husband was late and we were supposed to leave ten minutes ago, and I'm unhappy now, and so he comes in and I chew on him, and it's like, uh, I'm so sorry, honey, you came in and I became my two. You know, I can learn then to take responsibility for my own four. I can learn to recognize the four characters in those I have relationships with, and we could actually begin to communicate with one another at the level of the four characters, which makes it no longer personal. It's just like, I'm sorry, I was running that circuitry. We can take responsibility. So when I need to really bring myself together, I call it a brain huddle. Brain bi n B stands for breath.

43:51 Focus on the breath. The breath is the train that is running down a track in the present moment. When I breathe, I can change the amplitude or the frequency. I have the ability in the present moment to manipulate my breath. So bring your mind to the breath automatically brings you to the present moment. Our stands for. Recognize which character were you in before, or who called the brain huddle. I call this calling the brain huddle. Any four characters can call the huddle. So recognize who called the huddle. And if I'm really unhappy, I may call the huddle because I need a cuddle. You know, I need to be hugged. And if nobody else is gonna hug me because I am mean and ugly and loud, well I can hug myself. You know. Isn't it lovely that I have that capacity? My character for she's always there, So r is Recognize which character called the huddle. And in the beginning, I encourage all four characters to call the huddle. Get used to it, become familiar with it, because you really need it when that character two comes online and you're chewing on somebody and you need your own character two to call a huddle. So you got to practice it, right, it's just circuitry. Practice it or recognize who called the huddle. A appreciate the fact that regardless of who called the huddle, there's four of us in here. We've got all four of us. Okay, we may be feeling anxious or unhappy or angry or whatever, but there's four of us. Character two may be called the huddle. I is inquire. Okay, we're all here, We've

45:25 got all four of us. Inquire which one do we as a collective whole want to come out next? Do I want to keep chewing on you because I'm not done fighting with you? Or do I want to go do something and distract myself and do something productive? Or do I want to take a walk in nature and go be with God and let my heart expand? Or do I want to go to the art space or call the best pallenges, laugh my butt off and play with somebody? Who do I want? Inquire? Which one do we want to bring online? And then end is navigate Navigate the next moment. In this moment, Okay, I've decided I'm going to go get some work done. Well, I'm still feeling maybe some anxiety inside of my chest, so I'm going to navigate the next moment. After that, Okay, I'm feeling the anxiety, I'm going to go for a walk.

46:15 And it's like, okay, I'm going to go for a walk, and then a friend calls and she's in her too, and it's like, can I manage that person's too right now? Or do I really want to chew on them some more? You know, navigate the moment by moment by moment. This is pure power. This is power. This is who we are as biological creatures. We all have all of this inside of ourselves, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world. Boom, Why wouldn't we want that? It's pure personal freedom? Why wouldn't we want that? I feel like that is just the perfect point to finish this conversation, because it's brilliant life advice. What I really love about the brain huddle is that as you woke through it, it is you know, all of the things that I'm really drawn to and feel passionately about, you know, the things like just being present, having self understanding, self awareness, but also self compassion, you know, be kind to ourselves, be curious. If we could all embody more of these kinds of attitudes and qualities, not only would we be happier, but wouldn't the world just be a better place?

47:23 Yeah? You know, we are these really magnificently beautiful creatures, and a friend of mine says, you know, humanity, we are confused and more confused, and it's like, but we don't have to be. We can actually differentiate the different parts of who we are and learn to recognize that in the course of a minute, I can have all four of my characters passed through my brain three times. I mean, we're just running all this circuitry on automatic, and it's like wow, to be able to actually know who I am, to know who I am and therefore or what my choices truly are, and then the gain the power to know how to pick and choose who and how I want to be, regardless of who you present yourself to be in any moment.

48:16 Yes, Jill, thank you so much. I will put a link to the book Whole Brain Living in the show notes and put links to your very. Famous Ted talk as well. I just wanted to also make the point that you know, in the book you have a lot of examples about how we can learn to identify each of the characters in our brain. You talk about parts of our brain in relation to things like addiction and you know, mental illness, and how we relate to our bodies and there's a whole lot of really really practical, useful stuff in there. It's really great. I've been recommending it to everybody. But thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with us today. It's been a privilege from crabbing a happy here we go.

49:00 Thank you. If you're interested to find out more about Whole Brain Living, doctor Taylor's book is available now in all bookstores and it is called Whole Brain Living. I'll also include a link to her ted talk in the show notes, and it really is worth twenty minutes of your time. If you haven't seen it, or even if you have, I would recommend a rewatch. Don't forget. Also that all three of my Crappy to Happy books are now available on audible. You can listen while you walk, while you drive, while you do anything at all, really, And if you would like a paper book and you would like a signed copy, they are available to buy on my website castone dot com. I personally think they make a great gift. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do give us.

49:45 A five star rating and a nice review on Apple Podcasts. And to be sure that you never miss a new episode. Make sure you hit the little plus sign on Apple Podcasts or the follow button on Spotify, and I cannot wait to catch you in the next episode of Crappy to Haby listener