by Sean Croxton

Haters gonna hate.

Another of one of life’s certainties is that there will always be people — sometimes even those who are supposed to support you the most — who will do all they can to keep you down. They go out of their way to sabotage your diet and exercise program. They do all they can to tear you away from your significant other. For some reason, they can’t seem to be happy for you no matter what awesomeness may be occurring in your life.

That’s a hater.

Yet, little do we know that our biggest hater may be, in fact, that three-pound noodle between our ears.

Last night, I decided to pluck one of my favorite books, Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, off the shelf. In it, author Dr. Srini Pillay breaks down the science of fear and why even though we know what we want, we just can’t seem to act on it. We get stuck.

This reminds me of a Facebook status update I posted a couple of months ago, in which I asked my peeps what they would do if they were guaranteed to succeed. The responses were some of the most amazing aspirations I had ever read. Yet, when I later inquired about why they were not pursuing these inspiring endeavors, the almost-unanimous response was fear.

But where does this fear come from?

The human brain is quite the survivalist. Although we have developed higher order functions like speaking, thinking, and, of course, blogging, our brains still possess primitive forces remaining ever-vigilant for signs of danger or threat. It is these latter forces that may lie at the root of what I call the game of start-stop-start-stop-only-to-start-again-and-stop-again when it comes to moving toward our goals.

I detailed my own seven-year battle with the start-and-stop cycle, as it related to completing my e-book, in chapter 10 of The Dark Side of Fat Loss.

In the diet and exercise world, this cycle is rampant. And it may not have anything to do with the program one is following. In fact, it may not have to do with anything within conscious awareness! The source may reside with in the subconscious mind.

Before I go on, I should let you know that what I am about to describe is merely the basics of fear science. If I went any deeper, we’d end up with a really long blog. So, for further reading, I suggest you check out chapter one of Life Unlocked, or at a minimum, listen to THIS INTERVIEW with Dr. Pillay on UW Radio.

At the heart of fear lies an almond-shaped mass of nerve cell bodies, located in the center of the brain, called the amygdala (a-mig-duh-la), a primitive you-better-run-from-that-hungry-lion structure we all inherited from our ancestors. When danger is present, this structure lights up, thus activating our fear circuitry.

To say that the amygdala has an itchy trigger finger would be an understatement. Take for example people who have a condition called cortical blindness, with which there is no damage to the eyes themselves but to the striate cortex, the part of the brain responsible for processing the nerve signals relayed from the eyes. In other words, the eyes work fine, but the brain just can’t make images out of the information, thus the individual can’t “see” anything.

Studies have shown that when photos of people with fearful facial expressions — or other unsettling images such as spiders — are presented to cortically blind subjects, the amygdala fires and the fear circuitry is activated!

Equally mind-blowing is that it only takes a mere 10 millisecond (ms) of exposure to the image for the unconscious brain to register and begin to process the fear source. After just 30 ms, the conscious brain is set into motion.

If the brain can perceive a visually communicated image when the individual is without the ability to see it, just imagine what’s going on within our brains when we are inundated with negative news stories, violent video games, celebrity tabloids, office gossip, jobs we dread, and negative self talk?

So, what does this have to do with your brain being a hater, or why you’ve been playing the start-stop-start-stop game?

Consider the following analogy that I’m totally stealing, almost word-for-word, from Dr. Pillay. (I’m sure he won’t mind.)

Nerve tissue is live tissue that acts just like an electrical cord. When you plug the cord into its power source, current begins to flow. If you plug an electrical cord into a battery, which produces direct current (DC), direct current will run through the cord. If you plug the cord into a wall outlet, which transmits alternating current (AC) from a power plant, alternating current will run through the cord. The nature of the power generated by the source determines how the current flows. (Pillay, 4)

In Pillay’s analogy, the sources are the battery and the power plant, while the resulting currents are DC and AC, respectively.

When it comes to the nerve tissue in our brains, the source is the events of the world. As soon as we are born, we are constantly exposed to events (source inputs), all of which flow into our brains, consciously or unconsciously, regardless of whether we are wide awake, daydreaming, or sound asleep. In other words, the brain is always plugged in. If the events taking place are of a fearsome nature, then a fear current will run through the nerve tissue.

Now, imagine what would happen if we were consciously aware of every single event that took place around us. We would go nuts! There would be way too much to attend to. Yet, although we cannot process it all on a conscious level, the subconscious is still taking it in. Pillay uses the example of a patient who suffered from a case of anxiety that subsided once her husband stopped watching crime shows in bed after she fell asleep. No, she wasn’t watching the shows, but because of them, her fear circuits were firing as she slept.

Now for the hater part. The amygdala is connected to the conscious brain, thus allowing signals to run between it and the more conscious get-the-job-done action centers (the cortex) that we need to move toward our goals, whether they be losing weight, being in a healthy relationship, or making more money. Just as those whom we feel we are most connected to may be our biggest haters, the close connection between the cortex and the amygdala can put our plans of lean bodies, wedding rings, and higher tax brackets on hold.

When fear is present — again, consciously or unconsciously — the amygdala fires up. Pillay writes, “this amygdala activation will spread to the cortex and disrupt the synchrony your brain needs for the cortex to organize your efforts toward the goal.”

Amygdala gotta hate.

I’m running up against my 3-page blog rule. I’ll be back with more tomorrow. But, in the meantime, consider what fears you might have — consciously or unconsciously — about getting healthier and/or losing weight.

Do you worry about what other people — friends and family, in particular — will think of your diet and lifestyle changes?

Do you worry that your significant other, who has gained quite a bit of weight him/herself, will become jealous of the new attention you receive once you achieve your goal?

Or are YOU feeling weary about all of the attention?

Are you scared to death of your next weigh-in and body-fat check with your personal trainer?

As you ponder that for the next day, I challenge you to try just one thing that will surely calm down that overreactive hater in your skull. For the next 24 hours, don’t watch any news, read any newspapers, visit any news sites, play any violent video games, read any gossip mags, or participate in any gossip yourself. Try it for one day and notice how much better you feel.

If there is one thing I have noticed about the Professional Human Beings (PHB) I spend time with, it is that they avoid all of the above, all of the time. And they get stuff done!

Check out the video below regarding this kind of input control with one of my fave PHBs, Todd Durkin.

More on this topic — including some solutions — tomorrow!

Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Out.

Sean
PHB2B

by Sean Croxton

If there is one thing guaranteed about life, it is that we all evolve.

I can recall my early days as a personal trainer, when I considered exercise to be the solution for everything under the sun. I immersed myself in books, videos, and courses on fitness, strength, periodization, and anything else that could help me build the ultimate physical human machine.

Then I stumbled upon the work of Weston A. Price, Francis Marion Pottenger, and many other nutrition legends who convinced me that diet was a critical element of building not only a well-tuned physical body but one that enjoyed internal health as well.

As I learned more about nutrition, I became less enthusiastic about my personal training career. Since it was so different from anything else they had ever heard before, most clients seemed to be disinterested in my nutritional advice. They just wanted to work out. And since you can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet, I eventually hung up my stopwatch to become a nutrition consultant.

Working as a Metabolic Typing Advisor, I quickly learned that many of my clients had health challenges that went far beyond diet and exercise. Despite their much improved eating habits, things like insomnia, low libido, and digestive problems continued to persist. That is when I stumbled upon Reed Davis and the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN) course.

FDN blew my mind. I learned all about steroidal hormone imbalances, detoxification pathways, intestinal pathogens and dysbiosis (bacterial overgrowth), and a bunch of other cool stuff. The best part is that I could run lab tests on my clients to see where the hidden internal dysfunctions resided. Once we found those dysfunctions, I had the pleasure of helping my clients correct them through natural protocols.

Once again, I immersed myself in information, reading everything I could within the realm of functional medicine and the endless connections amongst the body’s many systems. You have no idea how much fun this was (and still is)!

As my FDN practice grew, another missing piece of the puzzle became apparent — mindset. Some clients just seemed to think differently than others. After a while, I could almost sense who would follow the program and eventually resolve their health complaints, and who would not. It all revolved around mindset.

This reminds me of one of the other reasons I left personal training — I was tired of being everyone’s therapist! Some clients would spend their entire hour dumping their problems on me. Hours upon hours of negativity would often drain the life out of me. After a hard day’s work, all I could do was sit on the couch or lie in bed almost catatonic as a result of everyone else’s woes.

I wanted to be a personal trainer, not a full-time therapist.

But the honest truth is that, just like the overlapping systems of the human body, the mind is more connected to health, disease, and the outcomes of the various programs and diets we follow, than most of us would like to admit. There’s a reason why my training clients found it so easy to vent during their sessions. It is because the mind and body are not two separate entities. They are one. And it’s about time that we as health and wellness bloggers start recognizing it.

As you may have noticed lately, my tweets and FB posts are more about mindset than nutrition these days. My radio shows have taken a slight shift away from typical health topics, and moved toward personal development. And if you could see my Amazon receipts, very few of the books I order are actually about health.

No, I’m not abandoning the real food and health movement to become a self-help guru. Not at all. And I’m not about to get all “new-age” on you. Underground Wellness will go on. Rather, my new mission is to help others to help themselves by way of taking the word “holistic” to another level.

Holistic (adj.) – characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

After years of experience, progression, and personal exploration, it finally hit me a couple of weeks ago — a lightbulb moment, indeed. I was at the gym working out and listening to a lecture on my iPod by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, author of the infamous book Psycho-Cybernetics. As I sat on the bench, mesmerized by the content of Dr. Maltz’s talk and taking way too long in between sets, he said three words that made me pack up, leave the gym, and head home to brainstorm. Those words were…Professional Human Beings (PHB).

That was it, the missing piece of the puzzle that I have been trying to solve since my personal training days. Yes, we all want to be healthy. However, I also feel like each and every one of us would like to be pros at being human as well.

Think about it, is superior health possible if you’re in a perpetual state of unhappiness fueled by negative self-talk?

Thoughts determine our feelings.

Feelings determine our actions.

Actions determine our results.

Remember when everyone was calling the movie The Secret a bunch of baloney with its “thoughts become things” mantra? Well, it didn’t mean that we can just sit around thinking about stuff and it will suddenly appear in our lives. That’s ridiculous! What it meant was the three sentences above. When we take more responsibility for the way we think, we tend to act differently. When we act differently, we are more likely to achieve the outcomes we are striving for. But it all begins with what’s going on between our ears.

If your diet occurs to you like a big inconvenient pain in the butt, how does that make you feel? How do you act? What results do you eventually get?

See what I mean.

What I like most about Dr. Maltz’s PHB term is the word “professional”. A true professional is committed to his or her craft. To me, being human is the greatest craft of all. In my personal life, I have embraced the idea that anything can be learned — love, relationships, communication, etc. Anything we wish to achieve or become in our lives can be learned and mastered by way of diligent study, mentorship, and practice. The only requirement is commitment.

And this brings us to The PHB Quadrant, a concept I finalized this morning while doing inverted rows on the TRX. (I swear I get the best ideas when I’m at the gym.) To be a Professional Human Being, I believe that we must seek expertise in the following four areas of our lives:

Health Mastery.

Self Mastery.

Wealth Mastery.

Help Mastery.

Like the systems of the human body, all four of the above are interconnected. For example, mastery of self involves taking control of the mind and the thoughts that go through it. Remember, thoughts become feelings become actions become results. Sorry for repeating myself, but this one is key.

And let’s be honest, real food can be tough on the bank account. Lack of attention and focus on wealth, or the mastery of finances, can limit one’s options at the supermarket. No money. No healthy food. It’s an unfortunate reality, but still a reality. I don’t mean that you have to be super rich to afford real food, but wouldn’t it be nice to purchase grass-fed meat, pastured eggs, and free-range poultry without all of the stress and sacrifice?

The last component of the quadrant, Help Mastery, is by far my favorite. There is nothing more fulfilling, enriching, and rewarding than stepping outside of ourselves in service to others. As John Demartini says in THIS INTERVIEW, to accumulate wealth, you must find someone to serve and something to sell. My buddy Antonio Valladares of Healthy Urban Kitchen sent that audio file to me on November 29, 2008. I’ve listened to it so many times I can probably recite the whole thing to you.

Life is too short to hate our jobs, or to expect to get without giving, or to be an expert in a particular field while barely making ends meet, or to bang our heads against a wall as we try to follow some rigid diet and exercise program without the proper mindset to follow through.

So, I invite you to hang out with me on this blog, as I learn and share the art of becoming a Professional Human Being. You’ll learn all about my fascination with the human brain and its influence on success and achievement. You’ll learn how you can break free from a job you don’t love, and how you can move toward creating one that falls in line with your passions. You’ll learn how to create time freedom, as you stop trading your hours for dollars. You’ll learn how to read faster and retain more information. And I’m super excited to learn how we can use particular foods, herbs, and supplements to sleep deeper, think more clearly, and simply be more productive people in general.

Why would anyone not want to learn this stuff?

I’m getting pumped up just writing about it!!

This is my passion that I wish to share with the world. Be on the lookout for the debut of my spin-off radio show, on which I interview a who’s-who of success, personal development, wealth, and money management experts.

Also, keep your eyes peeled for the Real Food Summit coming this June. Because when it’s all said and done, it’s really all about Just Eating Real Food. JERF!!

So, what does being a Professional Human Being mean to you?

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Out.

Sean
Aspiring PHB