The Blog About Calming the Hater in Your Head and Stuff..

by Sean Croxton

“The brain always chooses to shine the spotlight on fear above all other emotions.”

Ain’t that the truth.

As you learned yesterday, fears that we aren’t even consciously aware of can trump even our most stalwart attempts at reaching our goals. The oversensitive, fear-mongering amygdala brings to mind an anxiety-ridden driver’s ed instructor who taps his brake whenever his student approaches the speed limit.

You’re going too fast!

Watch out for the pedestrians!

You’re too close to the car in front of you!

Sheesh…

In its efforts to protect us from harm, the amygdala pumps the brakes on the action centers of the brain, known as the motor cortex. This battle between our unconscious motivations and our conscious intentions keeps us from sticking to our fat loss programs, from leaving our miserable jobs, and from earning incomes that will allow us to do the things we want in life.

No matter how badly you want to lose those 30 pounds, your brain attends to fear above all else and would rather save you from the consequences — real or imagined — of ruffling a few feathers (by changing the way you eat when with friends and family) or diverting from the path of familiarity. Sometimes, there’s nothing scarier than the unknown.

Posted by UW Sean in mind

Fear First: How Your Brain Can Be Your Biggest Hater

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.

Posted by UW Sean in mind

Are You a Professional Human Being?

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.

Posted by UW Sean in mind

How to Recharge Your Batteries in Life and Work!

by Sean Croxton

Green light.

About 10 years ago, when I worked for Todd Durkin I learned the art of color-coding the calendar. If I remember correctly, green meant Green Machine, yellow meant Mellow Yellow, and red meant STOP.

Green Machine is when you’re working your tail off, helping as many people as you can, making a contribution to the lives of others, and earning a good living doing it.

Mellow Yellow is when you tap the breaks a bit and slow things down. The fitness crowd may call this “active recovery”, when you back off on your workouts, reduce the intensity, and allow the body to recuperate before heading into another training cycle.

The color red is the universal signal to STOP. Break time! However, red can also indicate an emergency. And unfortunately, for some folks, it can take a real crisis — typically some kind of stress-induced health challenge — before they are forced to call a time-out from their overscheduled and undernourished lives.

Now I won’t lie to you and tell you that my Google calendar resembles a stop light. There are no green, yellow, or red weeks. But I will tell you that since I learned about Todd’s system way back in 2001 I have always been mindful of not only how I expend my energy but how I recover it as well.

For example, when I was a personal trainer I would take it easy during the summer months, working maybe 10 hours a week, just enough to pay the bills and have some fun. In an occupation known for burnout (my buddy Chris even wrote a book about it), I think these Mellow Yellow summers were what kept me going for as long as I did.

A few years ago, I even took an entire summer off, woke up without an alarm, spent many days with my feet in the sand and eyes on the ocean, and BASICally had the time of my life on the corner of 10th and J.

And as you probably already know, I take at least a month off from UW Radio every year.

I guess you can say I’m a master at recharging my batteries.

Posted by UW Sean in mind, wellness

Compulsive Overeating: Is It All in Your Head?

by Sean Croxton

My exploration into the human brain continues.

Last night I was hanging out in my bathtub (yeah, I do that once in a while) reading a book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. You can imagine how geeked out I was to learn that humans are only species with the ability to prospect. In other words, we can look forward in time and consider the future. Which means that we do whatever the heck we can do to control the future. We believe that this sense of control makes us happy. And when we lose this control, we freak out. I’m sure you can relate.

Why is prospection exclusive to humans. Well, it’s because we have ginormous frontal lobes in our brains. In fact, a frontal lobotomy — or chemical/mechanical destruction of the frontal lobe — would not affect you much. The only major side effect of such a procedure would be the inability to think into the future. The ability to prospect is gone.

I found this interesting because a lobotomy was, at one time, a common and effective treatment for anxiety. What do people typically feel anxious about? The future!

No frontal lobe, no future. Anxiety gone!

Trippy, huh?

Anyway, our last video was about impulsive overeating and its connection to decreased activity of the prefrontal cortex, the front one-third of the brain responsible for planning.

Today, we’re discussing another type of overeater called the compulsive overeater. This individual may have increased activity in a part of the brain located deep within the frontal lobe called the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG). Increased activity in the ACG may be due to low levels of brain serotonin.

Dr. Daniel Amen and I discussed this type of overeating in THIS PODCAST a couple weeks ago.

Proven and natural ways of increasing brain serotonin are supplementing with 5-HTP, l-tryptophan, or St. John’s Wort, as well as using the brain-boosting spice saffron.

But before you head out to the local supplement store to grab some 5-HTP, be sure to check out THIS PODCAST with Dr. Daniel Kalish.

According to Dr. Kalish, serotonin and dopamine are antagonistic — when one goes up, the other goes down. This can cause a problem down the road.

Load up on information, and then decide what is best for you!

And enjoy today’s video.