Conquer Negative Self-Talk & Rewire Your Brain with Dr. Betsy Holmberg

Uncover the power of rewiring your brain as Dr. Betsy Holmberg battles the tribal brain's negative self-talk, choosing to leave behind her past and empower herself against the automatic survival mechanism. Show Notes | Transcript :The tribal brain thinks in terms of in groups and out groups. It's looking at who's in my clan and who's my enemy that I'm scared of or I need to feel like I want to battle. And spirituality is about you know, we are all one consciousness, and we are all doing this together." Dr. Betsy Holmberg  Dr. Betsy Holmberg is not your ordinary scholar. She's an award-winning psychologist and author who has dedicated her life to unravelling the complexities of the human mind. At Harvard, she conducted research on non-suicidal self injury and suicide. Upon recognizing that mainstream literature couldn't answer all her questions, she began investigating the brain's hidden mysteries. She also ran the global behavioral health service line at McKinsey & Company, a premier consulting firm, where she ranked in the top 5% of all consultants. In this episode, you will be able to: Explore the inner workings of the tribal brain and how to confront and control negative self-thoughts. Uncover the mysteries of the Default Mode Network and get insights on how to effectively redirect attention. Learn to distinguish between genuine thoughts and survival mechanisms to achieve a higher level of self-awareness. Delve into the fundamentals of meditation and understand how it aids in empowering your CEO Brain. Discover the role and relevance of antidepressants in tackling mental health issues. Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: Sync Your Head, Heart, and Higher Self for Success with Hilary DeCesare Noah St. John Unveils the Key to Conquering Your Inner Critic Resources: Connect with Betsy here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand You're listening to the Live Love Engage podcast on today's show, how to end negative Self talk for good. Stay tuned. I am Gloria Grace Rand, founder of The L.O.V.E. Method and author of the number one Amazon bestseller, Live Love Engage - How to Stop Doubting Yourself and Start Being Yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically so you can create a life and business with more impact, influence, and income. Welcome to Live. Love. Engage. Namaste and welcome back, podcast and YouTube subscribers. And also, welcome to anyone new to the show. I am so glad you're here. And for those of you who may be just tuning in for the first time and don't know who I am, I am Gloria Grace, the light messenger and spiritual alignment coach, helping women entrepreneurs clear the inner blocks keeping you stuck so you can put yourself first and live the life you want now. And I am so excited about today's guest that we have on the show today because she is going to be talking about the tribal brain, and she has a wealth of experience in understanding what that is, and she's going to explain it to us in a minute. But let me introduce her. She is Dr. Betsy Holmberg. She is an award winning psychologist, author, and speaker. She ran the mental health service line at McKinsey Company, which is a global consulting firm. And at Harvard, she conducted research on non suicidal self injury and suicide. And she also has a PhD in psychology from Duke University. So, like I said, she's an expert in stuff dealing with the brain. So I'm going to bring her on here so we can get started with this interview today. So welcome to live love engage. Dr. Betsy Holmberg Hi, Gloria. I'm so excited to be here. Gloria Grace Rand Oh well, I'm… I love learning about the brain, learning about how the mind works. And so when I saw you, I was like, oh, yeah, we're definitely going to have you on the show today because I think it's so important for us to be able to understand how our minds work so that we can live fully, love deeply, engage authentically, which is what my show is all about. I know we're going to get into this tribal brain, but what got you interested in it I'm curious to know, with all of your expertise that you have, what led you to focus in on this particularly? Dr. Betsy Holmberg Well, it actually came from a kind of rough experience. So I was in the process of getting divorced. My husband had walked out on me in less than two years of marriage, and I was told by the lawyers to essentially do whatever is asked, whatever he wants, allow, because judges are pretty quick to make assessments of women that were withholding or were upset or were doing something. So I did do that. And yet somehow his lawyer had framed something little, just who drives the kid where as me not stepping up. And the judge turned to me and said, you're not doing enough to support your relationship with your ex and his son. And something in me just snapped. And I felt like, okay, the only way I can get an A plus in this situation, the only way to do the right thing in this situation is to actually kill myself. Because if I kill myself, then he gets all the time. He gets all the time, right? And so I called my parents and I told them this, and they immediately flew out, which, now that I understand the neuroscience of the brain, was the best thing they could have possibly did. So we all lived together. I went on antidepressants and got help, and I got through. But three years later, I was still… I just wanted to get off my antidepressant and feel that I had healed from this divorce. And so every time I tried, the voice in my head came back saying, you can't do this. You're not good enough. You can't have a job and be there for this child in the way this child needs. You're a bad mom. You can't do this. You can't do this. You can't do this. And I then kept going on antidepressant thinking that's the thing keeping me going. And I will be damaged forever now. And I just wanted something more for my son than this. I wanted him to have a better life. And so I thought, enough is enough. I need to find out why I am so broken. Like, why am I so damaged? And it wasn't in the trauma literature. It wasn't in our standard therapy literature, which I'd done in graduate school. And so I went to the more current neuroscience and learned essentially the neuroscience of our thoughts and why we think these awful things to ourselves. And so that's how it came to be. Gloria Grace Rand So tell us a little bit about why do we think these thoughts? Because I know it is common. I've heard statistics where they said, I think number one is like, what is it? 80% of the thoughts we think are the same thoughts and that we're also sort of hardwired in for negative thinking as well. Tell us a little bit more about this. Dr. Betsy Holmberg It's interesting because people have been talking about this forever, and the most recent ones who have taken the world by storm are Eckhart Tolle and Michael Singer. And they talk about how our thoughts are crazy and we shouldn't be listening to them. And they use their own personal experience to explain why. And I love those books. I love all of that work. And every time I read it, I feel like, yes. And you feel, you just immerse yourself in what that life would be. And you're like, this is so cool. And yet I never could hold on to it. It didn't feel real because my thoughts felt like they were helping me. They were helping me figure out how to go about my day and be a good parent and a good employee. So what I realized in this is the literature, this is the neuroscience of what Eckhart Tolle is saying and what Michael Singer is saying. And essentially, it's that we don't have one thought network. Our thoughts don't just come from us all the time. We have two. And the first network is what you think. It's the ones that you're choosing to think. But the second network is a survival system. And it is just think of it just like your stress system and how you get stressed when you're in danger. And it's your body's way of trying to protect you and keep you alive. These thoughts are a survival system that looks at the norms of the clan. This all developed back when we were cavemen. And so it's the norms of the clan and how to fit into the clan. And as long as you follow that, you will survive. You will stay a part of the community. When you don't follow that and you get kicked out, then that is death, too. So these two systems operate very similarly. And what we have been mistaking as ourselves for all of these thousands of years is actually a survival system. And that just blew my mind. Gloria Grace Rand Yeah. And some of the learning I've done well, I would say it's the spiritual growth that I've done, I've realized. And it's something I write about in my book, is that whatever you believe, God, higher source, the universe, whatever I believe that we are part of that, that's our true nature is that higher self, not this tribal brain, this survival thing that you're talking about that we've learned. So how do we… you've said that we need to actually shut down this tribal brain. So how do we do that? Well, you’ve kind of telled us a little bit, I think, about why, but how can we even do that? Dr. Betsy Holmberg So the secret lies in actually the neuroscience that first discovered that this system even exists. And so how it started was back with some fMRI researchers, and they were doing I don't even remember what the study was about, something like visual learning. And so they put people in an fMRI machine and they said, hold on a second, it's going to take us a bit to get module one up. And they're recording the whole time....