Your Brain Keeps Trying to Tell You This One Thing: Will You Finally Listen?

"I've decided that gravity should make things fall up. And I'm mad as hell about it," I tell him.

He stares at me blankly.

Daniel is a senior VP at one of the world's largest tech companies. While he loves his job, he's in a great deal of pain: anxious, on edge, unable to relax, short-fused and angry.

You know the drill.

People come to work with me on an incredibly diverse array of pain in their lives: job stress, leadership struggles, team conflict, boundaries, trauma, anxiety, marital problems, infidelity, parenting issues.

In this diversity, there is one thing that unites them all: Confusion.

People seek help because they can't quite figure out how to solve their own problem—and?this makes perfect neuropsychological sense.

Copious amounts of neuroscientific evidence tells us that when we’re in pain, we’re easily confused.?In a painfully ironic twist, we lose access to the genius of our brains—our creativity, problem-solving, emotion regulation and decision-making skills—at the very times we need it the most!??

In this article, I want to offer you a powerful beacon, a signal so clarifying and soothing it will permanently change the way you relate to pain in your life. And in changing your relationship with pain, you change your relationship with your power.

Your brain wants you to know that you have 2—and only 2—forms of pain in your life.

1.????The pain of suffocation?

2.????The pain of expansion

The pain of suffocation is any pain that results in your greater stuckness, smallness or suffering. The pain of expansion is any pain that results in your greater progress, growth and creation.??

You are a big ball of energy powering that meat suit you’ll spend your whole life in.??Imagine there’s an energetic flame that burns inside of you. Every action you take either weakens or strengthens that sacred fire.??When the pain in your life weakens the force of that flame and leads you to feel less than you were, that is the pain of suffocation.??When the pain in your life strengthens your energy and leads you to feel more than you were, that is the pain of expansion.?

While the pain of suffocation is an obvious pain, the truth is expansion hurts, too! Becoming more than we were is indeed a painful process, which is why we call it "growing pains."

Let's take an example: Being more courageous. These days, you have all of these calls for more courageous leadership. But if things like courageous leadership were easy, then everyone would already be courageous. There is one foundational reason it's so hard to be consistently courageous: It can hurt like hell.

The truth about these soaring virtues we know will ultimately expand us—virtues like courage, authenticity, and transparency—is we avoid them because they terrify us.

Take a moment and think about your life. Do you frequently:

• avoid expressing yourself authentically?
• avoid holding your boundaries?
• avoid being more honest because you're scared what might happen?
• avoid being more creative because you're worried you might embarrass yourself?
• avoid going after what you truly want because you're afraid you'll fail?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are choosing the pain of suffocation to avoid the pain of expansion. To break this cycle, you must ask: Is this the most powerful pain for my life?

Let's return to Daniel.

When Daniel came to me, he was deep in the pain of suffocation both psychologically and literally.?“I feel trapped. It’s like I can’t breathe because I can never get in front of my life. I’ve gotten to a point where it doesn’t even feel relaxing to relax.”??

For Daniel—and?like so many of us—he's suffering from a classic case of overworking.

After some exploration, he’s able to identify that the deepest motivation for his overwork is safety. On an unconscious level, he believed that if he did enough, prepared enough, produced enough, he would safe.?For example, he’s working in the wee hours of the night, not because he wanted to, but because he was afraid someone would get mad at him, criticize him, or think he didn’t have his act together.??

Here's the dangerous thing you must know about the pain of suffocation: The things it convinces you will save you become the very things that destroy you.?

For example, when he sends emails at 1 am, and the next day his world is still spinning on its axis—he still has a job, his face hasn’t been turned into a viral meme, people still respect him—his brain concludes that his worry-related behaviors?caused?his safety.??

When you routinely engage in these type of safety behaviors in an attempt to protect yourself from pain and nothing terrible happens, your brain goes: "Good thing I did all that worrying to keep us safe. You can thank me by doing it All. Over. Again."?

This cycle cannot end because—and this is so wild so get ready—the very type of evidence you gather to prove your temporary safety is the very thing that deepens your pain!?

Daniel gets particularly tearful when he describes how desperately he has worked for a solution. He's so tired from all this struggle.?It's crushing him, his family and it's affecting his team, too.?

But therein lies a major part of his problem.

This is counterintuitive, so listen closely: Often when people are in pain, they understandably seek the silver bullet, the magical solution that will make them pain-free. This is a fool’s errand, as hopeless as getting mad that gravity won't make things fall up.

Emotional pain is governed by the laws of physics the same way a falling object is governed by the laws of physics. When we put people in fMRIs and cause them pain, an energy shows up in their brains in very reliable ways. According to physics, energy can never be destroyed. This means that every time your goal is a perfectly pain-free solution you are seeking to destroy an energy that cannot be destroyed.

In your quiet moments of honest reflection, how often are you seeking the pain-free option—the option where everyone likes you, no one criticizes you, you never make a single mistake?

In these moments, you suffocate yourself.

You become the inflictor of your own pain!

You are universe incarnate; your life is a staggering act of genius.?You’re here, not by mistake, but to do creative, important, powerful things. You wouldn’t waste a single nanosecond of your life hollering about how gravity should make things fall up, so don’t waste your stunning power in search of something that the universe is clearly telling you does not exist anyway.

Your power is so close.??

Everything you wanted—the visions you imagine, the dreams you hold, the relationships you desire—are all right there. Do you really think all that energy was put inside of you by mistake? To torment you about all the things you want but can never have?

No!

The energy inside of you is calling you Home.

All you need to do is pick a more a more powerful pain.

Wiser pain, elevated power.?

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Next up: More on how to work with the power of expansion.

About Dr. DiGangi: As a neuropsychologist who specializes in the brain, anxiety and leadership, Dr. DiGangi helps you leave your pain and claim your life.