What if feeling your feelings didn’t mean falling apart — but actually gave you more control, not less? If white knuckling or pushing through is the best only way you know how to feel your feelings. You’re not alone. Discover the hidden mistake keeping perfectionists stuck feeling on edge, why you can never outthink your feelings and the right way to feel your feelings.
Want to bring rewiring into your reality? Where being confident, certain and playful is just how you roll? Perfectionist Solutions 1-1 coaching is your next step.
Mentioned In Episode 254:
Perfectionism Optimized 1 to 1 coaching
Other helpful podcast episodes in series on How Your Brain Actually Works:
Timestamps:
00:00-Your thoughts create your feelings LIE #1
01:53-Can't Feel Your Feelings Without This
04:14-Knowing how your brain actually works
05:24-"What is Wrong With Me?" Explained
06:37-Feelings Are Psychological LIE #2
07:16-Feelings are Emotions LIE #3
08:56-Where Feelings Actually Come From
10:08-How Depersonalizing Feelings = Freedom
12:46-Turning Mom Meltdown Moments Around (Manon's Story)
14:35-How To Control Your Feelings
16:01-Rational Thinking + Decisions LIE #4
17:32-Striving For Excellence Without Pushing Through
18:29-What Your Person Account Has To Do With Feelings
19:41-How To Identify Your Feelings Fast
21:12-How To Feel Your Feelings Visual Tool
22:33-Why Meditation + Deep Breaths Don’t Always Work
23:58-Thoughts Drive Your Feelings LIES #5
25:57-Perspectacles How Feelings Shape Your Perceptions
28:37-Turning Your Mood into Useful Fuel
30:07-Where Sense Data Fits Into The Equation
How To Feel Your Feelings Q&A
Q: Why does “changing my thoughts” never changes my feelings—especially as a perfectionist? A: This episode breaks down the myth that thoughts drive feelings (hint: it’s the other way around!). Discover why “thought work” is a torture device for perfectionidtic people and how the “CTFAR Model” does not actually work for any human with a brain
Q: What’s really going on when I’m overwhelmed by emotions even if everything looks fine on the outside? A: You’ll learn the neuroscientific difference between feelings and emotions, plus why this distinction puts an to the cycle of overthinking feelings and asking “what is wrong with me”
Q: What's the biggest misconception high-achievers have about feelings? A: Most of us have a totally backward understanding of where feelings come from (and it’s not just psychological!). CLG reveals the real, science-backed answer.
Q: How can I feel my feelings without getting “lost” in them or falling apart? A: Tune in for a client success story and discover a practical tool—the “mood meter”—to help you regain control and function, even on tough days.
Q: Does thinking rationally mean I can escape feelings? A: Logic and rationality can’t bypass feelings. Find out why every decision (yes, even the “rational” ones!) are shaped by your mood — and how to use this knowledge to your advantage.
Q: What’s one quick, practical tweak I can use to feel better fast? A: CLG shares micro-strategies (think 30 secs to 3 minutes) you can use right away to change your mood—and your experience.
Highly Credible Resources Cited in this Episode
Bar, M. (2009). The proactive brain: memory for predictions. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences*, *364*(1521), 1235–1243. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0310
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Barrett, L. F. (2006). Valence is a basic building block of emotional life. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 35–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.006
Barrett, L. F. (2016). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, nsw154. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw154
Barrett, L. F., & Bar, M. (2009). See it with feeling: affective predictions during object perception. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1325–1334. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0312
Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713–724. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930143000239
Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A. (1999). The Structure of Current Affect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(1), 10–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00003
Braem, S., Coenen, E., Klaas Bombeke, Bochove, van, & Wim Notebaert. (2015). Open your eyes for prediction errors. *Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience*, *15*(2), 374–380. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0333-4
Bobba-Alves, N., Juster, R.-P., & Picard, M. (2022). The energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 146, 105951. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105951
Cesario, J., Johnson, D. J., & Eisthen, H. L. (2020). Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(3), 255–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420917687
Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*, *36*(3), 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x12000477
Gendron, M., Lindquist, K. A., Barsalou, L., & Barrett, L. F. (2012). Emotion words shape emotion percepts. Emotion, 12(2), 314–325. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026007
Hoemann, K., Gendron, M., & Barrett, L. F. (2022). Assessing the Power of Words to Facilitate Emotion Category Learning. Affective Science, 3(1), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00084-4
Kleckner, I. R., Zhang, J., Touroutoglou, A., Chanes, L., Xia, C., Simmons, W. K., Quigley, K. S., Dickerson, B. C., & Feldman Barrett, L. (2017). Evidence for a large-scale brain system supporting allostasis and interoception in humans. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(5). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0069
Mattes, A., Mück, M., & Stahl, J. (2023). Perfectionism-related variations in error processing in a task with increased response selection complexity. *Personality neuroscience*, *5*, e12. https://doi.org/10.1017/pen.2022.3
Sullivan, W. T. (1990). Outward Searchers: SETI Pioneers . Scientists Talk about Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. DAVID W. SWIFT. University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1990. xiv, 436 pp., illus. $35. Science, 250(4978), 303–303. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.250.4978.303-a
Transcript for How To Feel Your Feelings:
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:00:00]:
Uninformed coaches and therapists say, if you change your thoughts, you can change your feelings. We use our perfectionist tendencies and we weaponize them against ourselves because we're like, well, if I can just change my thoughts, then why aren't my feelings changing? I must be doing something wrong. I just need to try harder. I must need to get more coaching. Rather than being like, oh, what if this is just wrong? Which it is. Thoughts don't drive your feelings. Your feelings are driving your thoughts. If you are ready to burn bright instead of burning out, to lead without losing yourself, and to enjoy the life you have worked so hard to create, then keep listening.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:00:39]:
I'm your host, America's leader on rewiring perfectionism, CLG, and this is Perfectionism Rewired, the podcast. Welcome to Perfectionism Rewired. By the end of this episode, you will know how to feel your feelings so they stop controlling you. You're gonna hear firsthand from perfectionism optimized client, Manon, when to build a skill set for feeling your feelings without falling apart and give you the space to feel and function at the same time, how quickly that can upgrade your experience and behavior. We're also going to break down the top five lies about feelings that are keeping you from being in control. You're also going to walk away with a GOAT greatest of all time tool I created to help you feel your feelings, so they are no longer controlling you. This is a visual episode, so grab your notebook and pen. If you are not a paper person, or if you don't have a notebook or pen handy, open up notes on your phone because I am giving you all the strategies today.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:01:52]:
So let's get into it. A lot of perfectionists think that they are feeling their feelings, and they're not seeing results. Their stress isn't decreasing, their performance isn't improving, they're not feeling any better. And because of that, they're getting increasingly frustrated, especially if you are someone like vintage CLG, who is just like, Ugh, feelings. Hard pass. The reason why this happens is because you're not understanding the foundational pieces of how your perfectionist brain operates and what feelings actually are. Most perfectionists, high achievers, therapists, and coaches think they know what feelings are and how the human brain operates, but there is a galactic difference between how you think your brain operates and what feelings are, and how your perfectionistic brain actually operates and what feelings really are. To help you with this, Perfectionism Rewired episodes two forty eight, two 40 nine, two 50, two 50 two, and two fifty three, the episodes I just shared with you, they're going to break down neuroscientifically how your perfectionist brain works with oodles of analogies, and you're going to be like, I get it now.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:03:18]:
So check those out. Today's episode is the seventh episode in the spotlight series on how your perfectionist brain actually works. Every episode in this series, along with any episodes mentioned, are linked in the show notes. If you are listening on Spotify or your podcast player, it doesn't include numbers, all of the numbers to every episode are available to you at perfectionismrewired.com. I refer to episodes by their number because it's a lot shorter than saying their title. Also, I change the titles sometimes, but the number and the content in them will always be the same. This series is like a matryoshka doll. You know those wooden dolls where you open one, and then there's another one inside, and they keep getting smaller and smaller until you get to the tiniest one that's super solid? That is exactly what this series is.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:04:18]:
Even if you're someone where you're like, Well, I wanna know how to feel my feelings, but I don't identify as a perfectionist yet, you still wanna listen to this series because it's about how all human brains operate based on the most current and accurate neuroscience research and findings. This is the stuff that neuroscientists all know, but hasn't yet trickled down to doctors, physicians, therapists. This wasn't taught when they were in school. Why it is mission critical? When you understand how your brain actually works, you will clearly see why the strategies, the therapist, the tools, whatever you've tried in the past, you will clearly see why that didn't work, and you will know with absolute clarity what will. Now that we have that covered, let's talk about how to feel your feelings so they stop controlling you. Typically, what happens with perfectionists? You feel frustrated and you look outside of you about what's causing this. And we know from episode two forty nine, that's not the way brains operate. Brains operate on predictions, and we don't react to things outside of us.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:05:43]:
Even if when you're in the peak of frustration, you're not realizing that. You feel frustrated and you look outside of you about what's causing this. If you can't figure out what's wrong with your life that's causing this frustration, you assume there must be something wrong with you for feeling this way. The second way I see this go with perfectionists is you feel frustrated, and you immediately make yourself wrong. Maybe you say something along the lines of, I shouldn't be feeling this way. Why can't I just be happy? I should be enjoying this? Why can't I just relax? Notice that both of those are psychological explanations where either something outside of you is causing you to feel frustration, or there is something wrong inside of you that is causing the frustration. But truth booth, feeling frustrated is not at all psychological. There is a neuroscientific answer where all of your feelings come from.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:06:49]:
Feelings are not emotions. This is lie number one that keeps you from feeling your feelings and your feelings controlling you. Feelings are not emotions. An emotion is a highly complex construction that is unique to each individual, and it is a context dependent experience of cognitive interpreting and labeling. You learned a little bit about this in episode two forty eight. All that you need to know for this episode is emotions are constructed, they are not hardwired in. Emotions are built by you, which also means you can build better ones. For the four eleven on how emotions are created, you want to make sure that you hit subscribe and follow because that episode is coming to you next week.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:07:46]:
Back to the truth booth, feeling frustrated is not psychological, and there is a neuroscientific answer where all of your feelings come from. And here's how we get to that answer. All human brains are born pre wired with feelings, like feeling on edge, feeling calm, feeling worried, feeling excited. And these feelings are with you every waking moment of your life, from your first breath to your last breath. Think about it. Like, when you wake up in the morning, do you feel groggy or refreshed? How do you feel right now? Are you calm, interested, comfy, curious, tired, grouchy? These feelings are what scientists call affect. But whenever I hear affect, I think of that commercial Aflac. There's also the whole efect, affect thing.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:08:37]:
So for the purpose of simplicity and you being able to feel your feelings so they stop controlling you, we are going to refer to affect as feelings or mood. You can call it a feeling, you can call it a mood, you can call them your feelings, you can call them moods. Tomato, tomato. So the neuroscientific answer to where all of your feelings come from is that feelings reference your physiological, not your psychological. This is very important. Go ahead and highlight it, underline it, bold it in your notes that you're taking. We are led to believe that feelings are emotions, which we know is wrong, and that feelings are psychological. But feelings are physiological.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:09:28]:
Wow. Wow. When I first learned this, I was shooketh. And this scientific fact is obscenely useful for us perfectionists, especially if you have a tendency to blame your feelings on other people or on yourself. Believe there must be something wrong with you when you are feeling certain ways, and tend to overthink what you're feeling and why you're feeling that way so much that you end up spinning out and catastrophizing, and then usually feeling a lot worse. What I find as a perfectionist and in my coaching practice perfectionist solutions is depersonalizing why you're feeling on edge, why you're grouchy, or why you're just plain frustrated. When you're able to depersonalize, a weight is lifted. It gives you the space to actually solve for what is actually happening in your life and the feelings that are going along with it.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:10:34]:
This is where perfectionism optimized one on one coaching client, Manon, comes in. We're gonna give you a little story about Mannan. Mannan is a high achieving perfectionist. Before coaching, Manon ran on fumes, powering through, and just keeping it together without anyone knowing how completely on edge she was feeling. Feelings were something that got in the way. I wish I could be a robot sometimes is what she said on her introductory coaching session together. And her coping mechanism for feelings was shoving them down like a trash compactor. Manon and I have been coaching for about eight months now.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:11:15]:
Here's what happened with Manon last Friday. Manon closed up shop at work at 2PM, and she went to pick up her four year old from a play date. There was an accident on the way there, and that caused Mannan to be late. Mannan loves to be punctual. When she got there, her four year old did not want to leave, and was screaming so loud, she woke up the twin babies that were sleeping upstairs. Her daughter refusing to leave, and now refusing to put on shoes, Manon picked her up to take her to the car. Still in explosive tantrum mode, Mannen's daughter vomited all over her while she was buckling the car seat. Of course, no barf got on her daughter, and this enraged her four year old even more because mommy smells so yucky.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:12:03]:
When they got home, Manon got kicked in the face while trying to take out her kicking and screaming daughter from the car seat. Soon as her daughter got out, ran to her room, slammed the door, and shouted on repeat, No, mommy. I need space. Manon let her daughter know that she could have space and that mommy was going to shower. After the quick shower, Manon noticed it was quiet. As she left her bedroom, she noticed a thick black line on the hallway. Thinking it was just a shadow, Manon turned on the light and saw that the thick black line was real, and went all around every door, and continued wall after wall of her house that she just got repainted. Manon found her daughter coloring at her little table, and an open jumbo black Sharpie lying next to her.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:12:46]:
Manon was feeling extremely on edge. Instead of snapping at her daughter, trying to furiously magic eraser the walls, and then picking up her phone to rage scroll, Manon paused. She noticed in real time what was happening. I'm already in sensory overload from the kicking and screaming and barf, and now my four year old permanently monitored wainscoting on every wall and door inside our house. Instead of pushing it down and powering through, Manon put on Bluey and redirected her brain's attention to the smile on her daughter's face, the cozy feeling of the plush rug underneath her feet. She walked to go prepare her daughter's snack. And during those two minutes of washing and cutting up strawberries, Manon used her personalized tools to restore herself. As she walked out the kitchen with the snack and saw the black lines, she left and was able to sit down with her daughter and just, like, be there eating strawberries and singing the golden corn song.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:13:50]:
There's a lot that we could zero in on here to demonstrate rewiring your brain. The key here you want to focus on is that by simply changing what you pay attention to in the world, you can change how your brain makes meaning. And that is the recipe for changing your experience and behavior. If you're wondering like, okay, that sounds like really cool, CLG. Here, let's bring it down to earth. Instead of paying attention to the disaster Manon disrupted and redirected her brain's attention. That sounds super simple, but it does require a superior skill set, which Manon has built over the past eight months. By changing what she focused on and making deposits in her person account, she changed the meaning of the meltdown and the marker mayhem.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:14:46]:
She was able to see it and laugh. Not a week later, not a day later, like, less than five minutes later. On edge is a feeling, and every feeling has two features. This is, like, what defines a feeling and, like, what a feeling really represents. The first feature of a feeling is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel. Scientists call this valence, and we're gonna call it the pleasantness scale. The second feature is how activated you feel, which scientists call arousal. We're gonna call it the activation scale.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:15:24]:
Every feeling has two features. It's not like, oh my gosh, what are these eight things that are going on with my feelings? It's simple. And this isn't just me oversimplifying it. This is science. This is neuroscience saying, hey, this is what feelings are. Feelings are like a soundscape or a feelingscape occurring in the background of your everyday life. You might have moments where your mood is the focus of your attention, but you also have moments where you're not really paying attention to it at all. It's like the sound of a quiet van running in the background.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:16:01]:
You can never be without feeling. Moments of rational decision are imaginary. This is lie number two, preventing you from taking control of your feelings. Moments of rational decision do not exist because moments without feeling are impossible based on the anatomy of how all human brains are structured. Now you might be like, where do these feelings come from? I get that it has these two features, but, like, where do they actually come from? Like, what does physiological mean? Let's break it down. Right now, your internal systems, organs, heartbeat, hormones, they are producing a storm of sensory signals. And your brain's number one job is to regulate your internal systems in the most efficient way in order to keep you alive and well. Your brain regulates resources, predictably, to keep you alive and well.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:16:59]:
At every moment, your brain is predicting your person's needs, and it's deciding where to allocate resources. What are these resources? Your brain is allocating resources that are limited and necessary for you to stay alive, like oxygen, glucose, potassium, bile. Just like enterprises have financial departments that forecast and track revenue and expenses, you have robust networks in your brain meticulously tracking deposits and withdrawals of these limited resources. The status of these resources available to your brain at any point in time is called your person account, just like how the status of your financials is called your bank account. Episode 252 gorgeously illustrates what your personal account is and the stronghold it has over determining your progress, growth, and development. If you're someone striving for excellence and you are not seeing the progress that you want to be seen, that episode is going to split the universe for you. The person account is a proprietary framework concept I created based on science. It's distilling everything into a way that makes it, Oh, I get it.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:18:16]:
Your brain makes a report of the activity that's happening inside your person account. Just like your bank makes this report about what's happening with your checking account. The status report that your brain makes on the activity happening inside of you, you experience it as feelings or mood. Because remember tomato, tomato. So mood is the summary of your person account. Are you flush? Are you over withdrawn? Do you need a deposit? And if so, how desperately? So when you feel like crap, it's usually because you have made a withdrawal from your person account that you haven't replenished. Now, mood doesn't tell you specifically what's happening inside of you. Like, your glymphatic system is blocked up.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:19:07]:
Go to bed two hours earlier for the next ten days. Right? We wish it were that precise, but it's not that precise. But it does tell you whether your person account is running a deficit or your running a deficit or your person account is solvent. This transformation from physical to mental confirms in a tangible, biological way that your body is part of your mind, and your mind is part of your body. They are inextricably linked, just like the Earth is round. Now let's give you your tool. I created a framework for one on one coaching clients inside of Perfectionism Optimize that helps you build a skill set for feeling your feelings without falling apart, and gives yourself the space to feel and function at the same time, like Manon did. This is a visual tool that shows you where your feelings land on the mood meter.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:20:05]:
I'm gonna give you a simplified version so you can have your own mood meter to use. What you wanna do is you want to draw a big circle. And then at the top of it, like the tippy top of your paper, you wanna write my mood meter. Now when you look at your circle, I want you to draw a vertical line that starts from outside the circle, goes all the way through it to the bottom, and you are gonna put little arrows on both sides. Label that your activation scale. You can label that in your circle or outside your circle, dealer's choice. Now draw a horizontal line that slices your circle in half, put those little arrows on both sides, and label it your pleasantness scale. Your y axis is how activated or not so activated you are.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:20:59]:
And then your horizontal, it starts at unpleasant, and then it's gonna go all the way to pleasant. I'm gonna give you some examples of where these feelings land on the mood meter. The feeling of cashmere on your skin. If you're allergic to cashmere, this is probably gonna be highly activating and very unpleasant for you. If you love cashmere on your skin, this is probably gonna feel very pleasant and not super activating for you. A popsicle on a hot humid day. Even if you don't like popsicles, it's like you are thirsty. That's going to feel really pleasant.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:21:40]:
And it will probably be pretty activating because, man, you really needed something to cool you down. The serene feeling when you look around and there's zero clutter in sight. That's low on the activation scale and it's towards the right on our pleasantness scale. The weariness from getting three hours of sleep because your one and a half year old decided screaming is the new sleeping, low activation and unpleasant. When you're feeling like you're a volcano that's about to erupt with lava, high activation, very unpleasant. You can use this mood meter to see for yourself where you're at. You can simplify it into quadrants. And the reason why the four quadrants are really helpful is we'll use deep breaths, for example.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:22:33]:
What I hear from a lot of you is sometimes deep breaths just aren't enough. Yeah. Because if you are highly activated right up at the top of that activation scale and feeling very unpleasant, you're in the top right, deep breaths aren't gonna solve it for you. Or maybe you're someone where you're like, yeah, I like to meditate, but meditation doesn't work for me all the time. This mood meter is why. Because depending on where you are at, there are very specific tools that you need. For example, I'm super handy. When you're screwing into very hard wood, you're gonna need an increased level than if you're screwing finishing screws into a light switch cover.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:23:22]:
Both of the time, you're screwing something in, but you're using different tools and you need to use them at different degrees. This is another reason why it's not that meditation doesn't work for you. It's that meditation does not work for every feeling. Meditation works depending on your mood, and not your mood of like, am I in the mood for it today? But literally, like where your mood falls on how activated or deactivated you are. Lie number three, or maybe this is lie number four. I've lost track. The next lie that we are truthing is your thoughts drive your feelings. If you've ever heard the CTFAR model, which by the way, is scientifically erroneous.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:24:14]:
It is based on a triune system of the brain. We do not have lizard brains that was disproven in the early 1950s. If you are working with anyone who talks about the lizard brain, or how there's a rational system of our brain and a non rational system of our brain, they're not using it as analogy, literally run away from there. It would just be like a travel agent talking about the flat Earth, and how your cruise can only stop here because if not, you're going to fall into space. It's literally the exact same thing. Thoughts don't drive your feelings. A lot of uninformed coaches and therapists say, if you change your thoughts, you can change your feelings. It would drive me insane.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:25:02]:
I would be working for hours, pages and pages and pages doing my thought work. I still had these feelings inside of me that weren't going away. I thought that I was doing something wrong. And we, as perfectionists, we use our perfectionist tendencies and we weaponize them against ourselves because we're like, well, if I can just change my thoughts, then why aren't my feelings changing? I must be doing something wrong. I just need to try harder. I must need to get more coaching. Rather than being like, oh, what if this is just wrong? Which it is. Thoughts don't drive your feelings.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:25:35]:
Your feelings are driving your thoughts. Here's how we know this. Feelings are like sunglasses that shape your perception of the world. I call them perspectives. Get it? Like perspectives, spectacles. The mood meter you get as a client inside Perfectionism Optimized. Every square has a color, and every color represents the perception that your brain has. Let's say you are feeling irritated.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:26:02]:
When you are feeling irritated, it's like you are putting on for spectacles that have maroon lenses. When you are wearing those for spectacles, everything you see is maroon. Everything you eat is going to look maroon. It's the same thing with spectacles, how feelings shape your perception. Let's say you get up in the morning, you're thinking about your day, and you are just like, I don't even want to get out of bed today. You're having one of those days. Then if you continue to go through your day that way, guess what's going to happen? Your brain is going to look for things that are wrong. It's going to magnify.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:26:43]:
It's going to focus on the features of your experience that are going to confirm that feeling. This is where your choices matter. When you are feeling irritated and you change what you do, like Manon did when she was feeling on edge, she paused, redirected what she was paying attention to, and restored herself. Instead of continuing to focus on the problem and letting that feeling escalate. When you choose to do something different, like Manon did, you're giving your brain the opportunity to learn. There's more than one option when you're feeling on edge. That builds more flexibility in your brain's predictions that we learned about in episode two fifty. Just because you are wearing maroon lenses of irritation when you wake up, what you do immediately after your choice, it matters.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:27:50]:
Because it shows your brain that, oh, wearing maroon lenses, we can put them down, and it changes what your brain is going to predict. Your predictions are what give you the actions that you are going to take. So change your predictions, change your actions. Change your experience of life, you change your behavior. There are oodles of quick and practical tiny tweaks. And when I say tiny, I mean, like, they take from thirty seconds to three minutes tops that you can use to change the trajectory of where your brain is going with its predictions. This is exactly what I help private one on one coaching clients with. They're able to take control of their mood so that their mood becomes useful to what is happening in that moment.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:28:48]:
When your mood is useful to you, it becomes fuel. Now that you have your mood meter on how to feel your feelings, you know what your feelings actually are, how your feelings drive your thoughts, and how just like the Earth is round, the physical and the mental, they are one. If this gave you any light bulb moments, go ahead and share this episode with a friend so that they can get these epiphanies too. Okay? Now that you know all that, it is time to open our next matryoshka on how your perfectionist brain actually works. This is something that I have mentioned in every single episode in this mini series. The Easter egg starts at episode 248, and you'll now be able to notice it, which is just another fascinating example of how your perfectionist brain works predictably. So what is this Easter egg? What is this next max trioshka that we're opening? It's your sensation signals. Up until now, we have only focused on half of the equation about what creates predictions in your brain.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:29:58]:
Sensory signals sense data, and the stories that you've trained your brain to tell about the sensory data is the other half of the equation. We'll be digging into sensory signals, sense data, and the stories you've trained your brain to tell you all about it in the next episode. I'm also giving you another visual tool I created that shows the exact five step process all brains go through that pinpoints precisely where perfectionist brains miss the mark and how to correct it. Once you see it by drawing it out, you can't unsee it. It is one of those frameworks where you're gonna be putting everything through it. I'm gonna be walking you through that step by step in the next episode, episode 255 of Perfectionism Rewired. Listen up. Taking charge of your perfectionism is so much easier than you have been led to believe.
Courtney Love Gavin (CLG) [00:30:50]:
Whether you wanna stop playing out worst case scenarios in your head or be joyfully present ambitious again, you don't need more rigid rules, guesswork, or hard work in perfectionism recovery. You need a framework that helps you understand and most importantly, rewire your perfectionistic habits from the inside out. It starts inside of perfectionism optimized. Besides the obvious mental health and wellness benefits, rewiring your perfectionism is the fastest way to figure out what's really underneath your perfectionistic patterns. This radically different proven proprietary approach helps you succeed by dropping the contempt and judgment that blocks change. Discover how to trust yourself, take control of your world, and feel truly empowered to own your perfectionism instead of being owned by it. Head on over to courtneylovegavin.com and start your transformation today.
Perfectionism Rewired is committed to truth and accuracy through a perfectionist affirming lens, offering cutting-edge research on perfectionism, interoception + neuroscience, for the practical perfectionist who wants to enjoy the life they've worked so hard to create.
Perfectionism is very powerful. But only if you know how to leverage it. For more on optimizing your perfectionist tendencies go to courtneylovegavin.com