It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:28.0]
Bob: Did I really want to end my life and did I really want to feel this way for the rest of my life? I was a 32 year old martial arts business school owner. So I was running my own business, but not very well. I have four kids at the time. Married, I went to church, I was, I was on the outside, what everyone would call a good person. And I had stopped looking at porn for like a year and a half, so I was white knuckle and I was feeling good. Every day was a battle. Every day was a fight. I hated myself. I was massively depressed. Suicidal, a lot of times and I was staring there 32 years old looking at the rest of my life going, Really— this is what I get to look forward to. I hate this! It's not that I feel horrible, it's that I don't feel good.” [01:15.6]
And if the the remaining five, six, seven decades of my life, we're going to be this way. What's the point? Do I really, really want to end my life? That was the question running through my head as I was looking at it. And fortunately at that point in time, I loved life more than I loved the idea of leaving life. And so I decided that I would find a way to finally end all the fear, all the frustration, all the anxiety, all the random dark thoughts coming to me at, at times when it seemed like there was no trigger. It's just I started feeling bad about myself and you know, or I'd start to be triggered by everything, it didn't matter what was happening. It was like I would get, I would get angry and I would spout off at the kids or I would snap at my wife and I have to go on these long walks so that I wasn't like just violent or something cause I never wanted to be violent with them and I at times I was praying at night going like come on God, just kill me now and somehow provide for them cause they would be way better off without me here. These were all things going on because I hadn't figured out what I'm about to share with you. [02:17.0]
You see a lot of people talk about emotions and they talk about emotions as if they're these things that you're supposed to manage and control right, to the best of your ability. Like emotions come from somewhere and we have a certain set of emotions that we call bad emotions and we have a certain set that we call good emotions. And the bad ones you're supposed to manage and control and put in cages, And the good ones, you just hope they come around more often. But we don't have any real control over whether they'll come or how long they're gonna stay, we can just kind of control them. And that's what everybody was telling me. Like that's what they say about depression and then they'll put you on medications because well, somehow sticking chemicals into my body and managing my chemistry that way is the only way to do it. Instead of learning to manage my own chemistry from the inside, which is where all these emotions are coming from, they're not floating on the breeze. They're not like hanging off the trees. I'm not like biting an orange and getting all a, well maybe if it's a good orange, but you know what I mean? That's not what was happening. So all this, all the talk about emotions was that they are certain things and you can control them and management and you have stress management. [03:23.5]
Let me ask you a question. If you had an employee that was constantly causing mayhem in the store, would you want to manage that employee or would you want to fire him or her? Right? I would fire them. Why would you want to manage stress? Get rid of it. Stress is not inherent in any given situation. ‘Oh no. It was a really stressful situation.’ No, it wasn't. If you had been asleep during that situation, and I use this example a lot, you wouldn't have been stressed. Only you being awake looking at it, thinking about it is creating the stress. Nothing was injecting chemistry into your system. So let me tell you today we're going to show you through the four, help you see the four different places where your emotions are being created from something where you won't have full control over them. And then I'm going to show you the three different kinds of emotions and what needs to happen in order for you to actually be able to take control of how you feel and have a choice in it so that if something comes up you're like, ‘eh, whatever, I don't want to feel that way anymore’, and you can actually change it without just ignoring it. Okay. [04:24.5]
So what are the four ways in which emotion, like when an emotion comes up, what are the four different reasons why I wouldn't be able to control it completely? Let's look at what an emotion is. An emotion is, and I think we've talked about this before, but way early on, several months ago and one of the first episodes, but an emotion is just your body's response to your mind, right? It is a chemical, mechanical, breath oriented situation that your body assumes because your mind had a kind of thought. So the chemistry creates this— your mind has a thought, there's electricity pulsing that's transferring it from neuron to neuron. And in the transfer stations between neurons, there are neurotransmitters that are chemicals, things like dopamine and serotonin and stuff are chemicals, right? So you have chemistry and electricity in each thought. And when I have a thought about something, you can't look at something and not have a thought about it, at least at the level of most things. Like there are some times where that'll, that's changed with me, but I'd say over 99.9% of the time I still, you look at something and there's a certain thought and feeling about it because your mind is shaping to the environment. [05:31.7]
Okay. And so you're looking at something, you have a thought about it. Electricity, fires and chemistry fires. Now, an emotion is the cumulative total of all that stuff. The electricity is tightening muscles and altering breathing and posture. The chemistry is also tightening muscles and creating, shifting the pH in the body. And so when you have an emotion, it's changing those things. If you want to change the emotion, you've got to change the chemistry; you've got to change the physiology and you've got to change the thought. Sometimes you can do all three at once, other times you only have one lever to grab onto, but you got to do it all. Okay. So…what places would emotions not be under your control? Well, if you couldn't control the chemistry or the physiology, then you wouldn't have total control and we would be looking for how much control can you get. And my answer to that is even if you do have something that's not like you do have an overproduction of a certain chemical, there's a ton you can do to gain control over how you experience life in some really powerful ways. [06:29.7]
Sometimes that involves medication. I'm not going to say don't take medication always, I'm not a doctor. You go talk to your doctor about that one. You figure out what's best for you. I've heard stories on both sides of it where people were like, “Man, it was the most amazing thing for me. I'm so glad I got it.” And I've heard a lot of stories of people like, “Oh, it was miserable, but it was the one my only choice”, that kind of thing. Okay, so the four times in which you would not be able to control your emotions completely would be one — when you're sick, right? If you're ill, something's gotten into you from the outside, or there's a disproportion chemically on the inside and you're in disease, how many of you, when you're sick and tired, are a little bit more snappy at people get angry or irritable more quickly? Right? You notice this because the chemistry is off. You can still shift your emotional state from that, but it takes a little bit more work than it would for an average on an average day, just because your body is already under a lot of duress chemically and physically. So when you're sick, it's a little harder to manage your emotions. [07:26.9]
Key points, take away from this. Treat your body well, eat nutritious food. Go back and listen to the thing we talked about with Belden. Get his book on Amazon. No one ever got fat from calories, beautiful book that talks about nutrition in a way that is so refreshing and so freeing to help you understand what your body needs.
Okay? So treat your body well and then you'll get sick less often and when you are sick, you'll recover faster and you'll have fewer mood swings and all the other stuff. Second reason why you wouldn't be able to control your emotions— Puberty. Now, a lot of the listeners are not going through puberty right now and so you shouldn't be having this problem, but there are different stages in life where certain hormones are released in greater quantities and less. I mean, the same thing would happen with menopause and with women; it's a monthly cycle, right? Hormone spikes and whatnot is going on as well. And pregnancy, now if you're a man, you're not going to have to worry about monthly cycles or pregnancies at all, so quit moaning and complaining about it. You have less chemistry to deal with, yours is more of a constant. But puberty is one where the body is spiking things up and down and going through all kinds of changes and it's trying to figure out how to regulate stuff and you're not always in control of that. [08:36.7]
So do teens have mood swings? Absolutely! We've all seen it and the better they treat their body and the energetically energetic practices, physical exercise as well as nutrition, the less mood swings they're going to have because their body's able to regulate things better. So you still have some control, but puberty does take its toll. Ooh, that rhymed. The third one is— pregnancy or menstrual cycles and stuff like that. That is only applicable to women. And the fourth one, and I don't mean like sympathetic pregnancy guys, that's not chemical. Okay. Even though the air in the room feels tense, that's not chemical. And the fourth one is— if you have a substance either injected into you or you ingest it, meaning you take a pill or there's food involved and you eat some bad food and you get food poisoning or you get a shot or your chemistry is in some way, shape or form altered, there's leftovers and residual traces from all kinds of anesthesia that can, that can alter things from vaccines, from, from whatnot. And I'm not saying vaccines are good or bad, I'm just saying like when you put a chemical in your body, your body has to process it in some way, shape or form. And that can affect your mood. [09:43.0]
We've seen this over and over again. For some people that affects it more for some people less. But these are the four cases in which you might find that you have less control over your emotions. Most of us are not dealing with this on a day to day basis. Okay. And by the way, chronic pain is also in the illness category. Like if you're in chronic pain, that's, that's also a thing, right? And that can be mitigated. There's amazing practices, and things that we can do. Some of them, we don't have them up for offer on our website yet, but they're coming soon. Okay. But some processes and things I've learned over the years that can really help people mitigate pain and alleviate some things is amazing. Okay. So these are the areas where your emotions are harder to have a choice in. Beyond that it's all up to you and so if you can't say someone made you angry with our kids; we used to do this all the time. You know, son comes in, “He's stole my shirt.” Really? He stole your shirt? Yeah, he stole my… You sound angry about it? “Yeah, because he made me angry.” He made you angry? “Yeah, cause he stole my shirt.” Okay. So you put him in charge of your happiness. Well “Huh.” Okay. Why did you put him in charge of your happiness? He's your brother. He's just going to play around with this, but it's not, he didn't make you angry. [10:53.5]
Angry is a certain chemical, bodily, energetic kind of experience. He didn't make the other person angry. If he had been asleep and brother had stolen his shirt and he wouldn't have been angry. Maybe when he got up because he thought about the shirt and he felt like that little bit of cloth was more important than being happy. And so he turned himself poisonous on the insight and poisoned himself and in poisoning himself, didn't do anything to the other guy. By the way, he's poisoning himself, hoping the other guy dies— didn't work. He's trying to cast a spell on the other guy with his angry words, hoping that Mom and Dad will get on his case and we will manipulate reality to do what he wants. Nah, not necessarily a bad tactic and it works a lot of times. But did we make him angry? No, he made him angry and I know that's a hard pill to swallow. But your emotions come from inside of you and they mine come from inside of me. [11:47.1]
And so when I would yell at my kids when many, many years ago when I scream and yell at him, I didn't, I didn't want to be that guy to yell at them and most of the time I didn't. But there were times when, you know, I couldn't handle my emotional states because that's what led me to, to addictive exercises to addictive behaviors and habits or compulsive behaviors and habits. Looking at porn, you know, eating chips and, and inhaling food and arguing with people and all these different compulsive habits that I had. It was because I had these emotions that I didn't know how to control. And so I had all this emotional stuff, things I felt about mean things I felt about the world, things I was frustrated with. And the only way I knew how to control them was this compulsive behavior. [12:24.5]
So I'd snap at my kids when they were being loud, on occasion. And when I did that, I immediately, as soon as I figured it out and could swallow my own pride a bit, I turned around and I’d tell them, Hey guys, I just yelled at you and that's on me. Like, you're not to blame for how I feel like you did some stuff that I didn't like and I didn't know how to handle that on the inside. And so I got super mad and I thought, well, I'll yell at him cause that'll somehow make things better. And it didn't make anything better and it probably scared you. And I just want to say I'm sorry, like I apologize, that's not your fault. Did I scare you? And then I would ask them questions and they would, you know, yeah, yeah. Scared me a little bit, dad. And I hope you understand that. I love you. You know, and I, I would go and I would own it in front of him cause at least if I couldn't control my emotions, I wanted my kids to know that it was not their fault and I wanted them to know that it's okay to own your stuff in front of other people. And even if you can't control it completely, at least make sure that nobody else takes the blame for it. If I couldn't give them the gift of a happy father, I at least wanted them to give him the gift of an honest father. [13:29.2]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety, or just anything that's making you feel flat-out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateAMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
And so that was my first step as I was going through this. And over the years what I've learned is, and nobody else is talking about it this way, so this is, this is my gift to you. Emotions really sit on a scale, you know, and in the literature for, for what it's worth, they'll say the scale is aroused versus calm, meaning you're really, really amped up or you're really, really calm to dead, dead would be at the bottom and fully alive will be at the top. That's kind of my preference for how it, how it is, and then on the one side you have like and dislike and the degree to which you like or dislike the amount your nervous system is lighting up is the degree of emotion that you'll have about it. You can have total ecstasy in complete stillness, right? Meditators do this all the time, but you can also have totally total ecstasy and ecstatic dance, right? [14:46.7]
These dancers do it all the time and you can have this, it doesn't matter what level of arousal or awakeness your nervous system is at. All of them can be ecstatic states, except when we say, I don't like this, or I like this. It's okay. It's not okay. So nervousness and excitement look the same in a functional brain scan. The only difference in the experiences, cause the person says I don't like it or I like it. That's the difference in the experience, right? And your emotional about it. But the same amount of arousal is there. Okay. Now the, the emotions that come, I'm going to put them in three different categories. Category one, category one is your, your mood. This is your habitual emotions. This is your mood swings. This is aligned with your circadian rhythm rhythms, how you feel throughout the day. So if you are, you wake up in the morning and you're always like blah, that's a mood. Your body has learned that set point. And if you want to change it, that's the time of day to change it. [15:46.8]
And then if you go, and most people who are dealing with depression, it looks like this, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're blah on a scale of one to 10 maybe you're a four or a two, but you're down. And then things might pick up before work. And so you maybe pump up to a two, a three or two a four or if I write and then at work you're busy so you're not really able to think about your emotional state so much cause you're busy doing other things and so you kind of plateau at work, maybe you're at a five or six or whatever. Depends on the person, some of them are a little bit lower and then as they get home what happens is they've got some things to do, maybe some fun with the friends so they might get a little spike and then when they, when they finally wind down for the evening and they're left alone to their own thoughts, they wind back down and they hit down at a four or three or two again. [16:30.3]
And that's what the graph looks like. And at the times of day where it's low, you want to change; you want to introduce something into your life. If you want to have control over your mood, start with the places where your mood is low and at those times shift some things. Now we've put stuff in place to be able to teach people how to do this in a really powerful way, like really simple exercises that are too much to go into here, the podcast. But if you want access to this and all the other stuff I'm going to explain, you can go to thefreedomspecialists.com/feel betternow and it will radically in 20 days it will radically change how much control you have over all these different types of emotions. Okay. Category one is— mood. You want to change it. You have to pinpoint the times of day when your mood dips and then you want to install insert something at those times that helps it shift. And I don't mean caffeine and artificial stuff that can help, but I what I mean is sustainable stuff that actually improves your life. That comes from the inside. So we don't use outside supports with what we're doing with our clients. [17:31.5]
Second category — reactions, things that surprise you. You know, someone pulls in front of you in traffic or you know your kid just screams and runs down the hall and and stuff like that, like when you, how you react to things. If you're feeling scared, people will react no matter what and I'm not, I'm not totally a 100 % positive that you can get rid of an adverse reaction to something, but what we're doing here is we're teaching you skills to be able to take your breathing and your movement and your body tension and other types of things to enable you to shorten the gap so that you react and the smallest amount of time passes before you're able to take that and turn it into something absolutely incredible for your life, right? You turn all of these compulsions into catapults and your life then becomes this amazing thing simply because you have learned to train your reactions, your instincts. This is not logical. This is not thinking through a situation. It's literally training your instincts to handle things differently so that when you tense up, you also release the tension in a really positive way. [18:33.26]
When you get cranky, you also release the cranky in a really positive way. That's a second category of emotion that you want to be able to train. The third and final category is — your worries, the things that stress you out. Addicts would call these triggers, but athletes might call it pregame jitters. If anything that you think about when you think about it, if it gets you emotional, if it has an emotional hold on, you could be a bad memory, PTSD for soldiers. Then that would be what we would call a worry or a trigger or stressor or something like that and you can actually dismantle those and diffuse those to where they no longer have any emotional hold on you. [19:10.3]
You can think about them and it's gone. You can actually delete some of these if you don't want them in your life because your memory is exceptionally malleable and you get to have a choice about what your brain does. It's just that when you grew up, nobody taught you. It's not your fault. It's not your fault that you don't know how to do this stuff. Nobody taught you, nobody taught your parents, like you just inherited what you inherited. All of you have done the best that you knew how we all did. And there's still a better way to do it. There's a way to do it that doesn't derail you. And that's what this is about. Learning to retrain your mind so that the things that you worry about no longer worry you. And there's some really powerful processes to do that. But the point is this, the upshot is this. [19:50.2]
Look, there's only a handful of situations where you don't get to have a choice in how you feel. Right? And we discussed those at the beginning, sickness or chronic pain, and you still have a choice. It's just not as much as one of one puberty. Still have a choice, just not as much of one pregnancy and menstrual cycles and stuff. Still have a choice, just not as much of one. And then also drugs or injections or food or something, substances in the body still have a choice, just not as much of one. These are all things that you get a choice about, right? And that you, you can have a choice about. But if you're not in those situations, then the, all the rest of it is within your power. You want to change your mood, pinpoint the times of day, shift it. [20:31.5]
You want to change your reactions, pinpoint how you react and retrain that. You want to change how you worry about things and stop having to worry and stress out about stuff so much so you can operate at your highest peak. Then train that and learn to dismantle that. And if you want to do that or I put together, we put together this program that allows you within three weeks to do all of this and has a really massive momentum gainer so that you can finally work throughout the rest of your life, continued to practice these so that they become second nature. You don't have to think about them anymore because you've trained yourself to just simply choose your emotions more wisely, to have a better mood, to stop reacting in adverse ways and react in ways that always improves your life no matter what's going on around you and to ditch the worries because worry never got anyone anywhere. [21:15.6]
So if you want to experience that again, thefreedomspecialists.com/feel betternow, it is an incredible program that will radically change your life and it has done this for so many people that we've worked with that we wanted to offer this to other people. Either way, whatever you choose to do, I hope you jump in on that one, but whatever you choose to do, here's the thing. Remember that you have a choice. The second you forget, you have a choice, the second you feel like a victim in life and you're not a victim. You may not know how to make the choice, and that's why we built this program. But you do have a choice. And if you want to learn, come, learn or find another way to learn however it is. But remember that you have a choice that you're not a victim to your life, and whenever you are, you decide that you're ready to step up and experience life differently. It's possible. [22:02.1]
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [22:22.6]
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