Hanna:
Hello hello you dirty minded humans. Welcome to episode number 26 of Let’s Talk Dirty and we are diving into some deep brain talk today with the thought “My Brain Is Broken”. And full disclosure, I am winging it tonight. I have a very bare bones outline comprised of like 6 bullet points and I’m just going to flow with it today. But I do think that this unplanned, feeling the energy of this topic and discovering where it goes on the fly is really going to lend to what I want to talk about.
I started thinking on this idea of broken brains because a lot of my clients struggle with anxiety and or a brain that isn’t typically functioning, and all of them think at some point in their evolution on earth that their brain is broken. And what I want to convince you of today is that that is never true. It’s just a thought that you’re choosing either because you want to be frustrated or fearful or have a pity party or because you truly think something is wrong with you that needs fixing. But today we are going to learn that you don’t need any of that. So if your cranium is home to a neurodivergent brain like me you’re going to love this episode.
Even if you consider yourself to have a neurotypical brain meaning you don’t have any diagnoses, you hit all your developmental milestones based on the standards of human development and you generally move through life not like wondering if your brain works the way others do, you might still like to listen in to this episode.
Because even you have had thoughts like why do I think this way? Or I wish I didn’t think this way…and that’s just another way of pitting yourself against yourself and your brain, which is what I want to talk about today.
The dirty thoughts we have about our brains that keep us stuck. The ways we fight against our own minds that send us further from peace and further from finding out how much our brains fight FOR us, every single day. And why we should all consider saying “thank you” when we kinda want to say fuck you.
There’s a difference between acceptance and complacency. Or acceptance and the defeatist attitude that comes from using your neurodivergence against yourself.
I talk to my clients often about giving themselves grace. Showing yourself grace when your brain isn’t doing what you wish it would do naturally. Grace is necessary to get to the place where you can accept what is, and differentiate what is from where you have control and power. And we want to find acceptance for how our brains behave first and foremost so we can stop fighting and start trying to better understand, appreciate and support our brains to work for us.
As we speak I’m sitting here in a towel with wet hair and it’s 8:00 pm because my brain lights up at night. And you might hear my dog Ghost chomping away at a bone in the background because he gets late night snack and this audio might not sound perfect but you know I used to try desperately to fit into the appropriate narrative of what a workday should look like and I’d beat myself up because my brain was broken and not working to create anything beyond mediocre before 11 am. Right like my brain doesn’t want to turn on and think creatively and with any sort of oomph before 11 am. And I read the books from the business minded people who said wake up at 5 and rise with the sun and get to work early and then rest when you're done and that just doesn’t jive with my brain. And for a long time I was like WORK brain WORK. Wake up and work better. But my brain was like nope, I don’t do mornings. My brain enjoys a nice leisurely morning. And I used to think that made me lazy. That made my brain broken. But I now know it just makes me brillaint—because I wanna love my brain back. She gives me the most epic downloads around like 4 or 5 pm and I get a creative outpouring in the evening and by 9:00 I’m done and I go back to rest, not because I earned it, which is a whole other episode. But because I know I can thrive in this life in my own way. Holding hands with my own brain, calling her out as a sneaky little biotch when I need to, but with love, always with love, because I know that her intentions are love and life for me. And it isn’t always about trouble-shooting our brains to perform. They aren’t trained poodles balancing balls on their noses, they are complex and multifaceted unique clusters of matter and nerves and cells and tissue with so much history, conditioning, genetic material and spirit sprinkles on top that serve to keep you alive.
And this is not to say that if I chose to wake up at 5 am and work I couldn’t. I know I could do that. I choose though.
Yeah? So for anyone who has ever looked at how you operate and looked at what your brain is throwing at you and been like ugh this makes no sense! My brain is broken! I have stress. I have anxiety and I shouldn’t! I have dyslexia or OCD or depression or aspergers or ADHD or an undiagnosed thing that makes me think shit I don’t wanna think what the hell is THAT called….
Stop trying to make it go away for a second.
And I know this contradicts what I teach but I don’t care because this is what my brain is up to tonight and I need to share it. I teach that we can control our thoughts. I do not teach that the reason we want to control our thoughts is because our brains are broken. They are not.
Because our brains actually make perfect sense if we take a second to slow down and think about it. And stop trying to rat your brain out to me. You’re like omg my brain is so messed up it just told me I have to go on a diet. My brain is broken and it’s giving me anxiety about this thing that I know isn’t even a problem.
Awareness is not tattle taleling on your brain. Okay? It is lovingly understanding even if you disagree. You can love and disagree right? We know this. So instead of beating your brain up for being broken or getting annoyed at it, what about your brain makes perfect sense?
Because your anxiety DOES make sense. Your stress DOES make sense. All of it, I think, makes sense.
You just aren’t asking your brain the best questions. You aren’t willing to hold her hand.
Like you know in grade school when you had to like walk in lines from classroom to classroom and the teachers made you hold hands and you like mini eye rolled like ew I don’t wanna.
Haha that’s what I used to do to my brain. Ugh I don’t wanna. Cooties. No.
But that’s why you feel like you don’t understand.Because you’re not holding hands with your brain.
You might be in bed with your brain on some seriously cray cray thoughts but the reason you jump in bed with your brain so willingly and get all tangled up with these unhelpful thoughts is partly because you refuse to hold your brains hand, look her in the eyes and have a deep and meaningful chat about what’s up.
Clients say to me all the time “I don’t get it!” “Why do I even have anxiety about this!?!”
Like the feeling of anxiousness and stress is some huge mystery.
If it feels like a huge mystery to you, a broken brain, or a “mistake” that you feel so anxious…you need to ask yourself better questions.
You need to hold your brains hand.Because all you’re creating now is a clash with yourself by thinking that what you feel makes no sense. You’re like crossing your arms over your chest and tapping your foot and rolling your eyes. And refusing to know yourself, truly. Because believe me, people who come to work with me that have anxiety have usually been to therapy before. They’ve heard all about how anxiety is the brains primal instinct kicking in to keep you safe and they are still like well that sucks though. That is stupid. My brain is an idiot if she thinks I need anxiety right now. There are no saber tooth tigers chasing me anymore. There’s nothing I need to run from so my brain is malfunctioning. Broken.
But feeling anxious, thinking the thoughts you don’t like—It all makes perfect sense to your brain! So try to understand her. She’s just trying to love you.
She’s just trying to love you.
I had to build to that thought over a few years of deep work. “My brain is just trying to love me.” Phew, some days it’s still tough to believe.
This became my conscious mantra when I was deep in the heart of healing my anxiety.
My brain is just trying to love me.
Because I had to remind myself every day that my brain wasn’t my enemy, even though I’d believed for years that my brain and I were at odds.
Use it if it resonates with you. If it sparks some loving intrigue for you. It does for me still when I’m getting frustrated by anything my brain is offering I pull myself back to this thought that she’s just doing her best to love me.
What is your brain’s main objective? To keep you alive, right?!
So when you feel anxiety, instead of asking “What the fuck is wrong with me!? How does this make sense that my brain is trying to make me feel so awful!?!”
Maybe some new questions…
What looks like potential death to my brain right now?
Why would my brain think that this thing might be death?
What’s the action my brain is trying to get to me to take?
What’s the harm in feeling anxiety, for my brain?
How is my brain a freakin genius right now?!
And maybe those are questions geared towards anxiety or stress or fear or like confusion or discomfort…And you’re like but seriously though what about my adult ADD brain. My unfocused brain, how the hell is this brain trying to love me?
Listen, you need to ask and find out.
And then for those of you neurotypical people who are like ok but I’m over here just wondering what the fuck my brains problem is because it’s always telling me I’m not good enough or I am fat or too old for this or I’m a shitty friend, mom, lover, daughter?
Like, ‘why do I even think that? It’s so unhelpful! Why do I feel that? It doesn’t feel good! My brain is such a bummer sometimes…’
The 100% honest to goddess truth is that your brain IS ON YOUR SIDE, even when it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t have the answers for you right now. Your brain does.
But I’ll tell you what, come to Private Coaching with me. In Coaching, we learn to LOVE our brains back. I will show you how to interpret what your brain is saying so that you can see for yourself that your brain is always just tryin to love ya. And you can let go of the self doubt, double down on your goals and build the life you want, with the help of your loving brain. Because where there is mutual love between yourself and your brain there is room to grow.
I will show you the clear difference between tough true love and self battery disguised as motivation. Shaming your brain for not doing it’s best by you will not do anything to create a copacetic relationship with yourself. You can’t beat your brain into submission and expect to learn anything.
So we need to learn to repair the relationships with our brains.
Release the shame associated with neurodivergent functioning.
Because when we think our brains are broken we often do the opposite of what our brains need thinking that we can like fix our brains malfunctioning by pushing back. One of the women I work with was diagnosed with narcolepsy and she said to me you know I’m not getting a lot of stuff done, the last thing I need to do is slow down.
And I said but what is your brain asking for?
Because her brain isn’t asking her to do nothing. Her brain is asking her to listen. In my clients mind slowing down meant not doing anything. Sleeping all the time. But slowing down, we found when we asked her brain some better questions, can look like constraint. Or planning. Or using her thinking brain on purpose to decide what she wants and executing it in less time than before. It can look like planning to rest and actually resting instead of spending rest time being mad about resting and beating up her broken brain.
So the other thing I want to mention is when we use this thought my brain is broken to justify why we can’t do stuff. Ok you know my stance on can’t right? It’s just not true ever. But we get a diagnosis or we know something about how our brain works and we use it against ourselves. This is a diagnosis, so my brain is broken, so I can’t be on time, I can’t have a business, I can’t date like a normal person, I can’t participate in a socially normal way.
On one hand a diagnosis provides relief right, we can use a diagnosis or an awareness to give ourselves grace and to learn our brains better, but very quickly what I see happen for some people and it happened to me where you use the diagnosis as the reason you can’t have what you want.
So if this is you this might be another version of this thought or another way you’re using this thought against yourself.
I want to finish things instead of only 75% because it would feel good .
I want to engage with people in my life and be present to them because I value relationship building.
I want to build a business in a way that feels fun for me.
I want to date because I’m interested in who I could become in a relationship.
Now if I don’t do those things it’s because I choose not to, not because I have no control over my brain.
And there’s nothing like a brain that works differently than the majority of brains to create an epic work around. Right? The adhd brains, the anxious brains, they are the brains that create ways to work better, more efficiently, more comfortably, more creatively, more strategically, more magically, more curiously, more genuinely, right? And when I say work I don’t mean like sit at a desk in front of a computer, I mean serve your authenticity efficiently and with a magic that hasn’t even occurred to anyone else before.
So like don’t say my brain is broken and I can’t. My brain is just trying to love me. How can I do this while holding hands with my brain?
You know that saying we’re all just walking eachother home? That’s what I imagine me and my brain doing. Walking eachother home. She’s there to keep me alive in her own ways and I’m here to listen, learn and challenge her lovingly. We’re coming home to ourself that way, together. Am I getting too sappy?
Haha you’re like Hanna stop it this is too lovey dovey for me. I get it you don’t love your brain yet and thats okay. Hear me on that too. That’s okay.
I want to tell you. Because I got a DM recently from someone who said you were just born with a brain that can think these crazy inspiring and motivaitng things and I was not. And she was like literally telling me I was doing a disservice to people by being positive. And maybe she felt like I was contributing to a toxic positivity or something but I want to just tell you all now: Stop comparing you to me. Your brain to my brain. That’s not fair. I take a bit of offense to that when people say like you can’t just say that positive shit. YES I CAN. Because, we are not at the same place in our evolution. And you didn’t get to see me at my worst. Because I was embarrassed and afraid all the time. There were at least 20 years of life where there were no inspirational quotes to be had.
Do you know how many times I had to cry over my mental health? At least 10000. At least. I used to cry myself to sleep every single night. Every night, and you know me I am all about calling out what’s a fact and what’s just our thoughts but listen to me when I tell you that I was the girl who woke up every day with swollen eyes and puffy face because I stared at the disgusting panel wall in my apartment on donner lake every night and cried. Every night. Because I didn’t know what to do. I hated myself, my anxiety. My brain.
For those of you who know what a panic attack is like you’ll get me when I say I was trapped in my own body for a really large portion of my life. I literally tried to claw my own skin off. Because it physically hurt.
Sometimes I read those memes like you know you have anxiety when: your eyeballs feel like they’re gunna fall outta your face and your head feels cold and you lose the ability to create saliva and you forget your own name and can’t hold up your own weight… and I literally think to myself…yeah, and about 400 other things that I can’t even describe with human words because the sensations are so fucked up and weird that no one else could possible understand even if I tried.
My mom used to ask me “what does it feel like” as I was crying, shuddering, clenching my fists and curling my toes and groaning …and I would say I don’t know. I don’t know but it’s so horrible. I hate this.
I was not born this way.
I was actually more likely born with a predisposition for anxiety disorder.
I went to therapy as a child. I had agoraphobic tendencies from the time I was little.
So no, I am not just blessed with good genes and a really great mindset. I worked and continue to work hard on all this that you see.
So no, it doesn’t just come easy, and I keep failing every day.
I failed just a few minutes ago when I got yet another email from this job I’m wanting saying not yet, I’m not ready yet. And I feel devastated. And I am going to go cry about it in a minute. And probably let my thoughts about how I’m not good enough and I’m a terrible coach and people think I’m fucking stupid for pursuing this as a career. And I’m going to beat myself up and overthink for a while. And then get anxiety about it. And be mad at my brain.
And then after that I’m going to get up and remind myself what else is true about who I am now.
That I am resilient. That I can make something out of nothing. That anxiety doesn’t run my life, it’s just a really familiar companion along for the ride. And that I still have so much growing to do and I’m so fucking jazzed to find out where that is going to take me.
And I wanna know who’s coming with me? It’s not about where you start it's about where you’re headed, yeah?
So if you think you’re brain is broken because you have anxiety or adhd or ptsd or any other diagnosed or undiagnosed neurodivergence I know what you mean. I am not just learning this shit from a book and regurgitating it. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying what I said to myself for years: that there is something wrong with me and it can’t be fixed.
But if you can learn anything from my experience learn this: I didn’t need fixing. I just needed to stop looking at my brain as a burden and start noticing how much it loves me. And the same is true for you.
I think this is a good time to learn about the multidimensional, multifunctional brain. We can be afraid and brave. We can be confused and sure. We can be compassionate and strong. We can be frustrated and peaceful. Like people think that they can’t ever feel happiness because they are sad. Nothing is wrong with feeling lazy or scared or unsure because you can feel all the ways. Thought work works best when you understand the magnitude of your brain’s capabilities. That you don’t need to stop unhelpful thoughts before introducing new ones. You don’t have to eliminate the negative emotions before you can feel the fun ones.
You don’t need to love your brain less for how it’s functioning.. you just need to anticipate the support it needs, and notice where you CAN feel, do, have, be how you want.
So if you haven’t had this thought yet, about having a broken brain, it might come up when you start doing more thought work. When you start to bring more awareness to what your brain is offering. When you start doing thought work a lot of times people are like screw this and like wanting to breakup with your brain.
The desire for brain breakup is what happens when you SEE the bs your brain is feeding you for the first time, and you want to immediately get the f out.
There’s no point getting mad at your brain. You’re kinda stuck with it for life, anyways.
When I hear clients saying “Ugh, I just wish I didn’t think this way!” Or “Why does my mind do this to me!?”
I feel for ya.
BUT I also know that these frustrating thoughts are signs that the fun part is coming, if you want to see it. I promise there’s fun here!
The part where you get to fall in love with your brain. And be it’s strongest ally. And give it the tools to do it’s best by you.
The pain and struggle of living with your brain is necessary to take action on supporting it to work with you better. The “wtf” moments can be a catalyst for you to become better at noticing, assessing, and planning for you and your brains long and happy future together .
Neurodiversity is part of the human collective experience. Right just like I always am on about all feelings being part of the human experience, the human collective needs to start recognizing neurodiversity in all it’s glory. The ways that people behave and the things they feel and how their brains function is never ever ever right or wrong. It’s just your brain trying to love you.
If you’re having trouble trouble-shooting your dynamic and unique brain, come to a consultation and find out how Coaching can serve as the next layer of support. Visit hannakokovai.com
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