John Assaraf: Innercise – Your Brain’s Inner Power
SANDRA SEDGBEER: You say in the book that brain science has revealed that humans have an innate negativity bias. Tell us a bit about this.
JOHN ASSARAF: A lot of people think negativity is bad, but think of this from a different perspective. When I write about having innate negativity in Innercise, the idea is to understand the hierarchy of how the brain works. Most people have never gotten past a high school understanding of the brain, and if you’re in your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s or 70’s, everything you were taught is wrong. The hierarchy for the brain is safety first – safety for your life, for your physical body, your emotions, financial safety, anything that could jeopardize your life and cause you any real or imagined pain. Real or imagined pain activates the negativity side of the brain, the fear/distress/ anxiety side of the brain first because that’s how we were hard-wired from the beginning of time for the safety of mankind.
The second and very important part of the brain that is required for us to understand is energy conservation. Our brain also wants to conserve energy in case of a threat; it needs to make sure it has the energy to run away or fight the beast.
The third thing that our brain does extremely well is to make sure that we maintain homeostasis, or keep in our comfort zone, whether it’s our weight, income, career, business, relationships, etc., so it never exceeds our hidden internal self-image and set point of where we think we should be or what we have become accustomed to being. Anything that jeopardizes any one of those three creates a negativity bias and puts us on high alert. So, the key is to understand that this is how I operate. There is nothing wrong with me. So how do I flip the switch from a negativity bias to either a positivity bias or a neutral bias where I can start making better decisions that are not based on fear or stress or anxiety? These are all skills that we can learn.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: You’ve said that to strengthen our inner Einstein the solution-making, forward-thinking part of our brain, we’ve got to Innercise our three core neuro-muscles. How do we do that?
JOHN ASSARAF: One of the highest human traits is awareness. Most people live habitually without giving much thought to what’s going on. When we become more aware of our thoughts, our emotions, feelings, sensations, behaviors and our results in a state of no blame, no shame, no judgment, guilt or justification, just pure awareness, we can move to another function of the brain and set a new course and intention – that is what do I want to be thinking about? What do I want to feel? What is it that I want to do? Between awareness and intention, we are now at the cause, and we are in the present moment. When we consciously and deliberately choose our behaviors and actions, we are operating at the highest function of human capability. So, a state of awareness gives us choice and choice gives us freedom, but most people don’t realize that they are not choosing deliberately day-by-day; they are operating based on sub-conscious patterns conditioned ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving and are no longer in control. That’s why we keep doing the same things, achieving the same results over and over again. And that’s why we fail to let go of disempowering habits or behaviors that are not constructive in our lives. But, in a state of pure awareness, by slowing down, we can activate some of the higher cortical functions of the brain and be deliberate, be present, and be at choice instead of being a victim of our past or present circumstances. This is a skill that people can learn.
One of the first Innercises that I teach in the book is called “Take Six, Calm the Circuit First.” It is based on neuroscience research that says when you take deep breaths in through your nose in four or five second increments and exhale out through your mouth – you blow out like you’re blowing out through a straw – six to 10 times you deactivate the stress/fear thought centers of the brain and recalibrated both hemispheres. You’re then in a state to move into Innercise Number Two, which I call AIA, which stands for Awareness of my thoughts, feelings and emotional sensations and behavior, and then Intention, and one Action step.
When you practice this once an hour, you interrupt the habitual patterns that govern and run your life. This gives you a chance – to begin with, let’s say, once an hour – to be deliberate, to be conscious and aware, to be on purpose and a choice. Then you realize that maybe you can do that every 30 minutes, or every 15 minutes, or even every minute. When you practice these Innercises, you are taking control of the most powerful tool in the known Universe – your brain. So, by taking more control of your brain versus running it on auto-pilot to conserve energy and keep you in your comfort zone, you can deliberately evolve and change your brains, so you change your life.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: What are the most common things that stand in people’s way? Why do we sabotage ourselves?
JOHN ASSARAF: I was just having this dialogue with my two sons, who went to see the movie, Bohemian Rhapsody with Freddie Mercury about why do so many musicians sabotage their success, whether it’s through drugs or alcohol, or in many other ways? The answer is because we have a part of our brain that governs our outer world of success.
So, let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to lose weight and look and feel great, but because of some negative programming around your self-image, self-worth or self-esteem, you unconsciously feel you don’t deserve to look or feel that good. So even though your conscious mind, your Einstein says: “Hey, lose weight, feel great, have more energy, do the things you want to do,” if there’s a subconscious self-image or self-esteem pattern that doesn’t agree with that, you’ll sabotage your success. That’s number one: self-image, self-esteem, self-worth.
Number two is fear. There are over 50 different types of fears that will deactivate our emotional center. So, let’s go to money now – if you have a fear of failure, or of not having enough money, or of disappointing yourself or a loved one, or being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed or judged, So, even though you might be motivated (Einstein) to achieve financial success. Your fear center is going to deactivate your motivational center and your motor cortex, and you’ll sabotage your success. You’ll procrastinate and won’t do it.
Number three is limiting beliefs in the brain is the lens by which we see the world and they drive our behavior. Let’s say you’ve been divorced once and you’re in your 50’s, and you want to be in another relationship, but you have limiting beliefs that you’re too old to use technology to find a partner, or not attractive enough, etc., Frankenstein will say, Uh, Uh, you can’t because… Everybody has something – a money story, a relationship story, a career or business story that governs our behavior, perspective or perception. Belief, fear, self-esteem, stories, and excuses – those are the four key things that hold people back. Now here’s the good news: Innercise has helped hundreds of thousands of people overcome those mental or emotional obstacles by helping them become more aware without pain, shame, judgment or guilt, then we upgrade their knowledge and skills and give them the behaviors to overcome it.
SANDRA SEDGBEER: For all of the experiences that have affected our self-esteem or created a negative belief or story, we’ve also had positive experiences and stories that have raised our self-esteem. So why is it that our brain focuses on the negative and not the positive ones?
JOHN ASSARAF: Negative experiences are wired in the brain 10,000 times faster than positive experience, and that goes back to us being hard-wired for safety first, so any negative experience gets encoded in the brain for memory and future avoidance as an awareness. We have to thank those circuits for trying to protect us, but we have the higher-thinking parts of our brain, the higher cortical functions of our brain, and that is where Innercise can help. We almost have to unlearn some of the things that we learned as children or young adults, and the thing is to make change easier. We have a brain that does not like change and resists it to conserve energy. But this is probably one of the fascinating things to think about: You have a brain, but you’re not your brain. You can instruct your brain. You can slow your heartbeat. You can increase your focus. You can decrease your pain centers. You can increase or decrease your heartbeat. These are all functions of knowing how to use your brain and some of your other systems better. I encourage people to learn a bit more about the brain; make it easier for yourself to be happy, or to be wealthy, or to be in better shape and have more energy and vitality in your life — all the how-to’s we know. So the last thing that someone should be concerned with, well, is how- to. You can read about it, you can Google it, you can hire a coach, you can hire an expert, you can hire a mentor, and you can take a course on it — all the how-to that just about anyone who is listening to us right now already is known to us, so that is the least of the problem.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with John Assaraf on Innercise
