If you're like most people there’s a stream of negative thoughts going through your mind. Here’s what mine sound like: “Peter, why would anyone care what you have to say?” Or this doozy, “You used to be relevant but now you’re just old.” And the classic, “Sure you could make something happen —if you only had the time.”
What’s the point of these negative loops playing in our heads? It’s hard to imagine that they have any positive function at all. But science has shown that there is at least one. There’s a very primitive part of the brain that deals primarily with emotions, it’s called the amygdala, or the limbic brain, and it definitely has an important, some might say, life-saving function. For example, if you were swimming laps in a Florida swamp and a large alligator were to suddenly appear, it would be the responses from your amygdala that would cause you to swim faster than you’d ever swam before. It would be your amygdala that sent the adrenaline coursing through your blood, all in an effort to save you from becoming human tartare.
But unfortunately, that same part of your brain intuits harmless psychological threats in the same way. This is the train of logic it follows:
- If you try something new you might fail.
- If you fail you will be ashamed.
- Shameful people will be abandon.
- If you’re abandoned (think back to earliest childhood) you will die.
That’s how deftly the amygdala makes the leap from something as innocuous as say, stumbling over your lines in a drama course to your own demise. And that’s why we have such a difficult time reinventing ourselves; on a subconscious level we see the challenge as something that involves our own mortality.
In order to humanize this limbic brain and the negative responses it sends, I’ve given it a name. I call this internal critic, Marv. Marv is my metaphor for: Majorly Afraid of Revealing Vulnerability. I’ve also come to understand that rather than working to hinder our efforts, Marv is actually a protective force, albeit one that’s working way too hard. Unless there’s a ravenous alligator, or some actual life-threatening situation, you need Marv to put his feet up, and sip an iced tea, so that you can get on with that poem, or business plan, or painting, or exercise program you’ve put on hold. It’s Marv that creates the knots in your stomach, the tension in your neck —or any of the other physiological symptoms you experience under stressful situations—but even though they seem to portend real danger they aren’t necessarily evidence that you should curtail pursuing your ideas. So what's the secret to countering Marv's debilitating naysaying? It’s all about taking the first steps towards your goal, even before your fear abates. Marv is activated by our fear; he is calmed by our actions.
For example, I’ve always wanted to fly a plane but I was worried I didn’t have the math skills (note to would-be pilots: you don’t need much math), or that I would become flustered and accidentally kill myself. And whenever I even thought about flying a plane a storm of negative thoughts and sensations would arise. For years I put the kibosh on the idea. However, once I took the tiny action steps towards my goal of flying a plane, as opposed to just fearfully ruminating about it, Marv was off doing something other than annoying me. And what do these small steps look like?
Like I said, they were small steps, ridiculously small. My first one was to simply walk to my computer with the intention of doing a Google search for: Discovery Flight Times in Santa Monica. Once I approached the computer to type in those words, I was already taking action on my goals, and since Marv is only sending warning messages when we’re fretting over our goals —not when we’re taking some sort of action on them — he was nowhere to be found. After several such small steps, it wasn’t long until I was actually flying a Cessna 172 Skyhawk over the San Fernando Valley.
Shining a light on the source of a problem is the best way to begin solving it, and the trick to dealing with Marv is to shine a light on "him" to determine if the threat he presents you with is real danger or mere anxiety. From there, all you need to do is to go from a state of passive mulling to one of active doing. Even when your actions are tiny, just like the way I walked to my computer and began a Google search, you’ll find it makes all the difference in the world in terms of bringing your own ideas to life.
