Do you ever feel like obligations are just too much? That they're inescapable necessities that have you caught in a fight or flight response?
Let's debunk that myth together. In this episode, we're turning the tables on our brain's primal response to obligations and reframing them as choices. This episode offers insights on how to manage stress and anxiety that come with perceived obligations. We unearth the extraordinary power of choice and the freedom in recognizing that we always have options, even in the face of DAUNTING obligations.
Struggling with personal responsibility and decision-making? Well, you're not alone. We'll uncover the importance of owning our decisions, however difficult, and the role of divine guidance in our choices. We'll share valuable insights on how to avoid the pitfall of regret and the power of seeking guidance from Allah in every decision.
Listen and apply for a powerful change in your life!
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If this podcast has benefited you, imagine the value of a one-on-one meeting with me! Click below to schedule your FREE consultation. Discover solutions with no obligation.
https://www.islamiclifecoachschool.com/appointments
Do you ever feel like obligations are just too much? That they're inescapable necessities that have you caught in a fight or flight response?
Let's debunk that myth together. In this episode, we're turning the tables on our brain's primal response to obligations and reframing them as choices. This episode offers insights on how to manage stress and anxiety that come with perceived obligations. We unearth the extraordinary power of choice and the freedom in recognizing that we always have options, even in the face of DAUNTING obligations.
Struggling with personal responsibility and decision-making? Well, you're not alone. We'll uncover the importance of owning our decisions, however difficult, and the role of divine guidance in our choices. We'll share valuable insights on how to avoid the pitfall of regret and the power of seeking guidance from Allah in every decision.
Listen and apply for a powerful change in your life!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this podcast has benefited you, imagine the value of a one-on-one meeting with me! Click below to schedule your FREE consultation. Discover solutions with no obligation.
https://www.islamiclifecoachschool.com/appointments
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognisably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Uthar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:In Islam, obligatory prayers are a fundamental aspect symbolizing devotion, submission to Allah. But sometimes the perception of these acts as a rigid obligation can lead to a psychological trap, especially if done over time. I know I just started this podcast and I already hit you with a deep concept, but I'm going to repeat it and slow it down just for our understanding. Any act, not just your daily prayers, if that act is perceived as a rigid obligation, it will eventually start to be seen by your brain as a trap. When your brain senses an absence of choice, it creates a narrative of entrapment. The concept here is a sense of freedom versus a sense of compulsion and how our subconscious mind perceives both and how it creates a completely different body experience of emotions based on what the mind perceives. A sense of freedom, of choice, loosens its grip on the body and a sense of compulsion produces tight emotions in the body. A lack of choice feels suffocating, leading the brain to perceive that the obligated activity is a threat equal to a physical danger, because the primal subconscious mind perceives every threat as if it's a threat to your existence and the next natural reaction that your body will have is it will go into fight and flight, freeze or fall. In response, if you see that you have to force yourself to pray, chances are that you're perceiving it as an inescapable choice which is very stressful to the body in itself, and no wonder you can't make it a consistent habit. This idea suggests that when we view an obligation as a compulsory act, something without a choice, it becomes a source of fear, a source of threat, and this fear response is overwhelming and uncomfortable. So, while trying to conduct the act, while trying to be consistent with your studies, be consistent with your prayers, body and mind have to overcome this threat of anxiety and the sense of entrapment. Then it wastes a lot of energy.
Speaker 1:From an evolutionary perspective, when humanity unlocked the power of metacognition, which is the ability to think about your thinking, your prefrontal cortex began to act like an internal scanner interpreting the sensations within your body. This was groundbreaking in evolution, because when this part of the brain detects stress, particularly the kind of stress induced by the sense of entrapment or obligation, it raises an alarm, mistaking these feelings for life-threatening dangers. This is like perceiving a tiger. Only the tiger is internal, a false threat fabricated by your mind. Dr Kelly McGonagall says in her book the Upside of Stress the tiger moved inside, meaning. Instead of worrying about the tiger jumping out from behind the bushes and eating you, the tiger started to be within you, tiger metaphorically representing a sense of danger and the object of fear as fabricated by your mind. When it comes to your sense of obligation. And it's fascinating to notice that a tiger outside of us creates the same sense of danger as if we perceived an obligation as inescapable or trapping.
Speaker 1:This capability to introspect, to sense the stress triggers our primal instinct to escape, and this trigger can be a sense of obligation, as it relates to the daily prayers. Escape from your obligations of being a mother doing laundry, being a financial provider for the family, or obligation pretending a garden that you planted. If you stop seeing a choice that you don't have to tend to the garden, that you're actually choosing to tend to it, the garden will be start to perceived as an inescapable threat Just because you have a sense of obligation towards it. All of these responsibilities will be detected as though there's a real predator. But we do have a profound advantage, and that's the one of mind management. We have the option to dominate this primal response. Our higher cognitive functions understand that the perceived threat is not real. We have the power to override these primal alarms, to recognize that the stress, whether worn from obligation or something else, is not a true danger. It's a remarkable demonstration of how a human mind is complex and how it has the ability to navigate between the primal and the higher reasoning.
Speaker 1:If you're having a hard time creating a habit around the priorities that you set, chances are you've stopped seeing them as a choice. You're making what the brain labels as obligation through the pathways of the primal response I described to you. That creates stress. This obligation starts to dominate your thought and mental space, intruding and bleeding this obsession into the other matters of your life. The key takeaway here is that, while responsibilities are important, framing them as absolute necessities without a choice creates an unhealthy mindset. Everything, ultimately, is a matter of choice. Recognizing this will transform how you approach your obligations, reducing the fear and anxiety associated with them. The goal is not to abandon responsibilities, but to understand and reframe your approach to them, recognizing the power of choice in your life. When the story to the self is that this obligation is inescapable, there's a lack of choice and autonomy. You feel trapped, you feel powerless, you feel helpless. That's when your primal brain is fully engaged and, through this lower brain, obligation becomes an object of obsession, and it's not a good obsession. It starts to affect your physical health, causes sleep disturbances and you think non-stop about all of the things you have to do.
Speaker 1:Important distinction I want to make is that you might not always like the choices you make. I personally make a lot of hard choices. I'm choosing to take the high road when people might have been unfair to me, and this is a choice that I don't like, but I am making it. Reminder here is that I always have a choice. I can stoop to their level or take the higher road. My brain is really good at forgetting that I have a choice in this matter, and maybe I'm making this choice because I want to be a better person than them. That does not mean that I let people walk all over me. It just means that I don't engage in petty arguments because my ego is hurt. I can choose to take the high road even though my ego makes it look like it's a difficult choice in the moment, because of the difficulty of the choice, the brain says you actually don't have a choice. You're obligated to be nice, and then I start to hate myself for acting nice. This is a very common scenario for highly empathic Muslim women. In this case, all I'm inviting you to do is to see that you have a choice of stooping down to somebody else's level or to take the high road.
Speaker 1:There is a level of cognitive climb, meaning more and more elevated thinking that you'll have to practice, and the cognitive climb to this is to get from. I don't have a choice to. I have all of the choice in the world. The small thoughts in between to practice is that it was a difficult choice that I made. What I'm doing is hard work, but it is my choice. Or I hated both of my choices, but I did make a choice. There was no coercion. No one forced me. I made a choice out of two bad options, because sometimes that's what you have to do in life. It's not like I'm telling you to think that you made the best choice in the world. If you have two bad choices, then maybe you chose lesser of the two evils, but nobody forced you into it. The point is to train your brain into a less threatening version of it was done to me, it is all being done to me. I'm always being told what to do, I'm being forced to, I'm obligated to. These are all highly triggering sentences to your lower brain. The slow cognitive climb to an improved type of thinking, more evolved thinking, is I'm making a hard choice, but nobody is forcing me. I might have not made the best choice, but I made it regardless.
Speaker 1:This pattern alone helps me elevate my worship so much because I didn't have a healthy portrayal of connection with my spirituality growing up. It was always you better do it or you're going to hell. I even used to be really angry for having to pray as a teenager and out of this anger my brain would always look for a logical benefit for why I had to do it and I would spin in circles trying to justify all the health and the psychological benefits of prayers. But the five daily prayers are way more than any benefit that you can fathom with your logical brain and I did not find the serene concentration and the connection until I was able to do this out of my own choice, out of my own free will, coming out of the trap of obligation. We pray because we need the prayers more than Allah needs our prayers from us.
Speaker 1:When you actually see the choice, even recognizing that you might be making a hard choice, then you will see the tension in your body will just unravel. It will just release itself because the tension that builds up from constant belief, running in the background, that you were manipulated into prayers. You were manipulated into doing something you didn't want to do. Maybe you're choosing to stay married because you have no idea how to deal with the financial obligations. If your spouse's financial support wasn't there, then you're choosing marriage. You're not being trapped into the marriage. You might be making a difficult choice, but you are making a choice.
Speaker 1:If you're living under the obsession of how obligated you've been to do the things you're doing, then you will need to amplify this voice in your brain that is ready to see the choice, how you're choosing, the actions you're taking, what two difficult choices you're choosing from. You're choosing to live in the West, even if you disagree with the foreign policy, you disagree with toxic capitalism, but you also don't like the choice of leaving your country to go to your parents' country, which is otherwise still a third world country, and it has its own challenges. You're making a difficult choice of staying in the West while your kids are being educated in public schools about sexual liberties and gender fluidity. You're making a very difficult choice. You're not being trapped into living an industrialized nation, even though your brain will tell you that you don't have a choice.
Speaker 1:But the point to consider here is that maybe you're making a choice between two difficult options. Maybe your father owed people money but he passed away and you're paying the loans back because you're doing the right thing. Your brain will say that your father trapped you into this mess and now you have left with no choice but to pay people back. But you always have a choice of not paying them back, just like your father didn't. Maybe you're choosing it because you want to be a better person, because you want to do the right thing.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying you have to do one or the other. I'm saying you're making moral decisions, and that is usually the hard thing to do. And that's the cue that your brain takes to make you think that you don't have a choice in the matter. And then the rest of the obligatory obsession follows. And I'm not saying I know all of the moral decisions behind your choices. I'm not living your life. That's up to you. What I'm saying is that you always have a choice. Obligation is an illusion that your lower brain creates in order to trap you by the hard choices that you make. Life is full of hard choices. We make them every day. This life is not promised to be easy, but you can recognize your hard choices and celebrate yourself for them. Allow yourself the win of making hard choices.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's that I'm choosing to stay in a toxic relationship because I don't have social connections, I don't have an education to survive outside of this relationship. Yet. What a sad choice to make. What a difficult choice, but it is a choice. And then I will offer you that.
Speaker 1:Once you come out of this constant narrative that your brain feeds you that you don't have a choice, that you're obligated to stay in the relationship, once you acknowledge to yourself that you're choosing a toxic relationship, as difficult as it might be initially, eventually your brain will start to show you that you don't have to keep making this choice. You can tap into other resources. It will start to show you all of the other support that you have. You can make new friends, you can work a minimum wage job until you get a higher education, the brain will start to show you other choices. Because until you're swirling in the neurochemical soup of the thoughts that you are bound and restricted to your current circumstance, your primal brain will remain active. Your prefrontal cortex, your resourceful brain, will continue to stay shut. And that is the perfect setup for you to continue to not see the choices and how you can actually leave the relationship in a healthy manner. Because at any given time, you are operating from two brains the lower or primitive brain that is wired for danger, safety, pleasure, and the higher brain that is wired for creativity, curiosity, empathy, growth and action.
Speaker 1:Once the lower brain is engaged and is ruminating in the trap of obligation, the higher brain gets shut down. It's disengaged and unavailable, meaning the faculties that you need to actually see the options of how you can survive outside of the relationship aren't even functioning. So it is extremely important to start seeing your choices, no matter how difficult that might seem in the beginning, and at the same time, when we consider our prayers as obligations, the brain says I don't have a choice but to pray. The truth of the matter is that you always have a choice. You don't have to pray five times a day. I know that sounds sacrilegious, but there are plenty of people on the planet, there are plenty of Muslims on the planet, that don't pray five times a day. Allah swt created us for His worship and then he gave us the freedom to not worship.
Speaker 1:The higher, more evolved possibility is that you recognize the importance of this worship and you want to worship, meaning you're making an active choice. It might be a difficult choice because the prayers seem interruptive, because they're getting in the way of your daily schedule or whatever other superficial obligations you have, but it is a choice you're making. It might be a hard choice. When you pray because of your sense of obligation, because your father will otherwise disown you, your community will disconnect from you obligations because of fear of hellfire. It renders your brain incapable of seeing the choice in the matter. Then that will create so much more resentment and rumination and the obstacles towards prayers become so high that you have to come up with a tremendous amount of energy to overcome this objection, to be able to pray for that day. Consequently, you will always find yourself in lack of motivation because there is never that high enough energy to overcome the monumental objection that your brain creates. You will have to generate a very high level of motivation to overcome the negative downward pull of the obligations that you have associated with your prayers.
Speaker 1:It's a possibility that you pray because you want to. Maybe you're praying because it's a commandment of Allah. It's a part of your religion. Maybe your act of prayer is not as good as it could be yet because you don't have constant concentration in it, but you always have a choice between not praying and praying with somewhat skipping concentration. You can choose a bad prayer that is not up to par to what you think going to be a perfect prayer, and this choice is to see so that you don't drop praying altogether just because you're obligated to having a perfect prayer. If you don't give yourself a choice through this fear of not having a perfect prayer, it will constantly keep your lower brain engaged.
Speaker 1:You're making a choice of staying in a marriage, staying in a career, no matter how strong the evidence is that you don't have a choice. You can't leave because of the kids. You can't change careers because of financial obligations. These are all reasons that make it a hard choice of staying in your situation. But you do have a choice. You have a choice to never caring about your kids and leave. You could become homeless and quit your job, but you don't want to make that choice. You want to make the hard choice of staying in the marriage and staying at your current job, and I gave you these extreme examples on purpose.
Speaker 1:The point I'm trying to highlight is to find a choice in whatever actions you're taking, and when you come out of the forceful narrative, when you're in a more resourceful state, then, and only then, will your brain show you how to choose differently. If you want. It will give you other pathways to take. Give yourself a choice, because then maybe you will see, the hard thing you chose was because that was the right thing to do, because you want to be the better moral human being. You're taking the high road, because you're stepping up to doing something that nobody else is taking responsibility for. You are doing the hard thing when you pray, when it doesn't seem like it's immediately benefiting you, and you still choose to pray.
Speaker 1:You might be making a difficult choice and you have the freedom to make this choice. A sense of obligation makes you a victim of your circumstance. You will not be able to think clearly about what to do next. Among all of this, you have to understand how important it is for a person to have a sense of agency that they've had over their choice they make. When people feel helpless and hopeless, they act completely outside of their true nature. When you own the choice, then through your own resilience, you're able to create something amazing out of a bad situation. Also, avoid the pitfall of when your brain tells you that among the hard choices, you made the wrong choice.
Speaker 1:Any human being that makes a choice has the capacity to deal with the outcome of that choice. Labeling it wrong is not going to do you any favors. You get to give yourself credit for making that difficult choice, which you don't get to do if you're constantly thinking that it's happening to you, it's happening towards you, it's happening at you. With that, I pray to Allah. O Allah, grant me the clarity to see my choices, strength to embrace them and the wisdom to endure the outcomes. In every decision I make, let me feel your guiding presence. O Allah, we turn to you to teach us the value of our decisions, knowing that in your wisdom alone, I am never outside of your mercy. O Allah, the Most Merciful, guide me to recognize my agency in crafting my life on purpose, on your deen, choice, by choice. Amin, ya Rabbal Al-Alamin, please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.