Islamic Life Coach School Podcast

Success Without Stress

Kanwal Akhtar Episode 211

Unlock the secrets of how your brain's shortcuts can both propel and hinder your personal growth. Ever wondered why we automatically link eight hours of study with good grades or happiness with chocolate? In this episode we unravel the brain's intricate web of cause-and-effect relationships that shape our daily decisions.

Learn how these mental shortcuts, while initially serving as essential survival tools, can turn into limiting beliefs that restrict our potential. This is a journey of self-awareness, encouraging you to challenge these ingrained patterns and open doors to new possibilities by questioning the automatic connections your brain makes.

Discover the transformative power of calmness as a catalyst for success in both work and everyday life. Explore how a serene morning routine can redefine your productivity, replacing stress-driven habits with focused efficiency. 


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Atar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.

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Alhamdulillah, you guys know that I love the brain. I love the brain as a device, as an organ, as a tool. It is an amazing machine and I absolutely the brain. I love the brain as a device, as an organ, as a tool. It is an amazing machine and I absolutely love it. I love your brain, I love my brain and it's just so fascinating to me and Alhamdulillah for this resource.

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One of the reasons why I love it so much is because the brain makes everything super efficient. It makes your life incredibly easy and it has some ingrained biases to make that happen. It's designed to process information smoothly when it sees things happening, to make it very efficient for the next time. It connects the two things as a cause and effect. This is all in an effort to help you make fast decisions without wasting energy in the future. What it does is it connects related or unrelated events to make similar decision-making efficient in the future. What it does is it connects related or unrelated events to make similar decision making efficient in the future, and by doing this it simplifies what would otherwise be rather complex information. For example, if you see a shadowy figure at night and your brain screams run, because it's already paired dark shadow with danger, this is a cause and effect relationship that your brain has already created based on your past experiences, so it skips the whole questioning of what is that Maybe I should find out it just skips to screaming danger as an effort to keep you safe, because that's a relationship it's already made.

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In this function of pattern seeking human beings, you and I start to naturally look for patterns. When your brain notices two things happening together, it assumes that one causes the other. It creates a story that helps make sense of the event. That is easy to remember and share, and human beings are natural storytellers. So forming these cause and effect links help create narratives that bring understanding and meaning. If you see the same person at school when something funny happens, your brain will have a tendency to think oh, they're a funny person. This way, the brain is writing a mini story linking the person with humor, just because you see them at the same time as you laugh.

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Also, from an evolutionary standpoint, it is extremely important to recognize cause and effect as a survival instinct. If your brain can connect actions like avoiding certain foods with feeling healthy in the future, it will guide your choices to increase your chance of survival. This is also true for learning. The brain breaks down complex ideas into simple cause and effect parts, which makes it easier to remember and apply in the future. Like imagine you tried a snack that looked great but tasted terrible. Your brain will absolutely file that away under never again. So now it's going to keep you safe by remembering that food as dangerous, even if it was just a snack fail. So the brain always has the preference for simplicity and certainty. It loves simple answers, things that feel clear and easy to trust, and creating a cause and effect relationship brings it a sense of control and certainty.

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In your experience, when a good grade comes from studying, you assume that's a cause and effect relationship. It will never let you believe that you can get a good grade without studying. It will always continue to believe that studying equals A+, which is simple and reassuring. But I'll tell you that I've aced a lot of exams without the traditional studying. I do learn, but I do it in a lot of untraditional ways as well, just to keep my life simple and easy, because I've learned to break these cause and effect relationships, which is what this podcast is all about. Because sometimes these cause and effect relationships that the brain creates start to hurt you. They no longer serve you in your life, and when that's the case, it's important to recognize what these relationships are and where you would want to break them. Like for me, when studying 8 hours a day equals getting a good grade, but I don't have 8 hours a day to spend anymore, then I need to break that cause and effect relationship in my mind. I need to relearn the pattern that sometimes paying super attention in certain times will create the same memory bank in my mind that will help me in the exam without me having to spend 8 gruesome hours doing rote memorization. That's me breaking that link.

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If you think eating chocolate makes you feel happier, your brain will ignore all the other times you felt happy without it. It's holding on to that. Chocolate equals happy cause and effect relationship, because that belief feels nice, it's simple, it's easy to remember, even if it's not always true. You learn the same cause and effect by observing people around you, people that influence your ideas. If a friend succeeds after a certain action, you'll have a tendency to think that if you behave the same way, it will lead to your success, even if the friend's success was just a coincidence or if their circumstances were completely different. This is the part of social learning that helps shape your belief about what actions will lead to certain outcomes. I want to invite you to start noticing in the future, after you listen to this podcast.

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Every time your brain is faced with conflicting information, it will have a tendency to create a simple cause and effect relationship, just to make things feel less confusing, and you are welcome to keep that bias. You're welcome to keep functioning at that level, but please be open to challenging this when it stops to serve you, which is the whole point I'm trying to make. Brain's efficiency serves you great until it doesn't. And the time it stops to serve you is when you start jumping to conclusions In the wake of your brain always looking for patterns. It will create a cause and effect relationship, no matter what, without pausing to ask if it's even true.

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If you start to think that you did really well after wearing a new shirt, your brain, consciously or subconsciously, might link the shirt to the good grade and you can decide that now it's your lucky shirt, even though studying and paying attention might have played a role. Similarly, your brain might have linked Saturdays with relaxation, your mom's food with comfort. And once your brain connects two things, it sticks with that story, ignoring all other possible reasons and outcomes. And this confirmation bias keeps you seeing only what fits the first idea, even if a lot of evidence exists otherwise. If a specific breakfast made you feel energized one time, your brain will notice that and have you eating the same thing over and over again, forgetting about all of the other things that bring you energy, which can be morning activities, being in the sunshine, taking a cold shower machine. It's like an over-enthusiastic coach who once learned that you did well under stress and when that happened it decided stress must be a secret ingredient. That's the only way I can do well.

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So next time you work on a big project, you feel jittery and you think to yourself I'm running out of time. That's the kind of stress that the brain is used to because it's linked that stress with success. You push through, you procrastinate until the last minute and you finish the project under stress and again you feel proud that you did a great job. The brain continues to grow in its confirmation bias that stress is what helped you out, and it continues to link stress with doing a good job. This is where things start to get messy. This is where your brain is being lazy about checking the facts and deciding that stress is not really necessary for your success. In this laziness, it continues to look for ways to keep you stressed, thinking that it's doing you a favor. In the meanwhile, the subconscious mind is whispering. Remember you work best when you're stressed and every project, big or small, feels like it has to be urgent and stressful for you to perform well.

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You have this unscratched itch of worry like if I'm not stressed enough, I'm gonna fail. If you're stuck in this ongoing loop, it is your perfect opportunity to break this cause and effect lie that your brain's created Might have served you in other ways, but not in this case. Your brain has always been busy associating stress with success, that it can't see how the habit is actually wrecking your performance and it's taking away from your sustainability. And instead of learning how to focus calmly, you feel fear creeping every time you aren't stressed and this brain's helpful shortcut is backfiring, convincing you that stress is more and more important every time you need to do a good job, when that, in fact, is not true at all. While trying to make things easier, your brain is just accidentally sabotaging your performance because it mistook one-time thing for a permanent rule.

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When you start to feel a nagging worry that if you're not stressed you're going to fail, it's time for you to break free from that cause and effect relationship that your brain might have created a long time ago. If stress helped you nail a few projects once or twice, that's perfectly fine. You can leave that in the past. You might use stress even in the future if it means a short-term boost. But it does not have to be a constant state, because constant stress is going to weigh you down. It's going to burn you out. It's not going to lead to sustainable long-term performance. You do not have to go out of your way to make sure everything feels harder each time you need to perform well. You can do things the easy way by making it easier for yourself, by finding new pathways in your brain, by asking a question how can I make this easy for myself? Breaking free from this cycle, you have to start teaching your brain that it's possible to succeed without feeling like you're under a constant deadline.

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As a busy woman juggling a career, a family, your personal goals, you're most likely used to running on stress because it's always giving you that final push, because your brain is still running on that old story of cause and effect. You have a body memory that's learned to associate racing heartbeat and whirlwind of thoughts with getting things done. But what if you could reach all of those same results without stress, without those physical symptoms, without the burnout? And it just starts with you believing. And it just starts with you believing that you don't need to feel worried and stressed out to perform well and start to retain things in your brain in a state of calm and even happiness. And when you do that enough times, the brain will create a new cause and effect relationship.

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If you think about me during a day having back-to-back meetings, picking up kids, dropping kids meal prepping and then squeezing time for side projects, kids meal prepping and then squeezing time for side projects, all in the meanwhile keeping focus on spirituality and coaching, if I continue to run on the pre-programmed cause and effect, it will be very easy for me to go into crisis mode every morning before I even get out of the bed, because these thoughts and anticipation of what your day is going to look like will trigger stress before you even started your day. So what I did, and what I'm recommending you to do, is you might just want to notice this feeling of stress and remember that you're learning to do things in a relaxed mode. If, at any point, you start to miss that fuel that keeps you going, bring into focus that relaxation, commitment and persistence will also bring you the same results. Without exhaustion and anxiety, you can get things done without being in crisis mode. Continue to imagine something new. Try something more Waking up with a calm morning routine, starting your day with a few moments of quiet, allowing your brain to ease into the tasks rather than continuing to create a rat race.

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Maybe it's just a few moments of sipping your coffee, spending a few minutes planning your day and removing all of the shoulds from your mind. Nothing should be happening other than what is already happening, because that's what's happening. Stop fighting reality. You're going to get into a practice of showing your brain that starting the day with calm does not mean that work does not get done. In fact, what you will learn that it will get done, but more smoothly and fewer mistakes, and it will leave you with energy to spare at the end of the day. Whenever you sense that urge to rush, you can just remind yourself, take a deep breath, focus on the task at hand and go through it one step at a time, so like, instead of feeling like you have to reply to every single email immediately you prioritize, you tackle and you commit to the time, and you create a result within that time and you call it done. You announce to yourself because you've decided that this task is complete. Give yourself that closure. The more you practice this approach, the more it will prove to you and your brain that you can handle your tasks without feeling constant pressure.

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At home, while you might have felt the usual tension, this time decide to focus on just one act. Maybe you're chopping the vegetables slowly. Maybe you're preparing the kids for bath. Maybe you're finalizing your next day's agenda. Maybe you're focusing on your salah. What you're doing each time you bring your focus from stress to calm, to fuel your actions, is you're creating a brand new cause and effect relationship. Your brain, in the name of efficiency, will continue to write the simple story that it needs to write. Your job is extremely simple just to redirect your mind, one moment at a time. The very proficient and efficient brain that I already told you I love will do the rest of the job. It will create a new relationship in your mind, something that creates success with relaxation, success without stress, and your experiences will become absolutely transformational.

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Your brain, which was just treated as a stress-detecting machine, as a path to productivity, it will begin to recognize calm happiness and it will recognize that relaxation is equally as effective to achieve positive results. You will reach your goals with calmness results. You will reach your goals with calmness. You will create accomplishments with relaxed mode and your brain will start to see that the stress-free success is possible and before you know it, you would have broken the miserable cycle of stress and success.

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It doesn't matter what profession you're in. You're a stay-at-home mom, you're a nurse, you're a teacher all you need is practice. If your kid springs up on you a last-minute project instead of rushing to find supplies, you will start to associate calmness and resourcefulness with this situation. If you're running behind on charts, instead of scrambling, you will learn to focus, create a steady attention towards the task at hand. Your brain will learn that calm can coexist with productivity. It rewires your mental patterns, and the beauty of all of this approach is, when there is a genuine emergency, your brain is still able to respond quickly and efficiently with fight, flight, freeze or whatever is required in that moment.

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But now, with this practice, calmness is going to be more and more available to you. Stress is not going to be the constant background noise in your mind. You would have learned that relaxation is a powerful state too, a one that supports your well-being and lets you get your job done effectively, and the job you do is even better compared to what stress could have ever provided you with. The feelings of being constantly on the edge continue to fade away. They're replaced by the sense of steady focus, and your brain no longer defaults to stress. A non-stress state becomes a new normal, and your brain, the same brain that's obsessed with efficiency, is going to become obsessed with creating calm, even in the face of a large project.

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Now it's going to start to see calmness as a true path to being your best self at work and beyond this socialized belief of high alertness and constant pressure being necessary for achieving your goal. It's completely outdated and false. Your brain, being an incredibly efficient machine, will create work-life balance with calmness, the same way it accidentally learned to create that through stress. You can absolutely and fully create success when your hearts are at peace. With that, I pray to Allah SWT. Ya Allah, grant us the calmness in our hearts and clarity in our mind. Help us approach our responsibilities with focus and peace. Remind us that success lies in trusting you, o Allah, not in constantly carrying the weight of stress in our hearts. O Allah, allow our minds to embrace calm and our souls to feel only your guidance. Ameen, ya rabbal alameen, please keep me in your duas. I will talk to you guys next time.