Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers

by Faith G. Harper

We should honor the past, we should remember it, and we should respect what it has taught us. But we don’t have to keep living there. That house is crumbling and toxic and far too small to contain you. It doesn’t support your present experience and it sure as fuck doesn’t fit into your future goals.

Next time you start feeling yourself getting into Eject mode, ask yourself these questions. And later, when you’ve cooled off, write the answers down: What specific emotion were you feeling? On a 0-100% scale how would you rate that emotion? What were the specific symptoms you felt (your emotional response)? What else was going on when it hit? Just write down everything that was going on, no matter how mundane. Because, patterns over time is how we figure out our triggers.

your experiences and reactions are valid and real and you are worthy of care and the opportunity to heal.

Emotions last longer than 90 seconds because we continue to fuel them with our thoughts. We do this by telling ourselves the same stories about the triggering situation over and over. This is when they stop being emotions and start becoming moods. We also continue to fuel them with our behaviors.

My favorite definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

To get to a place where we just feel what we feel? To sit with it for that 90 seconds? To remember that it’s just information from our body, part of our feedback circuit? That it doesn’t define us? Change anything about the essence of who we are? That it may not even be ACCURATE information about the situation? REALLY FUCKING HARD.

I have found that healing is way easier when we dig into it right away and don’t give our brains the opportunity to start mapping out bullshit signals that fuck us up.

You deserve every opportunity to heal.

we are in control of our experience at this point in our lives, even if we weren’t in the past.

It is amazing to realize you can feel something and not have it overwhelm you. That right there? That is what taking your power back really means.

Proving you can do something once is easy, getting so good at it that it becomes your second nature is way harder. But that’s what rewires a trauma reaction. Do it so often it just becomes what you do.

we are not destined to a prison of our past experiences.

The healthiest people are the ones who find meaning in chaos.

We are wired to have strong emotional responses because those responses keep us alive.

anger is like holding onto a hot coal and expecting the person we are angry at to get burned.