How to Unf**k Your Brain, with Kara Loewentheil

Hi, this is Kara Loewentheil, your host for "Radio Headspace" this week. I just wanted to let you know that there's a little explicit language in this episode. So listener discretion is advised. Now, let's start the show. (mouse clicks) (bright chiming music) Headspace Studios. (upbeat music) Hello, welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Monday morning. If you don't know me, I'm a former civil rights lawyer, a master certified life coach, and the host of "Unfuck Your Brain," a podcast that teaches you how to rewire your brain to create true inner confidence so you can get what you want out of life. Now, my podcast often focuses on how women are taught to think about themselves, but my advice on how to retrain your brain to think differently applies to everyone. And one of the things I've been vocal about is how society can condition us to feel like we're not good enough, even when we achieve great things. So this week, we're going to talk about how to live a life with less insecurity and more self-confidence. Today, we're going to explore what it actually means to unfuck your brain. It's all about how you can change your mindset in a way that serves you better and will help you blow up your life in the best way possible. When I talk about unfucking your brain, I'm using an irreverent term to refer to a really life-changing, scientifically based process, which is the process of becoming aware of what you're thinking and then actually changing what you're thinking on purpose. Most of us have no idea what we're thinking, which sounds wild, but it's true. You have so many subconscious thoughts that you are not even aware of, and they are driving your emotions and your behavior and the results that you create in your life every day. You can think about your brain as sort of open-source programming. You're born, and you know almost nothing, and you have to learn everything. The problem with open-source programming is that anybody can get in there and program it. Everything that you encounter is feeding your brain with ideas about who you are, who you should be, who's valuable and worthy and who isn't. And so because we live in a society that has inequality in it, we absorb a lot of messages that may not really align with our own values, how we want to live our lives, what we want to believe about ourselves and the world, but we're not even aware of it. The beautiful thing about the human brain is that it can change and grow forever, and this is called neuroplasticity. So it seems kind of funny to think about now, but until not super long ago, the scientific consensus was that your brain didn't really kind of fundamentally develop more after a certain point in your life. Thankfully, we know now that's just not true. Your brain can continue to grow new neural...