Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:30.54)
Okay, this is a cautionary tale about the thoughts you think every day and how it impacts your life, how they kind of run the entire show. So the other day I was out running errands and I overheard a group of women who are having coffee or tea, something warm and cozy. I live in a slightly colder place and we’ve, wood fires are going. So they’re sitting there, they’re talking about the holidays and I hear one of them say, it’s always so insane, right? Like every year there’s total chaos.
And the other woman jumps in and says, yes, completely insane. Last year was the worst. I thought December was trying to kill me. And so I was standing there waiting for my order. And I was thinking to myself, if they only knew what was actually happening, right, if they only knew what was going on in their brains, they’d be able to shift their experience of December. Because yes, life feels the way it feels. I’m never going to argue with your lived experience. Your current lived experience is your current lived experience.
I can’t know it entirely because I am me and I am having my lived experience, but what you are experiencing is your true experience in this moment. But there’s also something else happening behind the scenes that most people never really realize, or if they realize, they realize it on a very intellectual level and less on a, this changes my life kind of level. Your brain is basically a yes woman. So whatever you believe, whatever beliefs you’ve picked up,
from society, your family of origin, the magazine you read while you were waiting to check out at the grocery store and your brain just took his truth, it works over time to prove you right. So that means that your beliefs don’t just describe your life, they shape your experience of life. And we talked about this in a life lab lesson recently that was really kind of fun. It was a little bit impromptu.
And we were talking about time, but we started talking about Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics and our perception of the world around us and how basically we are always seeking to confirm the rules we have, the beliefs we have. And all the beliefs you have, they’re not true, right? Like they might be true to some extent or they’re true because somebody else observed them as some kind of rule and decided that they were true.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:50.36)
but there’s much more flexibility in the reality around you than most of us know. And most of us even want to admit because it feels a little bit scary, right? feels, suddenly reality feels a little bit less solid if we actually go into this. Okay, so your brain wants to confirm whatever you tell it. It wants to confirm whatever you believe. There’s this part of your brain called the reticular activating system, the RAS for short. You’ve probably heard of it, and if you’ve heard of it,
you know, this is just another description and it’s helpful to hear things over and over again. And if you haven’t, this is a very helpful part to know about. And the reticular activating system is essentially like the color sunglasses you put on or the filter that’s happening for reality around you. So you’re essentially bombarded with an overwhelming amount of sensory information, more sensory information in the world than you can actually process.
And so your brain has to filter it because you can only process like less than 1%, like far less than 1%, but let’s just go with 1 % because our brains can actually chew on 1%. And so 99 % of the information it has to filter out. And so it’s only really going to give you information that confirms what you already think, right? So it confirms what you believe. right now we’re in, I’m recording this in November. I think this is coming out either late November or early December.
And so if you have a belief the holidays are stressful, your reticular radio activating system, your RAS goes, sounds good, right? It doesn’t sense check it. It doesn’t say like, know, Cecelia, I don’t know if that’s a helpful thought. That belief might not support you. It’s just like, yep, go ahead. So it just takes it in, right? So I was saying, if you’re standing in line at a store and you read a magazine that says, new study, it’s
it’s much harder for women over 40 to lose weight than men over 40. And you just read that and that sounds true and it says it’s a study but you just think like, oh, that’s gonna be hard for me to lose weight. I was really thinking of going on a fitness journey this year. It’s gonna be hard. It’s gonna be a lot of work. Most of us don’t sense check all the beliefs that come in. We’re just bombarded with them but we don’t sense check them. So your brain takes whatever belief comes in, whatever we’ve just like,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (05:18.67)
we’ve has come in without a lot of security, right? And kind of this work actually is adding security there. And it starts to latch on to everything that confirms that belief. So the holidays are stressful. So your brain will start telling you like, the parking lot is so crowded, there are no spots. Oh, there are kids melting down everywhere. It’s so loud here. Oh, I forgot the timer on the cookies, right? Everything becomes this bigger thing. There’s less time, there’s more going on. And I know again,
you will say, but that’s just my reality. Like the parking lot was actually full. But remember, your brain is showing you 1 % of the information. Somebody else who has the belief, I always find a parking spot, they don’t go into the parking lot and say it’s full. What they interpret, because they have a different belief is, I know there’s a spot for me. There’s always a spot for me. So yes, there’s a similar reality, but your experience of reality changes.
So you think you’re just observing reality. We all think that we’re just observing. We all think that our brain is just reporting the news to us. It’s reporting, and I don’t even want to say the news right now because the news is kind of contentious, but it’s reporting the weather, something you can measure. It’s giving us a temperature and it’s giving a humidity and a barometric pressure. And these are all things that you can look at something and you can say, yes, it is 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, it is seven degrees Celsius.
And the truth is your brain is actually filtering it through something. instead of telling you it’s 36 degrees with 50 % humidity, it’s telling you it’s really, it’s a really cold outside. It’s really cold and this is going to be miserable. Right? So that’s what it’s giving you as the weather report instead of what, instead of the actual facts, right? Cause we never really get the actual facts, but here’s the most amazing news. All of the beliefs you have in your head.
Everything you think, essentially everything you think, is optional. It’s all just rules that we’ve picked up. It’s all just beliefs we’ve picked up from what’s around us and actually made sense for us to believe because other people around us believe it so then we’re part of the crowd. There’s all these different little elements in there. But we can just change any belief we want to. And around the holidays where things can feel really stressful and they do feel like maybe you’re in a pressure cooker and things are harder or bigger than you thought they were or that they normally feel.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (07:48.514)
this is actually a chance for you to check in with yourself and say, huh, what is my story? What are my unintentional beliefs about the holidays? What are my unintentional beliefs about the holidays? Sometimes that can be a hard place to start, but for some people, they can really write it down like, I believe all these, I believe I never find a parking spot, right? So I wanna give you another personal example that’s like almost cliche, right? I mean, it’s so cliche because I have young kids, I have three young children and this is,
within the last couple months, right? We’ve shifted now, but this was last couple months this was happening. And it snuck up on me. I have little kids. Bedtime with little kids is notoriously stressful, right? And there’s some people out there who think, and this just shows our beliefs, right? Some people are like, what are you talking about? I’ve never heard that. But other people are like, yes, yes, bedtime with little kids, it’s awful. So bedtime with little kids, it can be a lot.
And that’s even a story right there, right? It can be a lot. I didn’t notice that I had inadvertently absorbed that belief. I’d slipped into the belief that I agreed with it. My brain agreed with it. And so it started showing me things. One night, I realized everything was annoying me. Everything my kids were doing was annoying me. My kids were playing instead of brushing their teeth. They were turning their pajamas into like an acrobatic routine, which they still do. All of it felt…
like a personal attack because I’m not gonna get my time, I’m not gonna get to go to sleep, I’m tired, like what about me, right? My whole body felt tight, I just wanted out, I just, I wanted things to change and I felt really angry with them. And then I like paused and I said, whoa, whoa, Cecilia, you don’t, like I don’t often, now that I’ve been doing this work for this long, I do have moments of this, right? I am still human, but I’m usually pretty good at noticing them. So I noticed it and I said like, interesting.
You’re feeling really stressed right now. You’re feeling really even overstimulated with what’s happening. I wonder what’s actually happening. And I noticed that I had fallen into this belief that bedtime is hard. Bedtime is a struggle. And my brain now is showing me all the things with the, through the lens of, through the filter of, this is a struggle. Right, because we can watch one of my kids do acro, like,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (10:11.054)
acrobatics while they put on their pajamas and think that’s funny and like a game and even join in or we can think it’s them trying to delay. Right? Neither one is more true. And in fact, they feel very different. So I slowed down. I did a little bit of regulation in that moment. I also the next day I will say I did tapping on this. did tapping a few times on this to really understand the story that I had behind it. I did a few more intense breathing sessions to kind of let go of things to understand.
what was going on with me and the vulnerability that was there because really there’s a story that bedtime was a struggle, but the deeper story was people don’t care about me. People aren’t watching out for me. I’m not supported, right? So there’s this whole other thing going on, which is how it goes in coaching, right? We look at the surface thing, but we also look at the behind the scenes thing where the real work needs to be done, where the real healing and compassion needs to be placed. So I did all that in the moment.
I took a breath and I said, of course you’re annoyed. Of course you’re exhausted. That’s the story you’re telling yourself, right? The story I was telling myself is this is hard. They’re working against me. I’m trapped in bedtime, whatever you want to call it. And of course it felt awful if that’s my story, right? It has to feel awful. If I have those stories, it has to feel awful and my brain has to confirm them. They have to keep giving me evidence. So I, in that moment, and I can even like feel myself on that couch in this moment, I tried on a different belief.
not a fake affirmation, not toxic positivity, not forcing myself to go anywhere that I was not ready to go. So first I even asked, you ready to believe something different? And I was like, yes, please, I want relief. Like I want something different. I want this to feel different. And so I started asking questions because I love questions. So one of the first ones was, what if we could play our way to bed? What if I can move with them instead of against them?
What if this could feel a little easier? Or I wonder how this could feel a little easier. What if this could be fun for me too? Right? What if I was part of it instead of the person resisting it? And through asking these questions and doing the work behind the scenes and continually regulating my system around this time of day, like knowing, right, that, okay, tomorrow I’m gonna do a little prep work before bedtime. I’m gonna take my time to journal. I’m gonna take my time to do the tapping and the breathing.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (12:37.196)
So it wasn’t magic, right? It wasn’t like, finger snap, everything’s better. Although it did get better in the moment too. And it didn’t happen day to day. But slowly the entire vibe of our bedtime routine shifted. And so bedtime is now often this very sweet, playful wind down that we all move through together. And of course there are still moments where I’m trying to get a three-year-old to brush their teeth and then I want to brush their teeth and they’re trying to run away from me. There’s still those moments. But I have a different perspective on them.
Right, my experience of the reality has shifted. The reality might not have shifted, although very often it shifts to meet our expectations and beliefs. But I changed in my reality. And this isn’t me being a doormat, and this isn’t me capitulating, and this isn’t me condoning bad behavior. This is me taking responsibility for how I feel in the moment. And that changes everything. So it didn’t happen because my kids changed.
It happens because I changed, because my beliefs changed. Okay, so here’s another example in case that one didn’t resonate for you. And this is, I’ll try and make this one a little bit shorter. So a client the other day said to me in a session, a one-to-one session, she were there and we’re kind of talking about something else. And then she just, she just like casually, like in the flow of conversation and what we were talking about, said, I really think I’m losing my mental edge.
And the conversation wasn’t even about her losing her mental edge, but it was this kind of footnote on this other thing we were talking about. And she even had some evidence that she provided, right? She took a logic test and normally she does really well on those. And this time she struggled. And she just thought she was reporting the truth, right? But this is a classic reticular activating system, classic brain is a yes woman moment. Her brain picked up a belief, maybe from being around…
other people, maybe from reading something in the grocery store, right? You lose your logic, your logic capacity goes down as you age, right? Whatever it is, some belief about like, you live in the suburbs, those are not as intellectually stimulating, something like that, right? Or she just, she picked it up, it came in, she didn’t even notice it. It started to kind of like work its way into her system, repeat itself, then she starts to see evidence. And she’s like agreeing with it. And then she’s saying, yes, we’re losing our edge. Her brain says, okay, you’re losing your edge. We got it.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (14:58.71)
check, losing your mental edge. And then the logic test suddenly became the proof, right? Not because it was true, but because her brain was doing its job. Once we looked at the belief, once I said like, whoa, you just reported something to me, like it was weather, but in fact, it was opinion. In fact, it was this new thing that you picked up. And again, I don’t want to like, this is a place where you could probably get in.
And you’re like, well, there are all these studies about cognitive decline and blah, blah, blah. But there are also other studies that say that people don’t cognitively decline. And there’s this very interesting study where they put people in environments from when they were in their 40s, like they recreated the homes and everything, and they took away their assistive devices. And their eyes improved, their cognitive abilities improved, their balance improved, like all these things shifted.
they started to believe, they tried to see themselves differently, their self-concept shifted, their beliefs about themselves are different because they were in a different time in their life, even though technically they were still the same age that they were, right? So I think there’s just a lot more that we can discuss here that most of us are willing, that most of us are willing to discuss. But so I started, I just pointed it out, that’s a belief. What if you’re not losing your edge at all? What else could we say, right? Maybe there’s some belief where she, especially given her professional position, maybe she’s sharpening her mental acts every day. Maybe her logic skills are improving, right? And those simple shifts, again, without gaslighting yourself can be really powerful. Okay, I’ve talked about this a little bit, but I just want to go a little bit into the science. Your RAAS doesn’t work alone.
It works with your nervous system. So when your body feels unsafe, overwhelmed, overstimulated, your attention narrows. You literally see fewer options. Your cognitive and creative problem-solving capabilities decrease. You perceive less ease. You miss supportive moments, not because they’re not there, but because your brain is filtering them out because it is dysregulated. But when your body moves into safety, your brain opens the lens. You see more nuance, possibility, better interpretations, better solutions.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (17:14.734)
And I think a really interesting way to think about this is think about the last time you were having kind of a bad day and you felt sort of stressed and maybe you didn’t have such a high opinion of yourself. You didn’t think that you were like doing fine or the world was great and you spilled a glass of water. What did you say to yourself and what did you make it mean? It’s probably a big deal, right? It probably made it mean that like you have nothing together and you can’t even like pour a glass of water and like on and on. Think about the same situation, but you’re having a good day.
things are going well and life feels easy. You spill a glass of water and it’s like nothing, right? You just clean it up and move on with your life, no big deal. That’s the difference in nervous system regulation, right? So when you’re in that regulated space, you’re just like, it’s a glass of water, who cares? We have a saying in my house, what do do with the spill? We clean it up, right? What do we do with the mess? We clean it up. That’s what we do, we just clean it up. It doesn’t mean that you’re bad at water, right? Or bad at taking…
bad at existing or a bad person, it just means that there’s a spilled glass of water that you need to clean up. So that space of regulation is actually really powerful and that’s the space where you actually get to start to work with your brain, right? So not only does it see more possibilities and is more open to creative and cognitive problem solving, but it actually, you have the capacity to rewrite the beliefs more often, with more ease. I’ll say it gives you like editing rights to those beliefs. So safety widens your perception, stress narrows it.
So this is why nervous system work is always, always, always part of this. Okay, so if you’re listening and you want to incorporate this into your life, you might think of one area of your life that feels heavy or hard, and you might ask yourself, what beliefs do I have around this that makes this feel more this way? So for instance, the holidays are stressful, right? I can never catch up, I’m behind, I’m losing my edge, it’s too much.
And then look for how your brain has been proving that right. What is your reticular activating system highlighting? And then see if you can move into one gentler, more spacious belief. Again, we’re not 180 affirmation it. We are actually just seeing that slight opening. Like, even though the parking lot is full, I think I’ll probably find a spot.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (19:34.954)
Even though the parking lot is really full, I’ll probably get the things done I need to get done today. Right, so like those kind of softening of the beliefs are like, if you think of it like a path, there’s like one step on the way to maybe an ultimate belief of like the holidays feel easy for me. Work with yourself in that way and see, just see how it works, right? See if you can identify some of these things. And if this is resonating and you’re listening right now,
been living in a stress belief autopilot, then you need to come join me inside the Life Lab. You need to come in, give yourself this gift. I know that this time of the year can feel very busy. I know we all have the belief that it is very busy. And over and over again, my clients say that the hours they spend in coaching each week, the hour that they give to it each week is the most life changing hour of their week, right? So if you want to feel different in life, if you’re committed to creating a new reality for yourself in 2026,
That’s what we’re moving into that year. Consider it, right? It is an investment in yourself. It’s an investment in your mental wellbeing and your nervous system regulation, but it’s one that I promise will pay off big in your life over time. We don’t just talk about mindset. We rewire beliefs, nervous system patterns, shape your entire experience of your life, right? We’re using practical manifestation, practical nervous system work.
Practical mindset work so that you feel different in your life So if that sounds good to you check out the link in the bio You can schedule a call to talk to me about it to see if you’re a good fit. I’d love to do that And as you close out this episode Remember your beliefs are optional, but your brain is listening Your brain is always listening everything that you take in just ask is this what I want to be believing Is this a truth So your life experience can genuinely shift not by force, but by awareness, regulation, and choosing a belief that actually supports you. Right, and I’m just gonna slide one more in here because it popped up and it didn’t come up when I was writing the notes for this, but I flew when I was 30 weeks pregnant with two young kids and a lot of people told me how hard it was gonna be and I just remember thinking like,
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (22:00.834)
This is gonna be the easiest time I ever fly. I’m pregnant and I have two young kids. Everybody wants to help me. Everybody wants to help me. This is gonna be so easy. And those are two different choices, right? And guess how easy it was. It was like the easiest time I’d ever flown and I’ve flown a lot in my life. Everyone was there for me. It was like timing worked out perfectly. So it just matters, right? Your experience of reality matters because of what you believe. All right, that’s what I’ve got for you today.
I hope this was helpful, especially in the holiday season or wherever you’re listening to this. I’d love to hear how it impacts you, so send me an email or come say hi on social media, and I will see you next time.
