How to create physiological safety as someone who lives in survival mode

I'm going to share with you the ways that you can generate dopamine in your nervous system, especially when it comes to money, to create physiological safety. And I'm sharing this as somebody who one, broke out of poverty, two, who has experienced homelessness, three, who has a neuroscience degree. For a long time. So my the way I was raised, and I'm going to share this because it might be relevant to your experience. I grew up in a chaotic home. What does that mean scientifically? Chaotic home equals you were not able to predict the behaviors and the emotional state of your caregiver or caregivers, right? That's what chaos is. And so our brains then, I'm actually doing a talk on this later this week and I'm very excited about it. Um, our brains then, we have something called a salience network. And basically it is a system within our brain that is trained to say like, what is worth paying attention to? And dopamine is very much involved in that. So we have two parts of this salience network, this network that says what do we pay attention to? We have a top, a bottom up and a top down. Bottom up is very much like fight or flight, instinctual, attention grabbing. It's not conscious. Um, these it's like scrolling on TikTok, it's like a slot machine. It's like those things, like a loud bang or a flash or things like that. That's going to get your bottom up salience network to be like, we need to pay attention. When you grow up in a chaotic home, you are programming that part of your nervous system to be the main driver for things that you pay attention to. Okay, this is going to really relate to money, so stick with me. Get a notebook, get a pencil, this is going to put put a pause on this, go sit down, get a cup of coffee because this is going to be a minute. So, when you train your nervous system to operate this way, you're existing mostly in fight or flight. You're existing mostly in a part of your brain called your amygdala and a lot of your behavior is driven by spikes of cortisol, like stress response, right? And so, motivating yourself to do regular ass, boring, mundane shit that you know you need to do is very difficult because your nervous system has been wired to only do things when you feel like you're in an emergency situation, okay? There's nothing wrong with you, like this is your neuroscience, this is how you're built. And there's a way out of this and I'm going to explain. Then you have your top down salience network. And your top down salience network uses more of your prefrontal cortex, which is the front of your brain. It takes longer to develop. It is very intentional, it is thoughtful. Um, it also requires memory consolidation, which which happens only when you let your mind wander through moments of like silence and quiet and peace. But the irony is that if you grow up in chaos, you're always hypervigilant. So you never have a moment to just rest and let your default mode network consolidate memories and get to this like top down approach. Now, what have I done to start shifting the meter so that I, my attention is not just this bottom up, instinctual, fight or flight, hyperactive, cortisol response? How do I get the top down response to happen? And what I can share with you after years of fucking therapy, after years of studying neuroscience, more people need to know about this. This is like why do people just not understand this? Do people just not know how to teach this? Because people need to understand this. How do you get yourself to shift slowly to the other side? And it is a slow process. Is you have to generate dopamine and you have to make the things that you know you need to do, but you don't want to do, as rewarding as humanly possible. Because right now, both systems use dopamine, right? Because it's all about paying attention and dopamine very much has to do with attention and your reward your reward system. Dopamine is the molecule more, it's the thing that says do that again, do that again, do that again. And if something kept you safe, obviously your brain is going to generate dopamine and it's going to say do it again. Even though spending all your money until you get to zero isn't actually creating safety in your life, it is creating physiological safety because living in that emergency state is normal for you. It's what you expect. That is physiological safety to you at this point is living in an emergency. If you're not living in an emergency mode, you are not safe according to your nervous system. And so you have to create slow bits of safety by rewarding yourself for doing the boring things, okay? So for me that means getting a planner, this is not my planner, but it's a book. Getting a planner, making it colorful, making it sparkly, getting stickers, going, taking myself out on a date, going to a coffee shop, wearing a cute outfit, and like making it a thing, making it like and and actually, I didn't actually realize I was doing this until I just making this video realized, I do it before my 10:00 a.m. appointment on Sundays. So the time frame is constrained and so it feels like an emergency to me and that's how I get it done. But I'm doing the repeated behavior of um planning out my week. And I do a this video is going long, so I do a bunch of other things that help me do that too. But what I'm trying to say here is that eventually what happens when you start to do repeated behaviors over and over again and you build a habit of consistency, it is going to start generating physiological safety in your body in ways that you have never felt before. And as somebody who's like a few steps ahead of you in this process, I'm just going to tell you right now, we don't even realize like how much chaos we are personally creating in our lives because our physiolo physiology is like we need it. And when it when your physiology stops saying we need that and it starts saying we want consistency, we want sameness, we want routine, and it actually craves that and you just want it. Like you're not forcing yourself to want it, you just want it. Dude, I can't even like money cannot buy the type of safety I feel, the contentment I feel, the groundedness I feel. There's no person, there's no job, there's no dollar amount, there's no vacation, there's no house, nothing, nothing, there's no drug, and I've done a lot of drugs, man, let me tell you. Nothing, nothing comes close to the feelings of physiological safety I feel now that I have switched my habits in this direction. But you have to make it as rewarding as possible to do the boring, that is the only way out.