Embracing Uncertainty: Overcoming the Subconscious Fear of New Experiences

Embracing Uncertainty: Overcoming the Subconscious Fear of New Experiences

Jeffrey Besecker: This is The Light Inside, I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Our greatest lessons, it can often seem that some of them are hard earned. When offered new opportunities and growth, why is it we often become so resistant or fearful, even to the point of being paralyzed by our choices, shutting down emotionally, mentally, and even physically? Determining exactly why we fear the unknown and become paralyzed by it can be somewhat of a mystery. Enter, neophobia, a sometimes subconscious fear of new experiences that can often stir our deepest blind spots and biases. It can hinder our ability to try new things and derail our ability to form new routines. We're often unable to spot when this happens because subconscious patterns block us from seeing them, as a result leaving us reluctant to consider new opportunities or form new perspectives. Perhaps more importantly, it can often keep us from learning some of our greatest lessons and crippling our ability to change. and grow. Today we join change-leading catalyst Jamie Meyer to discuss the psychological mechanisms behind noophobia, transforming our ability to imagine a world of possibilities and open our minds to the richness of new experiences, when we return to The Light Inside. When studying the motivational factors that drive our habits, business theorist Alasdair White coined the term comfort zone to describe a common bias experienced when a person becomes rooted in familiarity. As a result, we become limited in personal growth and inhibit our adaptive responses to new experiences. To some degree, we all seek the certainty of both comfort and familiarity. Consistency, acting like a calming salve. Change naturally invites risk, often making us uncomfortable in situations where the outcome is uncertain. Status quo bias is a cognitive bias steeped heavily in emotion. This tendency to keep things the way they are can have a considerable effect on how we behave in virtually every aspect of our lives. However, unhealthy risk can also become a liability and even a direct harm to our well-being. How do we engage factors like healthy fear and healthy risk, allowing us to move beyond the reluctance we often feel towards new experiences, ideas, and information? Instances that often keep us stuck in our perspectives and inhibit our ability to create effective change. In her unwavering commitment to help others catalyze change, Jamie Meyer has made a career out of helping her clients navigate the distress we often feel during that uncertainty. Jamie, I'm excited to share a discussion exploring the subconscious and unconscious behavior patterns that hinder us from embracing new experiences or impede our ability to learn new information. If you would, Jamie, briefly describe how newophobia affects our lives when we encounter new ideas or experience unfamiliar situations.
Jamie Meyer: I am very excited because I am not technically inclined in the psychological space, but this speaks to me on a very personal level because I've lived most of it. So I'm interested to explore it and also explore it with the difference because all the information you sent through was very clinical and very research orientated. Whereas I'm looking at it from more of a lived it, worked it out myself kind of perspective. So I'm interested to see what comes of that conversation.

Jeffrey Besecker: It'll be interesting. And therein, I think, sometimes lie some of our difference where just that difference in approach can influence and change how we approach just even the whole function and form and finality of it sometimes.

Jamie Meyer: Absolutely. So I am interested, before we start, what your interest in this scope is. Why this podcast? Why exploring these very prevalent mental or emotional capacities in society?

Jeffrey Besecker: Ultimately going back to when I was five, six years old and started first, becoming aware of cultural difference, especially racial difference. Now we start to form some of those. And I think that was some of my early interest in why we differ so much in our perspectives as human beings. It was something innate within me at that young age of saying, although this person might have a different complexion, although they might have a different cultural background, a different history, why do we treat that so differently? And I think that ingraniated itself in my implicit memory to make that a central focus of life. I can pinpoint that as a core value now as an adult. I know where I started to see and witness that around that age, but That was kind of a key factor was observing those human relationships and interactions. Where do we start to form differences that divide us?

Jamie Meyer: That's so incredible that you were aware of that at such a young age, particularly because my experience in Australia, we never had that dark line. Like, I mean, I grew up in a very already accepting multicultural country and there was no real, outside of our Indigenous people, there was no real experience of that ingrained generational pass down divide, I suppose. When I first came to the US and witnessed it, it was actually quite It was like having somebody throw a bucket of water on me, just the way. The stench of colonialism. It wasn't a bad thing. I mean, it's not like, I don't say that in a bad way, like, you know, Americans are racist or anything like that. And it's not that I even witnessed outright racism or that I would consider it racism. It was more like the training of each race that they had in relation to each other, like the direct perception that they automatically had of each other was very bizarre.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's kind of a bizarre paradox to look at in and of itself because you would think that so many people that sought to escape difference, you know, they sought to find their own ground, so to speak, would have some shared common bond in that rather than now we've created this new social norm, this new bubble. Now we're these people over here and we've dissociated with this cultural dynamic that was once there, our heritage. It's just really confounding sometimes to look at. As you dig down that Jacob's Ladder or that rabbit hole of Conundrum and exploring all the patterns, it really truly becomes fascinating. I harken back to early high school and the civics aspect got me more stimulated on where I came from as a youth and seeing those disparities further intrigued me as I leaned into my college career. As an art major, I had to take psychology. As an artist, you have to understand to some degree human psychology to create impactful art. We attach and connect so emotionally to that. That fascination with psychology probably took a greater hold and has taken me further in life than anything I've done with learning in that art realm, because that is the core pattern and the core understanding of how we present and how we operate as human beings.

Jamie Meyer: You threw yourself right in the middle of it.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah. If you want to thrive in that, you have to kind of learn what's the system, what's the formula, what's the basis. That also ties back to a lot of my upbringing where we were instilled and imprinted with a value that said, and this literally was the mantra, I don't know is not an answer. Now that itself could become traumatic if it's not supported with the healthy system to back. With that, our mother reinforced, if you are feeling limited, if you're feeling befuddled, if you are challenged by finding an outcome or a way to create a result, go back and form the question and then seek out the pathway to create that action. If you don't know, understand, or have a perspective on something, there's always a lot of resources out there to find. know, that create that connecting point.

Jamie Meyer: You know, your mom must have been like highly evolved because I don't know anybody that grew up like that.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to see, I'd love to sit down and kind of do more of a study on my mother, as odd as that sounds. From my perspective and my experience, which was what I can talk from, I found a way to leverage that in a lot of healthy ways. There also are those dualities of purpose that do surface as self-sabotaging. They can be limiting. You know, they do create a lot of biases. Sometimes compassion can be a challenge because we didn't necessarily move through a lot of that stuck phase. or when we did, we were given the healthy tools that allowed us to grow and evolve. In that regard, then I learned to see a lot of 40,000 foot type structures where problem solving, coping, and maybe not even necessarily the best emotional coping skills, because I did have a traumatic relationship with anger in our family history and epigenetically and social structures. Ways that surfaced then in myself. Some of that may have been tied to some of that other subconsciously,

Jamie Meyer: But unfortunately, in the previous generations of masculinity, anger was a standardized show of masculinity. So if you already had that as an underlying pathway in your family, society would have only exacerbated that to a new level.

Jeffrey Besecker: It was normalized. And we go back to cultural influence there also. We were instilled then with some of that subconscious narrative that, well, you're German heritage, you know, there's hot-blooded German in you. It was patronized and downplayed and normalized. There was a conflicting social condition there where you're told that this is a normal thing, but it's not necessarily the healthy thing. So you've got this kind of guilt, shame, blame scenario that was the core of my trauma that played out. Well, I'm being told that there's some aspect of this is normal, but I can't do it. It's conflicting for a child brain because you don't have the logic skills to wrap around it. Some of that was also subconsciously influential on why I started approaching problem solving. Here's a conundrum for me at a young age. My brain was already in a mode, how do I figure my way out of this problem? How do I find resolve to it? Because it's very discomforting. It's very disorienting. There's no way to make real sense of this because there's too many conflicting things going on.

Jamie Meyer: And then you're angry.

Jeffrey Besecker: And then you're angry, which further conflates it because emotionally you're off, bounced and unsettled, you know. Then you weren't reinforced, or at least from my experience, I didn't feel and gain that reinforcement of, well, now the anger is being shamed in my eyes, in my traumatic experience with it. I see through society where I'm told at home it's normalized. It's a family thing because your grandfather started the trauma and his grandfather before that. And there's a family history. So there's your epigenetic trail. It's easy for me to spot it because it was pointed out plain as day. Now, when you then meet that concept of epigenetics, it's easier to dissect it because you've been shown the path. There's just not a logical way to, you know, it's like running through a gauntlet.

Jamie Meyer: And trying to find it like it's like the chicken, it becomes a chicken and the egg scenario. Like where does it start? Well, I mean, it started from the minute you were born because it was the example that was set for you in your reality.

Jeffrey Besecker: Human behavior is never that black and white or seldom that black and white. There again, I'm kind of deducing it down itself. By and large, it's infinitely complex.

Jamie Meyer: We're scared of that word, aren't we?

Jeffrey Besecker: And we can be until you learn to attune to it. Like I said, I did have kind of a jump start because we were taught to seek out that kind of information. So I'm now biased in my skills, in my traits and how my experience plays out in that. So now I have that challenge again of how do you compassionately meet others in that space? So you have to learn to kind of somewhat downplay it in yourself or embrace it and find a way to support somebody else to meet through that space and go through it.

Jamie Meyer: And it is very hard when you get to a certain point to remember the phases that you went through to get to your point and then be able to communicate back on that level when you don't utilize those mechanisms anymore in yourself.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah. And there again, it goes back to that pattern of reinforcement, that big words, big ideas, big problems, you know, all of those enormities we create in life don't have to be overwhelming. And if they are, all you have to do is approach it step-by-step and take a little action, start to unravel it.

Jamie Meyer: It's the unraveling I think that scares everybody though. Like once I pull this thread, what is going to happen?

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, and we won't even start to get into, you know, what I would deem. However, some of my identity constructs started to come together. Some of those normalized experiences of fear in the way that they surfaced, you know, not all fear, but most fear. Typical things that should maybe instill a little healthy fear in you didn't always manifest. I always had that curiosity for whatever reason. How do I create healthy fear and how do I have a healthy relationship to risk? Early on, I challenged a lot of those relationships and I paid the price. And rather than develop an adherence to it or kind of an avoidance of that outcome, I learned to say, OK, how do I do it smarter? And I still don't always. Just two summers ago, I found myself pushing a mountain bike two miles out of a woods after fracturing several vertebrae and breaking multiple ribs. Oh my goodness. But I'm out there, I had my cell phone in the car, no way to get out, and I'm definitely not lying down and sitting in the woods injured. I didn't know the extent of my injuries then, other than it hurt like hell. I wasn't going to lay there and wait for something else to happen. Get out of here.

Jamie Meyer: I mean, I think that's fairly healthy, honestly.

Jeffrey Besecker: Well, the situations that got me in it was the part that was maybe not the healthiest, you know, with age and wisdom, I'm going across a little, they call it a skinny because it's like literally about a maybe eight or nine inch wide bridge across the gap. It wasn't more than three feet off the ground, but when you're on a bike, you're already up my height three, four feet. Yeah. So I'm already, you know, six, eight feet off the ground and following directly onto my chest in my cranked back head. I didn't break my neck. Medical staff said, well, judging from what you're describing, you're lucky you walked out. You may have risked death. Because had you broken something in your spinal cord, which in the area you were at was a very real likelihood. So I've now reconsidered with healthy risk, how and where I ride my mountain bike. It had paid a year and a half journey of getting fully back and recovered. Luckily I did walk out, but there was a lot of lingering recovery. Anyhow, that's a long story diversion from where we started.

Jamie Meyer: No, but it does tell me a lot about you. I actually remember listening to this relationship psychologist. She's a woman. And she was saying that she was very lucky that she grew up in a strict Islamic household that had money because based on her personality type, if she had grown up anywhere else, she would have a hundred percent being a criminal because she was not afraid of anything. You know, like she'd stay down a gun. She had no respect for authority. She would have got herself in a lot of trouble. I found that an interesting self-analysis. And yours is the same, that you would literally get yourself in so much trouble.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's a wonder I survived many things. And it's also, you know, there again, I'm atypically bound by some of those normal constructs. And there can be sometimes a blind spot where you change so frequently, what is really that underlying factor that's causing you to change? Do you maintain and make sure you keep a healthy eye on that? Sometimes do you feel you do it to avoid things or is it just that natural curiosity or you kind of reach that evolution where there's a next step and you just comfortably step into it?

Jamie Meyer: I agree from the perspective that I use like avoiding something, but I actually don't believe that there is an end point. So I, you know, like I think the end point is death. Right. So like, at what point do you say, okay, well, I'm entirely involved in a life because by the time you get to that point, you're actually not. So I, yeah, I don't, I think it's such a stigma that change is a bad thing because we need the known and all that sort of stuff so strongly. So, I don't necessarily think, as long as you're not avoiding something by changing, that there is a point where that ends.

Jeffrey Besecker: Therein lies that paradox. Like everything else, complexity can slip in. We could talk for an hour or two just on that.

Jamie Meyer: About something that we're not even supposed to be talking about.

Jeffrey Besecker: Jamie, leaning in today, could you share with us a short textbook explanation of noophobia and how this subconscious pattern might also be closely linked to our need for familiarity?

Jamie Meyer: I don't know about a textbook description because I'm not really into textbooks, but it is literally the description of needing to be or have a familiar environment and being afraid of moving out of that familiar environment because we don't understand what's outside of that space.

Jeffrey Besecker: So looking at that, psychological comfort or mental state of calm and well-being is crucial for emotional modulation, fostering those environments conducive for healthy, optimal emotional regulation. Would you share a brief explanation of the complex nature of this phobia and how researchers categorize neurophobic responses from mild to severe from your own perspective?

Jamie Meyer: Yes, because again, I'm not a researcher. I'm not going to pretend that I have all that information. But essentially, the comfort zone, I mean, it's described to create a space where we're unchallenged or have a low risk or low stress levels. I don't particularly see the comfort zone that way and the way that it presents in that space. I think that we create a comfort zone in the known with stress levels and anxiety triggers that we know how to navigate. So being in a comfort zone doesn't necessarily mean that you're in a healthy space because you understand the known reality that you have. It simply means that you recognize a set of tools that you yourself have to navigate those stresses and those challenges. And so essentially that presents in a variety of different forms. It can be as small as hesitancy or as mild as needing an extensive amount of information before making a decision or understanding a new area of life or concept, which in retrospect probably does help because if we have no extra information we just dive off a cliff or ride up a hill and fall off our mountain bike. But then it can, a more severe case would then completely inhibit anything in being able to process anything new. So we shut down or completely reject anything that we don't understand or have any previous exposure to.

Jeffrey Besecker: The factors driving our human behaviors and the resulting outcomes are inherently complex. If you would, Jamie, can you share your insights on how the comfort zone bias might prime individuals to frame discomfort as the sole pathway to personal growth?

Jamie Meyer: I think it plays out in the idea that we think we're safe and it's not necessarily a safe environment. And that's what creates the discord between a comfort zone and psychological comfort is that we can have a comfort zone in a very unhealthy environment and we can continue to perpetuate that environment. So we have that bias. we move through life just basically repeating the same comfort zone. It's like putting lipstick on a pig. It's still the same thing, but it looks different. And we then start judging our reality or gauging the cycle of our life or the expanse or the limitations of our life as huge, because we've had different experiences, even though they're still within the same realm. So we keep just taking like a left step in the same space, using the same tools that we use, whether they are healthy tools or coping mechanisms or self-sabotaging patterns all in the same realm of idea in the name of comfort, in the name of being in a safe and secure environment.

Jeffrey Besecker: That role of certainty seeking also plays out as the fear of the unknown that manifests as an aversion to ambiguity itself. Things that we're unfamiliar with, things that are unknown. Prompting a preference for situations with clear or predictable outcomes. Could you share with us a little bit about how that might start to arise?

Jamie Meyer: Well, I think that our comfort zones are built from when we're very small. I mean, you've got to think about like, as you're coming up between, you know, the ages of one through five, you are little and the world is huge. So the immediate environment that you're brought into becomes this massive environment, even though in the scope of the actual world and the scope of reality, it's quite a small portion of what other people experience or what there is to be experienced. We think it's huge. So we define everything moving forward based on the immediate reality. have. That comes from preferences and biases of the people that are around us that instruct us in certain ways that the world is this way, or we believe this, or we act in this respect towards certain things. So the preference to that space is innate from when we're small. And unless we have something that kind of starts nudging us out of that space, whether, you know, we travel or our parents move, or that we don't actually have any exposure to anything else. So trying to correlate then something that's completely different or unfamiliar and put it in that space is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Jeffrey Besecker: So often then we're looking at that act of exposure which surfaces as a psychological subconscious bias known as mere exposure effect. where we start to then form that imprinted habit or pattern of searching for that familiarity. What impact do you feel biological and psychological factors like genetic predispositions, neural processing, and past experiences have in reinforcing the patterns of neophobia?

Jamie Meyer: We tend to judge everything that we come across as a past experience. We use all of our previous information to make an assessment on a new experience, whether that new experience has the potential to be different or otherwise. And so essentially we self-perpetuate the outcome by judging it based on our previous experiences. And so then those previous experiences are usually prefaced by our genetic makeup or generational inheritance of ideas around things. And so that becomes like a chicken before the egg thing, which one starts to influence the next. And again, staying in that comfort zone, we create a predictable outcome by continuing to lean on past experiences and not being able to look at any experience, even one that we've experienced before, as a new opportunity for something different.

Jeffrey Besecker: The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias where repeated exposure to a statement or idea increases its perceived truthfulness. The more we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it, even if it's false. This subconscious pattern, deeply rooted in our conscious processes, can play a significant role in shaping our attitudes and responses to new experiences. To connect the dots between the illusory truth effect and neophobia, let's turn to Daniel Kahneman's groundbreaking book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman introduces the idea of two thinking systems, System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and often influenced by biases, and System 2, which is slower, more deliberate, and analytical. When it comes to neuophobia, the illusory truth effect operating within System 1 can contribute to a heightened resistance to change. Our brains, seeking familiarity and perceiving safety, may be more prone to reject new ideas or experiences, simply because they haven't been encountered more frequently. Understanding these thinking systems offers insights into how our subconscious patterns can influence the likelihood of a neuophobia throughout our lives. Troubling, this even happens when we should know better, that is, when we initially know that the information is false. 95% of our thoughts are subconscious. Perhaps at some point in your life, you may have heard this statement, yet here's the thing, it's unfounded. There is no substantial evidence to support the claim. You guessed it, a theory formed about the subconscious habits of the human brain based largely on unsubstantiated subconscious conjecture. The theory that 95% of our thoughts are subconscious is not firmly supported by rigorous scientific research. While it is true that a significant portion of mental processes occur at a subconscious level, the specific percentage, such as 95%, lacks empirical evidence. So where did this concept of conscious percentages originate? The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, also known as ZMET, is a marketing research tool developed by Gerald Zaltman at the Harvard Business School in the early 1990s as a theoretical assessment technique. In a 2006 Harvard Business Review interview where Zaltman rather offhandedly speculated that probably 95% of all cognition, all thinking, that drives our decisions and behaviors occurs unconsciously. The theory elicits both conscious and especially unconscious thoughts by exploring people's non-literal or metaphoric expressions. As Zaltman described it, a lot goes on in our minds that we're not aware of. Most of what influences what we say and do occurs below the level of awareness, and that includes consumer decisions. This statement has been repeated often throughout our cultural vernacular, so we believe it is fact. Understanding these subconscious factors is crucial for promoting critical thinking and perceptual fluidity, helping us to navigate the vast amount of data and information we encounter, and ultimately making more informed judgments. Jamie, those subconscious patterns significantly shape our decision-making, our perspectives, and thinking systems, as we ingrain habitual responses, biases, and mental shortcuts. In regard to neophobia, would you share a few specific pattern biases and heuristics that start to surface in how we form our ability to consider new and opposing perspectives?

Jamie Meyer: We probably do that in every interaction that we potentially have, you know, we meet a new person, we're already assessing them based on what clothes they're wearing and previous experiences that we've had with people wearing similar clothes, their height, their sex, their mannerisms, we're automatically Instead of creating new information and judging that person based on what they're presenting as neutral, we start making correlations.

Jeffrey Besecker: Looking at that very aspect, you know, I had an interesting conversation with another coach last week looking at conditioned response. She had pointed out in our conversation how she'd like to eliminate all conditioned response. So I had to step back a little bit and say, well, is that theoretically possible? Where in our life does conditionality interject itself? And is it possible to cocoon ourselves in a bubble that removes us from those conditions? You know, where does conditionality touch our lives? We're conditioned to get up and care for ourselves every day. There's a conditioned response. We can't remove that in many regards because that's a healthy response. As we look at the opposite end of that spectrum, then we have things like social conditioning, where we're influenced in pattern in ways that can butt up against our self-concept. So therein we look at, is conditioned response beneficial or adverse?

Jamie Meyer: I suppose it completely depended on the conditioning. And it's very easy to throw around something that's healthy and unhealthy, but to whom is also the question. And it introduces more conditions, right? Exactly. One week tomatoes cause cancer and the next week they don't cause cancer. I mean, do you even like tomatoes? So I think that the conditioned response, the externally taught conditioned response needs to be evaluated. And I think it's just a matter of questioning whether or not it does in fact meet with the integrity of our self-image, but then how externally conditioned is our self-image, and that becomes a rabbit hole of how you get to the place where you completely understand your self-identity without externality, and then how you then create conditioned responses based on your level of self rather than adopting them.

Jeffrey Besecker: We really don't get an opportunity, per se, to see what happens when a human being is removed from that state of conditionality. We look at it from the point of study as being inherently cruel and vindictive to a person. We don't say, OK, we're going to take this newborn child and isolate them completely and see what happens. Therein lies a conundrum of theory. First, you know, there's no way to observe it generally because we're nearly constantly surrounded. And even then, pondered this as I walked with the dog the other night, I sat with the basic notion of this theory. Can we step into that isolation bubble in theory, even if we're subjecting ourselves to isolation on a desert island, as an example, does that remove conditionality?

Jamie Meyer: I don't actually think that it's a matter of removing visioning. Like, so for example, there's a reference to monk mode, right? And so monk mode is where you go and you don't even have to be a monk to be in monk mode, but you go monk mode is self-isolation and reconnecting with levels of importance and self, but human condition is not, if we were supposed to be completely isolated, we would not have tribes and societies and we wouldn't make connections with each other. So being in monk mode in real life doesn't actually speak to the point of being human and having relationships. So I think the point of understanding or creating a self image or a self identity is actually being able to learn how to discern between externality and internal self. So if you're not in amongst everything else and all of this other influence, how do you then decide what you are and what you are not? And how do you then create a divide between understanding what is external and what is self? It's like you would never learn how to make a decision. If you were stuck in isolation, you wouldn't understand what you did want and you didn't want because you'd never be exposed to anything.

Jeffrey Besecker: That's interesting. You know, in large portions of that, would you consider or maybe agree are kind of conjecture because there again, we don't often experience that to truly understand what that condition might be. In and of itself, you're creating that conundrum of condition again, because being there is a conditionality. Being alive is a conditionality. The state of my internal interaction is a conditionality. What's going on within my response? There again, those conditions, where I'm ultimately going, have an influential nature. They have an interactive nature. They have a relationship we can form.

Jamie Meyer: And so does in the adverse is being isolated because you would be isolated by yourself. Right. And so you would be conditioned to be fearful of any other human being. You would be conditioned to only be able to understand. whatever was going on in your head and what you would have in your head. Because like, are you stuck in a box in isolation? Are you on an island? Are there animals? You know, like whatever experience that you have is going to create, you know, is it cold? Is it hot? It's going to all create some level of conditioning. And again, going back to the idea that how you filter through all of those experiences and what you take from those, that becomes your self-image and your self-identity. Being able to discern what is true to you and what is an experience. That's the part of understanding what you are conditioned to know and choose. So for me, conditioning is you assess every possible facet. You don't assess every possible facet and you just have an idea of what exists because of one particular instance or several particular instances, being able to discern whether that is your identity or not is the choice to question this is not the only experience, there is 50 other experiences seeking out that information and then deciding for yourself what then you identify with.

Jeffrey Besecker: So those situations themselves, as we're speaking of selves and constructs of self, can present ambiguity and uncertainty. In addition to disrupting our ability to regulate or modulate our emotions, anxiety heightens psychological arousal and cognitive apprehension. Jamie, in what ways does this illusory truth effect trigger emotionally avoidant coping mechanisms that may cause us to cognitively discount outside or contrasting perspectives?

Jamie Meyer: I think that we become stagnant in an idea that distress, like anything, because we've become stagnant in our comfort zone, the idea of moving out of that creates distress. And distress doesn't have to be negative, but it becomes negative in the context that we don't understand something. And so we actually begin to shut down and we have words we have labels for that in society like oh I'm just stubborn or I understand this or you know I was brought up this way and so we cling to those labels of ourselves or these portions of conditioned self-identity that dismisses or rejects anything outside of that. We then become conditioned, I suppose is still a good word there, and numb to that level of stress, right? So we get so used to and accustomed to that level of stress that we don't need to expand our perspective because we're already in a state of stress.

Jeffrey Besecker: So from that perspective, so often we tend to lean into our thinking in the mind. Our cultured and conditioned belief is that it's all mindset, mind over matter, having the right attitude, looking only at the positive. From that aspect, we often overlook the fact that large portions of our conscious and subconscious processing happen within the body. What are some of the somatic symptoms we can look for and begin to watch out for when we start to detect the discomfort of our uncertainty?

Jamie Meyer: And so I would classify that as a reaction. So for me, a response is something that is conscious and considered. And so anything that comes from an innate, immediate way of acting would be a reaction. And so that's what's stored in your physical capability system to deal with those issues. And a lot of the times, depending on where their triggers come from or the perspective of their triggers will depend on the physical, the difference, the they experience in their physical anatomy when they react to something. Most often, and particularly in the fast-paced idea of society, our reactions are to either lash out or dismiss or project or, you know, the silent treatment's a really good one. We completely just close off any particular ideal. But it also creates this perpetuated idea of the right and wrong. Like if somebody is automatically presenting me with something new, it's something that I don't know. So it's wrong. And there then becomes a verse of what is then the truth in all of that, because I think I'm right. And you think you're right. And we both think the other is wrong. And so the conversation doesn't progress anywhere and the experience doesn't progress anywhere. you know, whatever opposing sides of it just go back to their respective belief systems or their comfort zones without actually challenging themselves. And so the part of that conversation that becomes the problem is that it's not that we're challenged by another person's perspective or a new experience. It's the fact that we will not challenge ourselves. And so our reaction is created by not wanting to challenge ourselves.

Jeffrey Besecker: Often we're not trained, it sounds a little bit kind of conditioned and subjective itself. We're not often instilled with the skills and assets that allow us to know and learn that about ourselves. Our upbringing environments don't always reinforce those habits. Let me put it that way.

Jamie Meyer: Nor does society. I mean, we're having this conversation like society, you know, everybody should know these things. They shouldn't because most often they're not taught as tools.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, from my experience, and there again that's subjective, it becomes one of the most widely maybe misunderstood or under-recognized patterns. Just simply being able to name our emotions when they arise can be such a monumental task for a lot of people.

Jamie Meyer: Or even how pigeonholed those emotions are. I mean, if you ask somebody like what emotions they think they experienced, they probably can name say 12 and there's 500 different levels, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: That's probably, if I were to go by just my general experiences, you know, even working within clients tends to be fewer than that. You know, even when pressed, a lot of us tend to shut down and not even engage with those emotions to be able to identify with them. We form that resistive wall. We form that avoidance. We start to suppress. We start to push that down into the neural system where we become activated, where our ability or response simply becomes reactive.

Jamie Meyer: Absolutely. And then not to mention, I mean, everybody would think, you know, like happiness has a positive connotation, but that is entirely dependent on your upbringing. Because if you were happy in a family of people that were not happy, that would have been squashed. That would have been a bad feeling to have, right? So not only do we not understand the full spectrum of emotional rate that we can have, but we also have our own specific connotations to what all of those look, feel like, and should present like.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, and that's interesting to point out happiness. That's one of our more common emotions we go to. It's one of them we feel we're most familiar with. Culturally, very often, we're reinforced, I'll say taught, reinforced that that's a constant state. Yet when we study our emotionality, most emotions, the actual emotional stimulus, only last for a few milliseconds to maybe upwards of 90 seconds, and then it's fleeting. The initial response is gone.

Jamie Meyer: Anything after that time is a choice, right? So they say the anger should last 90 seconds. If you're still angry after 90 seconds, you're actually choosing to be angry.

Jeffrey Besecker: And then that becomes a little subjective. And there again, certain parts of that we're choosing, but large portions of that, as that anger, we talked in our pre-call, I'm going to bring that into the conversation tonight. But as we talked, that anger, when it arises, if we start to form that disconnect and suppress it or avoid it for any reason, the energy doesn't just go away. The energy travels through its arc and actually is reinforced through your central nervous system and stored throughout our body. You know, generally the interaction is happening through the autonomic ladder. We'll keep it at that because I don't want to divest this whole conversation and dissecting it. Large portions of that, to get to the point, are unconscious. We don't have the ability to influence them, yet alone, once they're stored in that identifiable state. They're not in our conscious awareness, so it becomes assumptive. Looking at stress, stress is not necessarily emotion, and stress itself is an ambiguous concept, you know? What is stress itself and what does it actually feel like? Just stress. Now, how would you describe that?

Jamie Meyer: But see, I see stress as a reaction. So stress is a reaction to what you're previously describing where we are not processing a level of emotion. And so when I say that, like after that 90 seconds, whatever emotion you're feeling is a choice, It's more that you are no longer subject to a chemical reaction in your body. And you are, you are then in a state where you can choose a response. You can then question the experience of your emotion that you're having and process it. Right. Whereas if you're just blindly a passenger to whatever is being triggered. And so you, the idea that we don't have the ability to assess that is we have the ability, it's that we don't have the tools. And so, you know, nobody says to you when you're little and you're starting to get angry after that 92nd point. Now, why are you angry? Like let's work through. Nobody actually works through your anger there. They don't decide what your trigger is. They don't understand. They won't have a conversation about the actual emotion you're having in itself. So you do one of two things. You either express it or you swallow it and then you become stressed.

Jeffrey Besecker: So as we look at that, I'm trying to reverse engineer tonight because I know where my level of awareness is. I know I can go back, you know, from a scientific textbook perspective and map out a large portion of that chain of response, that chain of interaction, reaction, you know, it all becomes ambiguous again as we work through it. Going back to the actual interaction of stress response, one of the core originators of that is adrenal response. Can you identify what it feels like when cortisol is in the process of being released? Or do you feel the cause and effect of that? Do you feel the somatic interactions that happen?

Jamie Meyer: I think when you condition and you're working from a place of reaction, you cannot feel that experience. I think once you identify your stresses and the things that create that reaction, then you can start to identify that you're starting to become stressed. But most often we are the physiological experience that we're having when we become stressed. It's kind of like a toothache. You know, they say toothache goes from like not hurting to 10. There is no middle ground. And so when you are unconsciously reacting to something and stress ensues, you go from zero to 10 and you're a level of stress peak. And so most people are not even physically aware how stress manifests in their body. and where they feel it or where it starts because they go from a trigger to a state of stress and there's no awareness of the process that happens between the starting point and the fully manifested feeling.

Jeffrey Besecker: So it's interesting in that regard to observe how a common pattern of reaction then is projection and emotional inference. We don't even claim our own emotions a lot of times. We start to say, this made me feel. We start to form an association. Or if there's an interpersonal relationship happening, they made me feel. We start to project that that feeling or that response originated in that person. Would you agree?

Jamie Meyer: Absolutely. The one thing that we don't recognize is that, let's go back to the truth, your side, my side, and the weird part in the middle. is that we could be having the same conversation and saying the same words and not recognize that each of us have a completely different definition of those things. So without taking responsibility for the, even the idea that the other person meant something different than we perceived, but we can only perceive, like our understanding is based as limited by our perception of what they are saying. And so we take on the idea that they cause something, and that doesn't necessarily always excuse actions that we're privy to, but there is some sense of our own responsibility for how we react or, well, reaction is more unconscious, so how we respond is then where our responsibility comes in, or our accountability comes in.

Jeffrey Besecker: So as we meet those differences in exposure, I'll say exposure, because sometimes that whole idea of understanding awareness or knowledge can become a little ambiguous and subjective. That level of exposure where I've experienced this information, I've watched this occur, you know, I've had that personal interaction. How does that affect, from your perspective, our notion of truth? You might see it one way from your perspective because of your experiences, your implicit emotional responses having a big impact on that, your core assumptions forming a part of that interaction. What disparities might that start to create in our perception of learning and understanding just based on that notion of right and wrong and truth?

Jamie Meyer: See, for me, truth is where our understanding comes from. So our truth is connected to our comfort zone. it's completely entirely linked to the reality that we create for ourselves and what we believe to be the world or the reality that we are in. So when we are stuck in a comfort zone, we have a phobia of anything new or unknown. We hold that truth to, it has to be the one and only truth, right? And it has to be the one and only truth because if there's not one and only truth, our comfort zone actually is completely dismantled. And so I don't necessarily believe that there is one pure truth. I believe that the point of truth is that we understand that everybody has their own version of that. And to actually understand the truth does not mean that we all agree. It means that we took the time to understand and listen to the perspectives of other people in their truth. and why that is the case for them, as well as having ours presented as well. And so the truth is, the truth is multifaceted and there is not one solid truth. I mean, the same 10 people can watch the same movie and all hear and see a completely different story based on what they connect to, based on the experiences they understand, based on things that they don't understand. And while we all think we're watching the same thing, we're not watching the same thing. I don't understand what is wrong with there having to be a clear and defined truth or versus there being a ambiguous truth that everybody contributes to.

Jeffrey Besecker: That can often become a sticking point from my perspective. And we did an episode on a concept known as the unity of opposites, where that opposing truth in that kind of subjective truth, our opinions, our values are equally true. You know, they have equal impact, they have equal validity. No, that's not discounting things where we get a little more subjective, like, well, I counted six of these statistical data, and even that becomes subjective because there are blind spots in our perception. There are things we overlook. Now, as that complexity grows, we know six is fairly easy number to count in most conditions, but with consideration, statistical hard data, we tend to lean a little bit more perhaps, and sometimes can become that blind spot.

Jamie Meyer: I think that we have, we're so attached to needing to have a label or a definition for any one thing that it blinds our ability to have a complexity. I mean, you know, like if you cannot be two things at once, how can you be anything at all? Right. Like, so then we, but I mean, I am complex. I can literally be two things, maybe three things at the same time. And the idea that we like to understand something, it has to have a label and it has to fit in our comfort zone and it has to fit in our box. That, that has destroyed the idea that there can be multiple or conflicting things experienced in the one.

Jeffrey Besecker: moment. In that regard, would you agree that a certain aspect or percentage of cultural conditioning and normalization can be both beneficial and adverse again?

Jamie Meyer: Yes, because it would, to me, I think it's super important that we understand history and culture of where we came from and how that contributes to what we believe and think and how we interact with other people. Because the only way that we can really question what our own self-identity and what we want to take from that is understanding how it was created or the conditioned version of it was created in the first place. And usually we get stuck in that spot that fits in our comfort zone and that's the the extent of reality and it's the right, truthful version of reality. And so then that creates a division between anything that is remotely different to that existence. However, being able to understand our own should lend to understanding that somebody else has that same version that is different. They have been brought up to believe that their reality is the size of that same bubble, but the inside of their bubble looks different. And that should then perpetuate our ability to understand differences. For some reason, we're taught that we have to understand differences to make sense and find some kind of correlation between those differences. instead of just accepting that something is different enough, it can be right and true and own in its differences to ours. And so I think we need that level of understanding of our culture and our heritage and ourself to better understand other cultures. But there is a gap between where we see understanding that and recognizing it as equal to what we believe is a reality.

Jeffrey Besecker: Therein, we kind of get into levels of social dynamic. Going back through our evolutionary arc, you know, it was kind of important to say that thing there is a bear and it will kill you. There has to be some level of subjective truth to that. That's a shared cultural and diverse normality.

Jamie Meyer: But see, here's the thing for me, and I completely agree with you, but just to go a little bit further than that, who said the bear will kill you, right? Will the bear only kill you if you throw something at it? You know what I mean? Like, will the bear kill you if you attack it? Will the bear actually, truly kill you? And so now, I mean, millions of years later after bears, right? Are the bears then conditioned to attack humans because we hunt them? Because if you go out to, if you go hunting in, you know, Alaska or somewhere more remote, animals are not even spooked by humans, right? They look at humans are kind of like this unknown entity that they're curious about because they don't see a ton of humans. You know, they're not in the middle of civilization. Whereas if you have an animal in the fields of Omaha, Nebraska, he's far more conditioned to like the car's going to hurt it or that this guy with the weird thing and he's going to shoot me because I'm dinner, you know? Like, so at what point was the bear killing the human actually a response versus a reaction or a conditioned belief that it's dangerous?

Jeffrey Besecker: So when we poke the bear, what generally happens? My son's going to love this part. When we poke the bear, what generally happens?

Jamie Meyer: I mean, we're usually going to get eaten, right?

Jeffrey Besecker: Statistically, maybe. This is a principle I brought my son up on, is don't poke the bear. Generally, if it's not bothering you, don't create the point that bothers. Don't instigate.

Jamie Meyer: That's interesting because that's how relative is that, right? Like, okay, yes, don't poke the dangerous animal that potentially has teeth and will bite you. But like, do you not poke your internal bear? Do you not poke the thing that should be niggling at you that, you know, like, you just keep, like, then you get back to ignoring.

Jeffrey Besecker: I'm deflecting now. We come with a lot of context and I know I'm deflecting. I can acknowledge that from my limited introspect in that now I'm deflecting a little bit because I was trying to subjectively load that point. It does become subject then to conditionality. Well, under what conditions, what bear and what is going on, you know, and how are you poking the bear? So it becomes complex. Ultimately though, I'm going back to that idea of truth in illusory truth effect. Certain truths, like poking a bear, might be subjectively self-evident. I like to go back to that phrase, certain truths, because it's our search for certainty And is it self-evident? Well, you know, it's fairly evident when you witness six or eight people get mauled by a bear that, eh, I don't want to be nine, you know, statistically. Selective probability.

Jamie Meyer: I'd still poke the bear. I would still go and poke the bear.

Jeffrey Besecker: We talked about my history. I would find ways to just probably agitate the shit out of the bear and he'd leave me alone. But anyway, I'd probably just have a long rambling conversation with him and he'd get bored. But, you know,

Jamie Meyer: I have done that with a horse once. I have done that with a stubborn horse once.

Jeffrey Besecker: I'm trying to divest in a new direction today and not lean so hard into my illusory truths. There are certain things that I've studied. There are certain aspects of behavior I've studied. There's a lot of relevant or potentially relevant data that I could probably spew until I bored you to death. Irregardless, certain things are an illusion of truth, and we inherently, would you not agree, discover that some things are provably false. For instance, where's a for instance? Even then, you know, I'm going to find a for instance and find my get out clause on it. So for instance, what's a certain truth? We breathe to stay alive. There's a relatively certain truth. If you stop breathing, you're not what we quote unquote deem alive as a human being. It's a certain relevant truth.

Jamie Meyer: Yeah, but then where's the caveat if you've got oxygen support and how brain dead are you? Because you're technically not considered dead until you're completely brain dead.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, exactly. And do we die at that point? I think we're probably not the best illustration to find expansive idea flaws, because we're both automatically just flowing along and going to new ideas. Maybe that's our lesson today.

Jamie Meyer: Maybe that is the point. Maybe truth is fluid. What is true in this moment for me is not necessarily true in five minutes, or not necessarily appropriate for my truth in five minutes. I mean, literally.

Jeffrey Besecker: So we've had this level of chat, you know, where do we go with this today, Jamie? Have we made a valid assertion of illustrating how to just accept, learn and grow with new experiences and be open to new ideas, however we label them?

Jamie Meyer: No, I think we just decimated the idea of a comfort zone. I think we really got into how we like start accumulating new ideas and being open to them, but we definitely spent an hour decimating what contributes to our comfort zone and why it becomes limiting. For people that are so attached to known ideas, from a manipulation or influence standpoint, is it not easy to say what you know is a comfort zone? I want to present this new idea, so I'm going to shame the idea of your little bubble so that you will then be enticed to try this new idea or concept that I have. And because we are habitual in nature and we do like the things that we know, it's essentially just a prey on. what we don't understand we fear. Right. And so it basically just manipulation marketing by fear and predominantly fear is one of the greatest driving forces in the world. We don't do something because we're scared. We do something because we're scared. We are told that something exists and it perpetuates fear, which perpetuates a reaction rather than a response. And so it's anything that's created to intend a reaction and a predictable reaction. cannot really be the idea of describing what we're actually talking about. So because like a comfort zone for me while in his version was to try and distort that you shouldn't get stuck in this space and you need to create new concepts. For me a comfort zone is more about understanding like limiting our world intentionally so we can navigate it, whether it's healthy or unhealthy. And so a new idea is not necessarily something that we buy into. A new idea is actually understanding where and how we created the space that we live in and then what we even want to explore outside of that and using that to understand ourselves and other people so that we remove all of the division between my understanding and your understanding.

Jeffrey Besecker: I feel aligned with that today and we may have made our point. How do you feel?

Jamie Meyer: I mean, this is the kind of conversation that could go on forever. I think it's a nice spot. I mean, because it is ambiguous and it could, the rabbit hole is just endless. But I think for everything that we decimated in the idea of the conversation today.

Jeffrey Besecker: I'm meeting a point in my own alignment where I'm like, why create conflict? Okay. You know, let your idea speak. Let your view speak. Let that illustrate the interaction. If we were to interject opinion, I'm going to call wrap on this today. If we were to interject opinion and perspective from your perspective, Jamie, what are three tips we can use to learn, grow and develop our ability to be more open and receptive to new experiences and new ideas? Let's just keep it as simple as possible.

Jamie Meyer: My first thing is to challenge pretty much everything. So if you have a thought, whether it be a thought or an idea, play devil's advocate with yourself, right? Consider the complete opposite of that. I'm not saying one is more right than the other, but what it does is it perpetuates an idea of questioning what you consider to be assured and truthful or right and wrong. And it gives you some space to work with. You spoke about this earlier about going back to the crux of the problem and asking the correct question. But the lack of questioning is what creates so much division. challenging, like psychologically challenging yourself with the complete opposite of what you initially thought and determining how that feels for you and applied in that situation. That's probably a lot more than one. Let's use that as two. It wasn't really as simple when I started. It was more simple in my head when I started with it. And probably something that I find super important is listening, not to respond, but to hear. So actively taking on what somebody else is saying without, like with being completely neutral, without already expecting that you disagree with them or that you have a different perspective, just hearing them in themselves. It does a couple of things. One, it creates a bigger connection between the person, you and the person that you're interacting with. But it also, in a way, actually opens your own bias or own perception in naturally challenging it because you're not already dismissing it or dismantling it in your mind while they're talking or finding a way to argue with it. You're actually being able to hear and understand from their perspective what they're presenting.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you for those amazing insights, Jamie. As we wrap up, any final tips or thoughts for our listeners who might be dealing with neophobia and want to address their own blind spots?

Jamie Meyer: So the one thing that I will preface this with is in my experience, the more expert somebody decides that they are, and myself included, the more that I think that I'm an expert in something. the more closed to its matrix I am, right? So if you're having a conversation with somebody that is not as intellectually or knowledgeably advanced as you are in a situation, there is still something to be gained from that person. They can still contribute to the matrix of how you apply and understand the intellectual version of what you do know that they may not know. And so if you can, instead of interacting with them to correct them or to elevate their understanding that you intellectually have, if you just hear them, they will actually give you the answer. So then you draw, instead of you just leading with your knowledge, you draw on what they presented to you to connect that knowledge, right? So you don't necessarily need to regurgitate it the way that you know it, but they will give you the thing that will allow you to use your knowledge to help them. And so the other thing that I think that we tend to do too, when we know, like when we meet somebody and they have a problem or they're conflicted with something or they're challenged with something, we have 50,000 things that we know that we have done that because we've, we've done it. We've experienced it. We lived it. Right. But technically we sort of can only handle three new ideas. If we're, even if we're open to them, we can still only handle three new ideas at a time. So pick the most, like when you're talking to that person and you think to yourself, okay, well, I have something that would broaden your perspective, or I have something that would solve that problem. Pick the three that are the most important, but they also have to be the most actionable based on what they're telling you where they're at. They're not going to be able to, you know, if they've never run a marathon, they're not going to be able to go into a triathlon. So give them the thing that's a hundred meter sprint that they can actually build something tangible off. They can go from a hundred meters to 200 meters instead of they're not going to parachute out of the plane.

Jeffrey Besecker: So thank you, first and foremost, for that valuable feedback. I know that process itself can be very discomforting for us to just simply open up and listen to feedback without the need to try to answer and resolve it from your perspective. So I thank you for that to consider today for my growth and knowledge, looking at that idea of being able to fix others problems or that tendency to want to fix others problems while we overlook our own. You mentioned finding that one nugget to take away that might grow. I'm going to leave that out there with the idea of the Solomon's Paradox, which is simply that idea we just talked about. How we can often intuitively see our own answers in other people by how we answer their problems. yet we overlook it a lot of times and we know that information inside. That's my nugget today. Thank you, Jamie, for sharing so much knowledge and wisdom with us today. And thank you for creating that space where I can simply step out of my own way and allow your light to shine.

Jamie Meyer: Thank you for having me and for this rabbit hole conversation. And I do really, it has not been lost on me that before starting this, you said that you would jump all over the place. and you would try to keep the structure. And I challenged myself to be able to keep up because I said it was my superpower. I think I did pretty well.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you, truly, for sharing from your open heart today. This truly has been fun.

Jamie Meyer: This has been fantastic. Thank you very much, Jeffrey. I really appreciate it.

Jeffrey Besecker: Comfort in our truths can often become our greatest blind spot, leaving us cemented in our subconscious limitations. Neuophobia, driven by the illusory truth effect and influenced by our cognitive thinking systems, acts as a barrier to addressing our underlying fear, uncertainty, and lack of familiarity with new data and new ideas. This bias not only hinders our ability to adapt and change, it also constrains our journey towards becoming the optimum expression of consciousness. emphasizing the importance of actively challenging these mental patterns to foster a more empowered expression of personal and intellectual growth. If you found this episode meaningful, please share it with a friend or loved one. And as always, we're grateful for you, our valued listening community. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker.