Welcome to IVF This, episode 40- Infertility and the motivational triad

Hello my beautiful friends. I’m so happy to be talking with you today. Everyday is a great day when I get to talk to you. 

I’m going to share a little listener love, because It’s been a few weeks since I have and it’s one of my favorite things to share. 

But first, I want to give you all a little personal IVF update. Before I share it I want to give a trigger warning, so if you don’t want to know or you feel like it will make you uncomfortable that’s not a problem. Skip over for about 45 seconds and you won’t have missed anything. 

So, I know many of you follow me on SM @IVFthiscoaching but for those of you that do not, we did have a positive BETA! WE actually got it the day before our 10 year wedding anniversary which was AMAING. And the repeat beta looked great too. So we go in a few weeks for our first scan. 

I have loved and appreciate so much the DM’s of support and comments of support. I truly love this community and I’m so blessed to be a part of it- even thought none of us actively pursued being a part of it, right. No one of us were like, “hey, I gotta go hang out with this group.” No. WE call ourselves the worst club with the best members and I believe that from the bottom of my soul. 

Now the listener love that I mentioned. This comes from KMaxwel who says, “My daughter shared this podcast with me. I am so happy she did. I thought by not asking, I was being supportive. Didn’t want to pry! I know better how to relate to her and her husband. Thank you.”

Well, thank you KMaxwel! Thank you for being open to listening and taking in the things that this podcast talk about. And you know what, I think that you not wanting to pry, that belief that by NOT asking I’m being supportive is probably how A LOT of our loved ones feel. Not wanting to pry. Not wanting to make the experience MORE uncomfortable for them. Yea, I think that is such a normal and almost natural reaction. So, I love that your daughter shared the podcast with you AND that you responded by listening. What a beautiful testament to your love for your daughter. 

And I think this is such a great opportunity for everyone else listening. Everyone has stories that we tell ourselves. For KMaxwel her story was, By not asking I am being supportive. Now, her daughter’s story (I have no way to know for sure right, I’m taking a guess) her story might’ve been something like, “my mom doesn’t care enough about this or me to ask me about it.” 

But neither of those stories were true. K’s story about how she “should” show up for her daughter was not ture, and (if) that was her daughters story, that wasn’t true either. 

I think very often we get trapped in our stories. They almost become our cages. We see the world through the lens of our stories. Which is fine, that’s how our brains function but it can be very painful when the stories we tell arent’ true and they don’t serve us. So I’m just over the moon proud of these two amazing people who stepped away from their stories. To show up for each other. 

So, what are your stories? What are the things that you tell yourself over and over again, that you don’t even question, but that feels terrible? What is a story about yourself that you’re wanting to or willing to drop so that you gain some peace?

If you’ve got one of these stories, I can help! I can help you suss out what the facts are and what is the story- in fact, this is one of the most important parts of my coaching program. So if that’s you, go to my website, www.ivfthsicoaching.com and book a free mini-session. Totally complimentary and it’s 30 minutes of straight coaching. I hope to hear from you soon. 

Now, to get into today’s topic. 

The motivation triad is one of the things that really blew my mind when I started learning about it. It’s one of those things that, when I really understood it and really took a look at, I FINALLY understood why my brain thinks the way it thinks. When it freaks out, when I feel good, all the things. And that’s why I wanted to share it with you, today. 

So I want to teach you about the motivation triad because 1) I want you to know why your brain does what it does. I believe by understanding this you will be able to show yourself a little more compassion, some understanding. Because if you’re doing things that you don’t want to do or wishing you could change or you’re frustrated by your behaviors or really anything, if you’re beating yourself up- gosh, friends, I just want you to stop. 

We never feel better in the face of self-criticism. We don’t make progress, we don’t achieve what we could achieve, we are aren’t everything we could be- when we are constantly berating ourselves. I always think of that voice in our heads, the one with all the should, the self-criticism, as this just shrill, bitchy voice. At least that’s what it sounds like in my head. 

So understanding why you’re doing the things that you’re doing is the foundation for quieting that shrill and bitchy voice. Also, many of you attach your identity or your personality to your thoughts, to your emotions, to you behaviors. You make the past mean something, everything, about your future. And this will hold you back, every.single.time. 

So teaching you how your primitive brain is wired helps you to understand why the parts of you l that you can control are unfolding as they are and so , hopefully, you’ll stop beating yourself up for it. And then, you can go out and create the life you DO want- yes, I promise you this is possible even while you’re waiting for the family of your dreams. Even while you’re going through all the treatments, taking a break from treatments, all of it. We have to be willing to flip the script on the old, tired-ass ways that we think, And that is always based on the motivational triad. But it’s nothing to judge yourself for, this is how your brain is wired. 

Alright, so you’re probably asking yourself, what in the hell is the motivational triad? Beautiful questions. The motivational triad is the basis for all of or unconscious thoughts, it is the brains way of chasing the only THREE things that it cares about: seek pleasure, avoid pain, and to be efficient. Animals and humans have ALL been designed with these principle motivator, which is why it’s called the motivational triad. And these three motivations increase our odds of survival- at least they have over time. 

Seek pleasure, avoid pain (I also call this seeking safety), and being efficient, these three motivations have made sure we had food, that we procreated, and that we have designed a world that has helped us to minimize and avoid potential threats to our survival. 

So let’s break them down, one by one:

Seek pleasure- basically means eat the food, have the sex, watch the TV, scroll the social media. Any thing that gives you a solid hit of dopamine- which is VERY intoxicating to the brain. 

As our species was evolving the eating of the food and the sex having was VITAL to uor day-to-day survival. These were VERY strong motivators. Animals do it. Humans do it. So this is built into the basic wiring of our brains. 

Meals weren’t readily available to us thousands of years ago, even hundreds of years ago, so we had to be highly motivated to get the food. But that’s not the society we live in now. Food is readily and abundantly available to us. WE no longer have to kill in order to eat. There are some that do, right, hunters, but it’s not necessary for survival when you have three groceries stores within 10 miles of you. But our primitive brains don’t know that. It still thinks we have the threat of hunger and death-s o seeking pleasure is a huge motivator. 

The second part is avoiding pain. This is really simple. In our brains, pain = death. So we are pre-wired to avoid anything that might hurt us. Pain = death, fear = death, rejection = banishment from the tribe which was certain death. Uncertainty = potential death and this is a HUGE one during infertility and fertility treatments. This is why uncertainty feels so damn awful, because our brains are telling us, we don’t know what on the other side of this and it’s probably going to kill us. This is also why we use emotional cushioning, and if you’re not sure what I am talking about check out episode 15 of this podcast called Emotional Cushioning. But we use emotional cushioning because we feel like getting excited or hopeful during our journey will only lead to greater disappointment- and disappointment is painful. And Pain=death. 

The third leg, of this triad is efficiency. Much like my husband, our brains LOVE efficiency. They seek it out. Our brains want us to expend as little energy as possible, not only with the way our bodies function and how we move but also what’s happening on the inside of our brains. That’s why so much of what we do is governed by autopilot. 

WE don’t really think about or concentrate on most of what we do during a given day. WE don’t have to think about how we need to brush our teeth, we just do it. We don’t think about how to drive a care, we just get in and start driving because our brains is designed to be efficient. 

So, when we are learning new think, like when we were learning to drive, we had to concentrate on them a lot. We had to use a different part of our brains. The more we practiced, the more we thought about it, the less we HAD to think because our neuro pathways were being created in our brains- they are like the habit routes of our brains. Our brains were designed so that once we’ve learned something, the higher brain can delegate it to the power part of our brain, and then we get to put it on repeat. 

This is efficiency in the brain. This was AMAZING for our survivial. Be efficient, burn less calories (both physical and mental energy.

So this is the motivational triad. It has serves us incredibly well over time in that it’s the things that has kept us alive as a species. 

But here’s where it breaks down for us during infertility and fertility treatments. 

Seeking pleasure often looks like over eating, over drinking, overspending, the Dr Google rabbit holes, the FB group rabbit holes- I know some of you might be thinking there isn’t pleasure to be found in dr google or on the message boards but that’s not true. Whether we are getting information we are wanting, or in the more likely scenario, information that is scaring us- that’s still dopamine. It still hits that reward center of your brain, the pleasure center of your brain.

I’ve had several people tell me that they don’t know why they can’t stop googling things- because you don’t like how you are feeling and you think you are getting relief (hello pleasure) but you’re really just creating more suffering because you’re never satisfied by the thing you don’t actually want. You don’t actually want to read horror stories, look for positive stories, read case studies, or medical journals- what you want is certainty. Certainty in the thing you’re worried about won’t come to pass or the thing you’re hopeful for will come to pass. 

And that then brings us to avoiding pain. Now, I mentioned earlier how the uncertainty feels like death. But there are other ways that we do this too. Maybe we avoid friends and family because we fear rejection- not overt rejection, maybe, but a subtle rejection. Like an asinine thing they might say, or a callous remark, or your journey being ignored completely. This might also be why you maybe are afraid to share your journey- which is fine, I’m not suggesting that everyone air their infertility laundry like I do, but it’s important to be aware. 

Maybe we even stay in friendships, relationships, or situations that no longer serve us because of that fear of rejection that fear of pain. The pain that comes with any loss. 

Maybe you are really hesitant to even start fertility treatments, or to do more fertility treatments, because the potential pain feels unbearable. Again, I don’t believe there’s a right or wrong here this is just about creating awareness. 

Maybe you’re powering through or even past your emotional or physical limitations because the fear of the pain of NOT getting what you so desperately desire is so strong. 

This is the motivation triad of avoiding pain. This is the dramatic survival instinct that associates anything new with pain, anything uncertain with pain, any potential for feeling uncomfortable with a threat to your survival. 

And this keeps us stuck because we often interpret fear as a problem. As a Giant red stoplight. When we think fear is a giant red stoplight, do we go towards it or even past it- no! we stay locked into fear. Trying to resist fear. Trying to resist uncertainty. Trying to resist the potential for pain. 

Alright, and that third part, being efficient. So this can mean for us IVF’ers that our brains get stuck in this autopilot, right?

We have these patterns of thought, of belief, of emotions, of behaviors. Our brains is good at it and we can end up, if we’re not careful, getting stuck there. WE can exist in that space where we feel completely disconnected from ourselves and our lives but also not reconnecting. Kind of just walking around like the shell of our former selves. Like being anxious, or angry, or whatever it is you’re feeling, becomes so familiar, even if it’s uncomfortable, that you stay locked in because it’s efficient. 

We continue to looks to the past for evidence of who we are instead of looking to the future and deciding who we want to be because efficiency is ALL about the thoughts that we already have, feeling the feelings we’re used to, doing the behaviors that we’ve always done. Our brains desire to keep us efficient means that we just keep repeating. 

We find ourselves in this kind of limbo because you’re believing the story that you don’t know who you are without the family of your dreams, without realizing that vision. Or because you don’t have any evidence that you can create something new, like you’re not sure you CAN think or feel a different way. 

But I want to offer you hope, this is just the effect of your brain trying to be efficient. Your brain WANTS you to believe that something like coaching won’t be helpful because “this is just how you are”

I had a consultation with someone recently who told me she didn’t think she would benefit because this was just how she was. She was and would always be an “anxious mess” (her words) and after years of therapy that wasn’t all that beneficial, this was just how her life would be. 

But I told her that I didn’t think she TOTALLY believed that. Otherwise, why would she have gotten on a call with a coach. I mean I get that I am delightful to talk to but time is a very precious commodity, so there was SOMETHING in her that saw a possibility of change- even if a remote possibility. 

This comes from a survival instinct, from your primitive brain, your brain prefers to repeat existing patterns simply because it’s more efficient than change. If we want to create something different, feel differently then we have to think something different. We have to take different actions, and we have to understand the motivational triad and see how it holds us back.

Our brains will always, always, always tell us to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and be efficient. And if we don’t challenge that, guess what will happen? Gues what we will have? Nothing will happen and we will have more of the same. More of feeling like garbage. More anxiety, more fear, more BS thought patterns that tell you you’re not good enough or doing enough. That everything is your fault. More of the same- or maybe even worse. 

So how do we flip the script when we can see the triad for what it is- old, outdated programming and we want something different. WE need a NEW triad.

First, instead of seeking pleasure, we need to seek discomfort. What might that look like? It might be, instead of trying to shove your feelings down by distracting or busying yourself. Maybe you give yourself 5,10, 30 minutes to sit with yourself, be uncomfortable and process the emotion. Instead of resorting to food or alcohol to numb away the day, spend some time journaling to identify the thoughts that you’re having that make you feel like you have to numb yourself out. Uncomfortable, probably, eh who am I kidding, yes. It’s uncomfortable especially in the beginning. But each time you step into discomfort, you’re training your brain that you are not afraid of yourself. You are not afraid of your emotions. You’re training yourself to believe, you can handle WHAT EVER life throws at you. 

So, I’m sure you have figured out what number two is- instead of avoiding pain, we need to open up to it. Not seek it out, I don’t want you to like drunk dial your old boyfriend or something, but lean into the pain. Let it pass through you- again, processing and allowing for the emotion to be there, when it’s there. We need to learn the skill of fully processing pain- once you’ve done that, once you have shown yourself that you can feel pain and NOT die, once you’ve shown yourself that you can handle ANY emotion- THEN you can start to question whether fear or uncertainty are really something to be scared of. 

One of my favorite things to ask myself when I can feel that fight, flight, or freeze response kick in is, “Am I in danger?” If I am not in danger, then I take 5-6 very deep relaxing breaths, just something to calm my nervous system down, before I move forward with anything else. 

Since we no longer live in caves, the possibility of us being in really danger is considerably lower than our primitive brains want us to believe. But it can FEEL real. And that’s why that moment of breaking the habit of feeling afraid by asking yourself that question, can be so powerful. 

Our primitive brain associates fear and danger. But there is no danger in fear, pain, or grief other than NOT processing or actively trying to avoid it. 

And finally, instead of trying to be so efficient, we need to recognize the value that comes from exerting effort with intention. Our beautiful brains are capable of change- ne thoughts, new feelings, new behavior patterns. WE don’t HAVE to just keep recreating things from our past.  

There is plenty of science that touts the magnificence of neuroplasticity but we have to work at it. And this is why I teach what I teach and what I help my clients so when we’re coaching together. We have to work towards new ways of thinking so that we can create new patterns that we can then put on repeat.

We have to stop defining ourselves by who we were in the past, by those outdated thoughts and beliefs that no longer serve us, or we are just going to continue to create more of the same in our lives. I love the very ”coachy” saying-  You can’t solve a problem with the same brain that created it. Changing your life, EVEN during infertility, will require you to change your thoughts. When you change your thoughts, you experience new feelings, based on those new feelings, you will take different actions- that is how the cycle works. 

This is my challenge to you- flip the script on that outdated programming that you’ve carried around for far too long. Seek discomfort when you would have normally sought pleasure. 

Open up to pain so you can process it fully and decide to do the work of being intentional with your brain instead of settling for the old habitual thought patters that your brain is so well-versed at thinking. 

I promise you, this is the way you create what you want out of life- regardless of where you are in your journey. I hear people talk about feeling like their life is on hold waiting for their family. 

This is based on old outdated programming. I would venture to guess that this is not the first time in your life that you felt like your life was on hold. Maybe it was in high school, waiting to graduate, or waiting to find the love of your life, waiting to get married, waiting to finish school, or buy a house. This thought didn’t just magically appear during infertility. 

Flip the script. 

If you need some help with that, I’m here. I gotchu. We can do it together. 

Ok, that is what I have for you today, my friends. 

Have a beautiful week and I’ll talk to you next time.