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Have you ever wondered how habits and addictions happen? Have you ever wondered how we can actually change our habits and our responses to our thoughts?

In this episode, Kathryn interviews Dr. Amy Johnson about why our brains do what they do and why we respond with the behavior we respond with.

Meet Dr. Amy Johnson

Amy Johnson, PhD is a psychologist, coach, author, and speaker who shares a groundbreaking new approach that helps people find true, lasting freedom from unwanted habits via insight rather than willpower. She is author of Being Human (2013), and The Little Book of Big Change: The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit (2016). In 2017 she opened The Little School of Big Change, an online school that has helped hundreds of people find freedom from anxiety and habits and live a more peaceful life.

Johnson has been a regularly featured expert on The Steve Harvey Show and Oprah.com, as well as in The Wall Street Journal and Self magazine

Check out Amy’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram.

In This Podcast

Summary

• The truth about our brains
• How change happens
• The Little School of Big Change

The truth about our brains

Our brain is a machine that truly loves us. It talks to us 24/7 and attempts to anticipate what’s coming next. It was designed to keep us alive no matter what and that hasn’t changed much over history. There used to be many more perceived threats, but there aren’t as many anymore, but our brain doesn’t recognize that. The brain hates uncertainty and so we end up believing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings as truths. Once we get into that scary thought, it’s easy to give it power, as the brain is wired to protect us.

How change happens

All change comes from what Dr. Amy calls a “see change,” which literally means Seeing things differently. Short-term changes can be forced via dieting or quitting bad habits, but it isn’t necessarily really felt. It means getting curious about what is directly perceived and beyond how our brain talks. It’s easy to get duped by our brain because it’s so compelling and has been with us since day 1.

Change happens when we recognize all that and realize we don’t need to always listen to our brain when it’s trying to scare us. Let it do its job.

There is a different source of common sense, wisdom, resourcefulness that we can always look toward to guide us in a moment. That’s where any kind of big change starts to happen for people. They now are less caught up in the dramatics of a brain and they’re more grounded in something that’s more sure. 

And from there, every choice looks different. 

The Little School of Big Change

Dr. Amy’s Little School of Big Change is an amazing group and community people come in from a variety of paths they want to change.

With a myriad of habits, it can often involve thought patterns such as OCD, anxiety, and negative self talk.

Everyone comes together and explores those thoughts from the beginning. She proposes what if we are all 100% healthy, clear, habit free, anxiety free all the time by nature, but our mind just thinks a lot in certain ways. We get caught up in what it’s thinking and it can take on a snowball effect.

She then spends six weeks doing a deeper dive into that more positive thought pattern until it becomes an absolute truth for people in the community.

It’s so much of what we’ve been talking about here so far is exploring with people that we are habit free and anxiety free and depression free and all of that by nature. When our mind settles down, any one of us just got into a deep meditation or just as we’re falling asleep at night, it doesn’t have to be a practice at all.

We have these moments where our mind is just kind of quiet. We don’t have habits in those moments. Even if you’re wildly addicted to something. 

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Podcast Transcription

Kathryn:

Welcome to the show, Amy. I’m so excited to have you here today. 

Amy:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

Kathryn:

So I’d love to start out with you just telling me and our listeners a little bit about yourself and your journey to where you are today. 

Amy:

Yeah my journey was kind of like my own struggles and my own issues as it is for a lot of people.

So I grew up just really insanely curious about what made people tick and I knew from an early age that I love to write. I love to invent characters and live in other people’s heads. Cause my own head wasn’t so fun to live in. And I also loved psychology and really like self-help.

I mean I was like nine years old reading Wayne Dyer books and just kind of love this stuff from an early age. So I was a bit of an anxious kid and had some issues with anxiety, especially as I got into my early adulthood. Then my anxiety took a different turn and showed up as eating issues for a good chunk of time in my twenties and into my early thirties.

And I was a psychologist and a coach and helping people, but not knowing that there was more, cause I couldn’t really help myself. I hadn’t found the thing that really helped me. So I was always on that search and then I found it about now about 12 years ago and this understanding that we’ll talk about and this way of seeing who we are and our habits and our experience, it’s just been completely life changing for me and for a lot of people I’ve shared it with so it’s pretty fun. 

Kathryn:

Well, I’m super excited to talk to you about that because I went on my own sort of anxiety journey. I didn’t realize until I went back to school to become a counselor in my mid forties that I had been living with anxiety and perfectionism my entire life.

And that’s what I help my clients withs so I’m dying to know your methods and your program. How would you say anxiety begins in us? What do you know about that? 

Amy:

Yeah, well I think it begins for sure there’s a genetic pass down component sometimes. Not always.

But even then what gets passed down is kind of maybe a different energy level in our bodies. Like the physiological differences. For sure we learn how our parents and people around us react to life, react to things. And so we get a lot of that from a very early age. 

I think when we really look at it, what’s at the core of it is this pretty much universal misunderstanding of our experience. We become spooked by ourselves. We feel something, we think something and we absolutely take our thoughts and feelings as truth. And again, when I say we, I mean, all humans, right? 

No matter what you know, like we always do and we always will to some degree, cause we’re wired, we’re designed that way. We feel uncomfortable or we have some scary thoughts and then we get afraid of them and we give them so much power and then this snowball starts. And when we don’t know better, it’s really hard to jump out of that snowball. We’d just get kind of carried away.

Kathryn:

Yes and we began living our lives in our head instead of in the present, out in the world. Right? 

Amy:

Absolutely. And then we have people telling us, Oh, you’re anxious. This is a problem. For a person whose mind is already racing, now here’s more problem and then we get the labels and absolutely it all just kind of takes off.

Kathryn:

 And it becomes a fear about having fear ultimately. Is there anything interesting you’ve noticed about habits and behavior during COVID times in particular?

Amy:

Yeah, I think, understandably, a lot of people I’ve worked with have a little backslide or just are feeling like it’s, not all, but some where it’s not even that they want to go back to the habit or anything like that. It’s almost this like societal expectation, like everyone’s sort of looking at us and we’re all looking at each other saying, Whoa, isn’t this weird, like what the heck’s going on? How are you doing?

Which is great of course, like we are being shaken by this. But, we humans are designed for uncertainty. We’re designed for change. Like we are incredibly resilient and I think it’s really easy to get caught up in the news and the hysteria and people checking in and other people’s all over the place.

To sort of be like, ah, it’s all falling apart. I must be suffering too and to go back to those old coping mechanisms and comforts. Even though, what I’m hearing a lot of people tell me is like, it’s so weird. I had a couple of drinks because I got all caught up in what was happening and I thought I needed it.

And then after my first drink, I realized, I don’t even like this anymore. Like, what am I doing? This doesn’t help me. You know? So it’s really cool to see that too. How it’s almost like our mind wants to say the world is falling apart, grab something quick. 

Then oftentimes, especially once we’ve seen a little bit about this, we grab something quick we’re like, Oh, I don’t need this. There’s so many like little reflexes and impulses that we’re acting on, but truthfully we’re so designed to get through what we’re going through and that it’s not always easy, but you handle it. 

Kathryn:

Knowing that knowing that we’re designed to handle uncertainty and that we are very resilient, what do you think it is that makes so many of us want to control outcomes and know what’s going to happen next?

Amy:

I think it’s because we have a brain. I think it’s that simple. Like it’s not even us. It’s not, I love looking at it. Like it’s not even us, like we know better. We’re the ones who can sit around and listen to shows like this and have these conversations and be like we’re not in charge of any of this really.

We know this, but we have a brain that talks to us 24/7, our entire lives. Our brain is all about knowing what’s coming next. And even that people might curse their brain when they hear that. But no, our brain loves us. Like all it is is a machine. We just need to love it and respect it, but also know it’s just a machine.

So it’s just doing what it was designed to do, keep us alive no matter what, and it hasn’t changed much over history. It used to be a lot of threats and now there aren’t so many, but our brain still thinks there are. 

Kathryn:

It triggers our body to the fight or flight. Right. I mean, it’s always looking out for problems to solve for us, even when there aren’t problems.

Amy:

Exactly. Uncertainty, like what we’re going through now, is a big one for the brain. I mean, it hates that. 

Kathryn:

Tell me what do we need to start with to make big change happen? 

Amy:

Probably all change comes from what I often call like a see change. Seeing things differently. Now we can force change for in the short term, right? We could all go on a diet or not drink or not smoke for a few whatever we can make ourselves do things. But to really be changed, to really feel it and get to a point where what we’re looking for feels natural and it’s just how we live our lives. It’s about a see change and that’s really about. I think getting curious about what we’re seeing here, like who are we beyond all of this, these thoughts and feelings, beyond how our brain talks. A big part of that is seeing how our brain talks, because it is so compelling and so loud and it’s been there forever.

We’ll get caught up in it very easily. We’ll get duped by it. I think once we get a little bit of a feel for yeah we have a brain that’s always trying to protect us and scare us, but that we don’t need to listen to that. Let it do its job. 

There’s a different source of common sense, wisdom, resourcefulness that we can always look toward to really guide us in a moment. That’s where I think like any kind of big change really starts to happen for people. They now are less caught up in the dramatics of a brain and they’re more grounded in something that’s more sure. 

And from there, Oh my gosh, I mean every choice, everything looks different. 

Kathryn:

Yeah, absolutely. I work with clients a lot about trusting themselves to be able to make decisions. I think that part of it is we’ll focus on the eight different domains of our lives and what our “why” is in each.

When you know that it becomes easier to make decisions and disregard the chatter of the brain. How do you help clients sort of dis-recognize and disregard the unhelpful chatter? 

Amy:

Really by coming to know it intimately, like see how it works and how it is the same for all of us. 

I have a new book coming out soon and this is not going to be the title, but this is what I wanted the title to be was “That’s Just What Minds Do.” Because we’re constantly talking about, Oh yeah when your mind’s off comparing you to everyone else, when it’s off worrying, when it’s off problem solving when it’s off doing these things. Yeah. That’s what a brain does. It has nothing to do with you really. It has nothing to do with your choice.

Like you said, it has nothing to do with any of those eight areas of your life. It is just a machine doing what a machine does. I think that those conversations where we get really familiar with how all brains work are amazing because all of a sudden it’s not personal. When our mind is talking to us and you know, when it talks to us, it uses our details.

It’s not just chattering. It’s like, so, and so said this about you and you should be here in your life. And it brings in so much stuff that it’s such a compelling story, right? But when we sort of see, Oh yeah, that’s what everybody’s mind is doing in their own way. I think it takes a lot of the power away.

Kathryn:

It’s no longer. Oh my gosh, am I going crazy? This is a normal thing.

Amy:

Yes, exactly. 

Kathryn:

Normalizing it is a big deal. So when you were talking earlier about diets and changing things, briefly and I’ve noticed with my clients that willpower and grit can only get you so far when you are trying to change how you do things. How do you help clients break old habits and create new habits?

Amy:

Yeah I agree with you, willpower is a good thing we can use it, but it is a tool we have to use. And we don’t have the resources to use that tool for long. It doesn’t go very deep. It’s an action. You know, it’s a bandaid, really. It gets you over a hump, but it doesn’t leave you seeing life in a new way.

It’s so much of what we’ve been talking about here so far is like exploring with people that we are habit free and anxiety free and depression free and all of that by nature. Like when our mind settles down, any one of us just got into a deep meditation or just as we’re falling asleep at night, it doesn’t have to be a practice at all.

We have these moments where our mind is just kind of quiet. We don’t have habits in those moments. Even if you’re wildly addicted to something. Everyone I’ve ever worked with who has like a major addiction even, they have moments where using their substance is nowhere on their mind because that’s them, that’s them being them. Their mind is kind of quiet.

What that shows us is that we do have habits and anxiety and all of that, but it’s thought that’s doing that. It’s just when our mind gets wrapped up. And then like, we’ve been saying, when we tangled up in that, we listened to it. Cause it’s, talking about us and it’s scary.

Seeing that we are habit free by nature and just noticing how thought comes and goes. We don’t need to manage our thoughts. Like it comes and goes, it’ll come and scream at you. And two minutes later, it’s telling you, you look great today. It’s all over the place.

Just exploring these things really gives people a sense of freedom and sort of feeling like, okay, I don’t need to not be human. My mind is going to do whatever my mind does. But I couldn’t sit and watch it. I don’t also don’t need to let it boss me around so much. And that’s huge.

It’s really everything when it comes to a habit because our habits are, we know better. We don’t want to be doing this thing, but we feel bossed around by our mind. 

Kathryn:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s, there’s a learning and appreciation for the fact that thoughts come and go and we don’t have to control them.

We just don’t need to get tangled up in them and the belief that they define us, that they are real, that they are true. 

Amy:

Yes. 

Kathryn:

How do you help clients do that? 

Amy:

We do it by conversation. By exploring it really that’s it. I mean, it’s a series of deep conversations and my favorite way,  how I work with people personally, these days is in my little school of a big change.

It’s all in a group setting. It’s a couple hundred other people just like them who have a variety of things. Who are saying, Yeah, but what about my depression? Or what about my uncertainty? Or what about my binge eating habit? What about my smoking habit? And when we can look at all of these different things and see, yeah, they’re all the same. They’re all the same, they’re all habit free.

Your mind gets revved up. It says, give me that thing so I can feel better, but even if you don’t give it that thing, your mind will settle down. You know, it’s so hard in isolation when we’re just alone in our own heads. It’s near impossible to not get caught up in that, but when we’re in a conversation and really in a group too, people start to see, Oh, your mind does that too.

Oh, it does settle down. You know? And so we learned so much from each other that way. 

Kathryn:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of like riding the wave, knowing that it’s going to come, but also knowing that it’s going to go. 

Kathryn:

Yeah and that, and that the way this safe. It’s not like we have to white knuckle through the wave.

It’s like coming to see, oh yeah. There’s waves every day, all day in life. There are waves. 

Kathryn:

Yes so many clients that I work with who have anxiety or depression are telling themselves, their brains are telling them, that they can’t handle whatever emotion or whatever thought is coming. 

Amy:

Yes. 

Kathryn:

And that is what is keeping them stuck, where they are helpless believing that they can’t do it.

So that is one thing that I work on changing is accepting the emotion as it comes and feeling it so that you can teach yourself it is going to come and go and I can sit here and handle it. 

Amy:

Yeah, exactly. 

Kathryn:

Very cool. Tell me a little bit more about the little school of big change. 

Amy:

Yeah it’s an amazing group and community where again, people come in from a variety of things they want to change.

It’s a ton of different habits, a lot of what we might consider like a thought habit. So things like OCD and anxiety. Just excessive worry, all of that. People who just think Oh I’m so negative, or I don’t have any confidence. All of that is just down to our where our thinking goes. So in a way everything’s habitual.

We come together and explore this and really start from the beginning. Like, what if you are 100% healthy, clear, habit free, anxiety free all the time by nature, but your mind just thinks a lot. And it thinks in certain ways, and we get caught up in what it’s thinking, right. That’s it.

I mean, that’s the basic sort of premise. Then we just spend six weeks diving into that until it becomes an absolute truth for people. So it’s so cool. It’s very much what you just said too, is so important around how. We are designed to just handle, it’s just energy. It’s just energy, thoughts, feelings, right?

It’s just energy moving through us. But our mind thinks we can’t. So we have this horrible experience of it. Our mind is over there saying I can’t handle this. There’s all that resistance and we still handle it. I mean, look people don’t die from feelings like feelings move through us.

We always handle it. But I think what you said is so key that when we can see that we can handle it. Not only can we, we always do handle it and it’s just our mind saying we can’t, it just gets so much easier. 

Kathryn:

So would it be okay for me to ask you about your eating and your struggles when you were younger and sort of what, what helped you come out on the other side?

Cause I think that would be really powerful for us to hear. 

Amy:

Yeah. I was binge eating and bulimic for about eight years and at that point what I knew was more of the therapy side of things and more of the active, what I might call the active self-help. Like changing my thoughts, like looking at the content of all my thoughts, what am I thinking and why, let me turn it around.

It was my attempted recovery, which went on for eight years, was a full time job. And, it didn’t really get me. I mean, it helped my life in some way because I think a lot of those things do have benefits, but it didn’t help my eating disorder. What finally helped me was a couple of things.

One seeing something just at a brain level, kind of like, we’ve been sharing. My brain was taught by me innocently to produce these cravings for binges. That’s because I would feel bad, whatever that means. I have all this horrible emotion and often it came on the heels of restricting my food.

So I would starve and kill myself through workouts and feel horrible obviously. Then my brain would say, no more of this, you go eat some food and you better eat a lot of it really quickly. And so it’s like, when I could finally back up, I was so caught up in that. It just looked like a problem and a weakness the whole way through.

But when I finally could kind of see, Oh my gosh, like my poor brain is just trying to help me. Look at what I’ve put myself and it through. It’s just trying to help me. I saw that all the dopamine hits and happy chemicals that would happen when I would binge my brain was taking that as evidence of like, Ooh, this is good.

Let’s do this more. I got a feel for how all that was working and the reason that was so helpful I think is because all of a sudden this had this habit had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t that I had no discipline. It wasn’t that I was some kind of loser that I couldn’t get myself out of it. All the me, me, me sort of went by the wayside and I was like, Oh, this has nothing to do with the kind of person I am.

I just have a brain and this is what I’ve done to it. So that was huge. From there, I began to see when my brain would demand food, like, Oh yeah, you’re just doing what you’re taught to do. But rather than thinking that when I fed it, it would settle down, I started to see again what we’ve been saying that no it’s settles down on its own.

I knew that from my panic attacks, I could have a massive panic attack that might last 10 minutes, which felt like 10 hours. But even in that time, it always settled down. It always changed on its own. When I saw that was also true of my urges. Oh my gosh, it was just such a rush. It was like, wow.

So I, can feel this and think t’s going to last forever and have my body moving toward food, but I can actually just watch the whole thing happened and it will completely settle down on its own. No action needed. Then I just started playing with that. It was awesome. 

Kathryn:

Wow. That is an amazing story.

Do you remember what thoughts you had that led you to that anxiety into your wanting to control your eating? 

Amy:

I don’t remember a lot of them. I mean, there were a lot of little specific thoughts. A lot of it was since I was in that cycle, that kind of binge restrict cycle, I would just work myself so hard physically going to bootcamp classes with no food.

It was just insane and that just felt like punishment. I needed to do that to myself to be okay, which is nuts. As soon as I would go to the other end, which thankfully I did again, because no one can start starving themselves, my brain would try to protect me then.

Then I just felt like a big loser because I couldn’t keep up the toughness.  I vaguely remember all that, but a lot of times it was more just this kind of wordless feeling of just being lost. Feeling like horrible and yeah, and then these ideas would come in to help me feel better.

That’s another piece of this that I love. I love seeing that our wisdom is always there for us and I didn’t recognize it as that. But even in even an idea, like, Hey, go eat something. I thought that was a massive problem because my mind said don’t eat, but that, gosh, I mean, look how much wisdom is in that.

It was trying to help me feel better. It was trying to keep me alive. A lot of it was more of a feeling than the words that I remember. 

Kathryn:

It’s really just about turning down the static so that we can really listen to ourselves. 

Amy:

Yeah and seeing when we feel bad, like maybe you just feel bad. You don’t even know why, you don’t know what words are in your head. When we feel bad, that’s always showing us that our mind is talking. We might not hear it, but. feeling bad is not our nature. So, always, if you just wake up in a funk or you’re feeling depressed or hopeless, you might not know what your mind is thinking, but your mind is thinking.

Kathryn:

Absolutely. It may have become automatic at that point, but it is telling you something that’s creating that emotion. Yeah, for sure. So now I’m wondering if we could do a little bit of a fun lightning round. 

Amy:

Yeah. Cool.

Kathryn:

Beyonce or Lady Gaga?

Amy:

Beyonce.

Kathryn:

Sumo wrestling or NASCAR.

Amy:

Ooh. Sumo. 

Kathryn:

Do you have a role model or someone that you look up, you looked up to when you were younger?

Amy:

 I idolized every teacher I had. I always wanted to be that kind teacher, especially the ones that like saw the good and all the students. Yeah. 

Kathryn:

Enhance your school right.

Amy:

Yeah.

Kathryn:

 Awesome. So is there anything you do every day without fail, besides the normal things that we all do, like brush our teeth?

Amy:

Well check my email. That’s a horrible answer. I kind of wish that wasn’t the answer I for sure check my email every day, even on vacation usually. I love to go for walks. It’s like my happy place. So I do miss a day here and there because of weather usually, but, walking, it’s hard to hold me back from that.

Kathryn:

Yeah, definitely. Do you have a favorite style icon?

Amy:

Oh, no, but I love like black and white and just super minimalist. 

Kathryn:

Yes. Do you like Diane Keaton? 

Amy:

Yeah. Classic. Yeah, absolutely. 

Kathryn:

Especially since you live in Michigan, how would you spend your day if you were snowed in and couldn’t work?

Amy:

Oh, I would be by the fire reading all day long. 

Kathryn:

What would you be reading? 

Amy:

Nonfiction. I don’t read a lot of fiction, but I love, like Malcolm Gladwell type of books, like scientific stuff, but not heavy, fun, kinda light stuff like that is light as nonfiction can be. 

Kathryn:

Awesome. Would you rather have fresh flowers or fresh produce delivered to your door?

Amy:

Produce.

Kathryn:

What would you eat?

Amy:

I love mango. Oh my gosh. That’s something I do without fail is I eat a banana, every single. So yeah. Bananas and mangoes and cucumber. Yeah, we have a garden that’s really fun.

Kathryn:

Oh, that’s awesome. So I wrap up every podcast with the same question to my guests. It is what is one imperfect action that you think we should all take today to get closer to our best lives? 

Amy:

That’s a great question. I think, I’m sure people have answered this way before, but in everything we’re talking about and seeing that we have everything we need and our mind just gets in the way. I think just compassion is so huge for ourselves, right? It’s so much easier to have compassion for others. Self compassion for what you think, what you feel, because it’s not the way it looks. If we’re ever beating ourselves up for what we think or feel, we’re just confused or just not seeing it the way God would see it or the way life sees it, we’re just turned around. So that little bit of compassion takes us so much closer. 

Kathryn:

Well, I second that let’s all go out today and find a little more self compassion and self love for ourselves and beat ourselves up just a little bit less today.

Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed our conversation immensely today. I really appreciate you being on the show. 

Amy:

Yeah, I enjoyed it too. Thanks for having me. 

Kathryn:

Where can our listeners find more about you before we wrap up? 

Amy:

So my website is dramyjohnson.com. It’s just Dr. Amy Johnson.com and there’s tons of stuff there.

Kathryn:

All right. So y’all go check it out to find out more about Dr. Amy. Thanks again for being here today. 

Amy:

Thank you.