Dr. Scott Lyons
Appearances
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. meaning what will we do to get the thing that's so deeply missing in us And that's the most surprising thing about addiction to drama. You can get so distracted and see like, okay, that person's always busy. They're always making challenges that are unnecessary.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
Their emotional responses are totally disproportionate to what's actually happening into the environment. We all recognize that and we can go, okay, that's just who they are. They're a drama queen. They're addicted to the stress. They're addicted to the chaos. They're just constantly of chaos and crisis.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
But the reality is underneath the surface of that is a deep wound that is desperately trying to be filled, that is desperately trying to be avoided simultaneously. And that's the tension here. That is such a unique tension of going, I want you, I want connection, I want to be less alone, I want to be healed. And at the same time, that connection,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
That intimacy, the techniques or the tools of healing feel so dangerous. And so they're just running from themselves consistently. It is a way to survive and burning down the village to try to get any sense of sensation and experience aliveness because the numbness it takes to avoid that underlying pain is so significant that you have to do something extreme to feel alive above that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
there's a lot of really interesting research that we can unpack. And it all comes back to why any addiction? And Gabor Mate is this brilliant physician and addiction specialist. And he says, don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. And that is the lead in for understanding what's happening in the brain. You know, we register emotional and physical pain in the exact same way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
It's not discerned. A heartbreak is significant pain. A abandonment wound is registered in the same way that when we break an arm. And it's important to understand that because our basic human nature is to get relief from suffering.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
And we have this whole physiological process called endorphins. Endorphins are those things that are releasing into your body to help you feel more pleasure, to feel pain relief and emotional warmth, actually. And it makes us feel more connected to each other. And those chemicals in our brain and our body are so significant for helping us relieve some of that underlying suffering.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
And if we've had childhood wounds or trauma like most of us, yeah, we're running on a continuous process of unprocessed trauma that it constantly elicits a sense of pain. It's in our brain, we're going, we are in constant pain. That is being registered. And so Understanding that we are in constant search for the things that could relieve us from that pain.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
One of the other components of addiction is dopamine, right? It's a neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation and pleasure again. Notice how we're talking about those two neurotransmitters are about pleasure seeking or moving away from pain. And that's so essential. And even busyness. Yeah, I'm doing more and more and more and more. I'm going to all these social events.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I'm doing all these work activities. I am doing... And the doing keeps me away from the feeling. And so I get another dopamine hit because the feeling that I would be feeling if I could is likely the things I've been avoiding for a long time. And that's painful.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
So if you think about maybe some of your earliest environments, the ways in which you became familiar with your family, with the people around you, with the environment, and we call that the baseline experience. Yeah. So if I grew up in a chaotic household like I did, where there was a lot of physical abuse and alcohol and drugs, that was my baseline way of knowing how the world works.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
And there's a way in which I'm going to find that I'm going to seek it out consistently. You know, we can think of, Freud talked about it as repetition compulsion. We keep going towards the familiar in hopes that we can eventually find something else. That's why we keep entering into these same relationships over and over again, hoping that next one will be a better person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
But the reality is until we've addressed the why we're seeking those people unintentionally, we're going to keep repeating the same pattern. So, Chaos is a familiar hell. And we will always chase the familiar hell because anything else feels like an attack to our nervous system.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I think it's really important to recognize that we contribute to our own suffering. And that's such a hard thing to hear because when the world feels like it's against us and we're in that place of victimhood, which so many of us do, that is one of the essential qualities of this addiction to stress, that the world is coming at us. That it's coming for us, but it's not with us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
That sense of being alone. And that is that child who's burning down the village to feel the warmth, to feel that comfort, to feel supported, to fill the gap of those underlying needs, childhood needs that were missed.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I would go back to the question, how, if at all, did we feel loved as children? How did we understand our value and our worth? Was it freely given to us? Did we have to do something in order to get something? And oftentimes, even when a parent is unavailable or they're busy on their phone, as a child, we turn it around at ourselves. Oh, they're not available because I'm too much.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
And I have to prove that I have value to them And so I'm going to stay busy. I'm going to be a perfectionist. I'm going to go do that other grad school program. I'm going to keep earning everyone's love and keep dismissing myself and keep abandoning myself in the meantime to try to get them to come to me. Meanwhile, I have continued to leave myself. And that is a significant issue.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
So of course, this idea of worthiness, of busyness, if I'm busy, then it means I have value. If I'm doing something, I have value. And if I have value, then I'm worth something to someone else. Maybe eventually even to myself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I would go back to the question, how, if at all, did we feel loved as children? How did we understand our value and our worth? Was it freely given to us? Did we have to do something in order to get something? And oftentimes, even when a parent is unavailable or they're busy on their phone, as a child, we turn it around at ourselves. They're not available because I'm too much.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
And I have to prove that I have value to them And so I'm gonna stay busy. I'm gonna be a perfectionist. I'm gonna go do that other grad school program. I'm gonna keep earning everyone's love and keep dismissing myself and keep abandoning myself in the meantime to try to get them to come to me. Meanwhile, I have continued to leave myself. And that is a significant issue.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
So of course, this idea of worthiness, of busyness, if I'm busy, then it means I have value. If I'm doing something, I have value. And if I have value, then I'm worth something to someone else.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I'm going to just pause with that question. What is the first thing we do in healing this addiction to stress, this
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
Do you have all these thoughts come up? Do you have this impulse to sort of bulldoze the opportunity to kind of reflect? And that's where I would start actually, is in what happens in the pause, what happens in what we might call boredom, what happens when there isn't a stimulus to keep us going or some type of something that we're seeking or attaching to that relieves the pain for us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
What happens when we stop trying to manifest situations and relationships and environments and that take away, that create that endorphic pain-free response and have to come back to ourselves? So that first step is self-awareness. That first step is going, oof, this is uncomfortable. You know, when I was navigating my addiction to drama, which is, I'll be honest, it's an ongoing process.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
It is an ongoing process. But I remember sitting in a bathtub and having this impulse of like, oh, I got to go pick up my phone and call someone or I got to go read a book or I got to do this or I got to do that. And I simply turned around and I asked myself, what am I running away from? What's under the hood of this impulse to distract? And it was too much to actually deal with by myself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
That's what I came to clarity about. It's like, oh, it's so much stored up that never got seen, that never got felt, that never got experienced, that never got held, that never got supported, that that's what I need. I'm going to eventually be able to do that for myself, but maybe not right now. So finding someone who can hold you in the discomfort of,
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
of silence, the discomfort of not being in an activated stressful state or the anxiety or the trauma or the busyness and just say, I'm here with you. This is scary. This is scary because the moment we start to settle in our nervous system, there's an alarm that goes off that says it's not safe. A lot of these skill sets you will learn with someone else.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I sit with people all the time and I don't know how many times I've had to repeat to them. And that was then and this is now. And that was then and this is now. And it's not something that they'll understand cognitively. They have to embody it. They have to experience it in the same way. You might know you're safe, but unless you feel you're safe, you're not safe.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
And it takes time to rebuild and reestablish safety as something that is safe. Calmness, settledness as something that is safe. And stress as something that is safe. We want to have the full range of that human experience with the baseline of safety, which so many of us have never truly experienced.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I don't think you're going to like my response. which is if you're already looking at how you can help others, what are you avoiding in yourself still? How are you using that nether version of busyness to keep avoiding, to be out of touch with the things that need to be held, seen, supported, and felt within yourself? Lord knows I'm a psychologist. I went to a lot of school.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
I've helped a lot of people through the last 30 years. And my goodness, there's no better way to avoid yourself than to help someone else. And it is a form of control. So I want to just name that. Oh my gosh, my neighbor is addicted to drama. They're so busy. They're so stressed. It's so hard to be around. What comes up in you? Come back to you first. Can you stay in yourself?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
Because until you can, you can't address or connect with them. Any type of change or transformation takes relationality. And if you're not home in your own process, in your own experience, in your own groundedness, there is no relationality to go and do some type of intervention with someone else.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
We're done.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
So I think some of the more common ways we recognize that people are addicted to stress, addicted to drama, addicted to busyness is they are constantly doing. They are in constant motion. They are in a constant state of anxious, even though they may not realize it, other people can see it. And so you'll notice it's in the language they use. They're making mountains out of molehills.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
They're venting, they're gossiping, they're overscheduling. It's always about the doing. It's taking up space where they are not being in the space within themselves. It's an avoidant technique and it is a form of control.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
So whether it's an avoidance of their emotions, whether it's an avoidance of intimacy and relationships, whether it's an avoidance of having to deal with things in their life, how are you using that nether version of busyness To keep avoiding should be out of touch with the things that need to be held, seen, supported, and felt within yourself. What are you avoiding in yourself still?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
Especially with people who are really attached to being in stress. And I know that sounds so wild because who would want to be attached? Who would want to be connected all the time to a sense of stress? But when we go into the science of it, you'll realize we all actually do that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
even if they're busy, they're most likely not getting things done, at least not in the expanse of their life. Maybe it's one particularly focused thing, like, oh, I'm really good at filling my schedule, or I'm really good at this one aspect of work. And they really hyper focus on and they obsess. And yet all the rest of their life, their house, their apartment, their bedroom is a mess.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
Nothing else is getting done except the thing that they're choosing or they've chosen to hyper focus on to avoid themselves or the feelings underneath or their relationships or the fear and vulnerability of intimacy.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Real Reason You’re Exhausted: How To Gain Control of Your Time & Your Life
when you like go to the underneath surface, like what's underneath the pattern? What's underneath the survival strategy? And I think about this quote or this proverb that says, a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.