Your Mind is Not the Boss w/ Dr. Richard Louis Miller
episode
Journey to the Sunnyside | Mindful Drinking & Alcohol Health
36 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Journey to the Sunny Side, the podcast that helps you build a better relationship with alcohol and uncover the secrets to mindful living. Each episode brings you real stories, expert insights, and practical tools to support your goals. Whether you're cutting back, taking a break, or thinking about quitting for good, I'm your host, Mike Hardenbrook, bestselling author, neuroscience enthusiast, and habit change expert. This show is brought to you by Sunnyside, a personalized science-backed program that helps you to drink less through habit change, coaching, and community. And for added support, we now have Sunnyside Med, a clinical option offering access to compounded naltrexone, a prescription medication that reduces cravings and helps prevent binge drinking.
Ready to start your journey? Get your free 15-day trial at sunnyside.co. Dr. Richard Lewis Miller has spent more than 65 years helping people understand the mind, the body, and why we do the things we do. In this episode, he shares a simple but powerful idea. Your thoughts, cravings, and feelings may be loud, but they do not have to be in charge. We talk about how easy it is to get pulled into automatic patterns, why alcohol can become a shortcut for relief, and the question that can create just enough space to choose differently.
Richard, thanks so much for coming on today.
You're welcome. It's lovely to be here with you.
Well, it's a privilege to have this conversation because I rarely get to talk to somebody with the depth of experience that you have, along with very... unique and pioneering ideas. And so I'm really interested to get into that today. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on to share your, what is it, 65 years in clinical practice?
Yeah, about 65 years, Michael.
Incredible. All right. So this is undoubtedly going to be a great episode. Okay. So you often say in your work that the mind is a tool, not your boss. What are the core principles behind that idea?
Well, we grow up believing that everything that we hear in our heads is something that we're meant to hear as if it has almost a divine or magical purpose, sort of like, well, I wouldn't be hearing it if it wasn't important. So I better listen to what my mind says. And I am questioning that entire notion. What I'm saying is the mind is a tool just like the computer, and the computer doesn't tell us what to do, and the mind isn't made to tell us what to do. However, where the mind is different from the computer, is that the computer, if we don't type or talk into it, it stays quiet. The mind is similar in that it has an accumulation of a huge amount of information plus feelings and emotions. However, it does not stay quiet.
It is a self-generating machine. So it will generate ideas, thoughts, pictures, movies, music, colors, you name it. The mind can generate it. And it will. Just like when we go to sleep. We do not know how, most of us, to throw a switch and say, dream, or throw another switch and say, no dreaming tonight. We don't know how to do that. But what I have learned and I'm passing on is that there are switches to throw to turn the mind off. And that is why I'm talking, part of why I'm talking about the mind as a tool. We not only can learn how to turn it off, Michael, we can direct it to think about exactly what we want it to think about. It takes practice, practice, practice. It's a skill, and over time, we can learn to change the channel, we can learn to put the program on that we want, we can learn to direct it to think about topics that we wanna think about, and we can learn to turn it off.
That's why I say the mind is our tool to use, but it's not the boss. It wants to be the boss. It does, but it's not.
It makes total sense. So take me back to this concept that you felt called to, that you needed to define, that you needed to give switches for people to know when to turn it off and when to turn it on. What were you seeing around you that made you think that I need to define this so that people can get better results than maybe they are currently?
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