Case Study
By 9 pm most nights, Jess is exhausted. Like bone-deep exhausted. After all, she owns a boutique clothing shop in which she’s been working since early morning.

But she doesn't go to bed.

Instead, she sits on the couch and scrolls. Instagram, TikTok, news, whatever. Just mindlessly scrolling while her body screams for sleep.

She knows what she's doing. She can feel herself doing it. "I should go to bed," she thinks. And then keeps scrolling for another hour.

Around midnight, she finally forces herself upstairs. Mad at herself. Frustrated, why couldn't she just go to sleep when she knew she needed to?

She lies in bed, angry at herself for staying up. Making it take a while till she falls asleep.

Then 6 am comes, and her alarm goes off, and Jess hits snooze even tho she's got to open the shop.
And she's mad at herself. Again.
It's a cycle that happens on repeat, and Jess couldn’t figure out how to break it.

It's a Thinking Skill
Jess's nightly cycle wasn't about discipline or willpower. It was about how her brain processes the whole situation.
You see, your 28 thinking skills are running in the background, helping you do any task. Including making decisions, organizing, and even listening to this episode.

If a task is a challenge for you to do, it’s a sign of weak thinking skills. In Jess’s case, the weak thinking that was causing her to get into this cycle was understanding reality.

I'm going to walk you through exactly what we did to help Jess get out of this pattern, but first, to see how strong each of your thinking skills is, you’ll want to take the thinking skills assessment (for free!) at lifepixuniversity.com/cf

Understanding Reality
Understanding reality is about understanding what actually is. Often, we try to fight reality, but that doesn't work. When we understand reality, we can work with it.

Jess’s brain was in desperate need to relax each evening, so it would turn to scrolling. The problem was she’d end up scrolling not for 10 or 20 minutes but for way too long. Which meant she’d end up going to sleep late, and it would affect how she’d show up the next day.

Jess would tell herself she’d need to stop scrolling, yet she’d continue to do it every day because she didn’t understand the reality that her nervous system needed to relax before she went to bed.

Just telling herself to stop wasn't actually understanding the reality of what was going on.

Once Jess developed an understanding of reality, she was able to see it was less about the scrolling and more about the regulating. This then helped her replace the scrolling with more nervous regulating techniques, and she’d naturally scroll less.

Here are three practical exercises I used with Jess to improve Understanding Reality:

1: Name what's actually happening, not what you wish was happening.

Jess kept telling herself, "I should just go to bed."
But that's not reality - that's a wish.

Reality was: her nervous system was wired and needed to wind down before it could sleep. Scrolling was her brain's attempt to do that.

Saying out loud, “My nervous system needs to wind down before it can sleep,” helped Jess make a tea and read a book instead, because all of a sudden her brain was focused on what it needed to do.


2: Look for the need behind the behavior.

Every behavior that looks irrational on the surface is usually meeting a real need underneath. Jess wasn't scrolling because she was lazy or undisciplined. She was scrolling because her brain needed to decompress.
When you catch yourself doing something you "shouldn't" be doing, get curious instead of critical. Ask: what need is this behavior actually trying to meet?

Sulking on the coach?Maybe your brain needs some endorphins. A walk outdoors will help with that.

Avoiding the work? Maybe your brain is overwhelmed by how much it has to do. Start by just prioritizing the tasks.

P.S. There's also often a thinking skill involved because emotions and cognition are two sides of the same coin.

3: Ask "What is this telling me?" instead of "What is wrong with me?"

Jess spent months being mad at herself for the cycle. But anger at yourself is not understanding reality - it's avoiding it. Every pattern your brain runs is giving you information.
The exhaustion, the scrolling, the frustration - those are data points. Use it to help you!!

What is this pattern trying to show me? is a great question to use to help yourself actually understand reality.


Cheers to Peak Brain Performance!