Greetings, greetings, and welcome. Welcome back. It is Monday. But it's not just any Monday, it is Making Moves Monday. That's right. Here on the Sweet Spot, we don't call Monday Monday. We call it Making Moves Monday because you've got to make your move this week. And I'm here to help you. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dr. Derek Sweet. I'm a board certified psychiatrist and I'm the host of The Sweet Spot. I work with elite, high-performance athletes and entertainers. I work with high-level executives. But you know what I really like? I enjoy sitting right here with you. Across the coffee table. Just talking about life. Trying to figure out how do we break through? How do we get to our next level? How do we live the life we love? Yeah, that's it. That's what the sweet spot's about. We take science, soul, and success and we blend it up. And this week, our theme is break the barrier. Break the barrier, absolutely. That's what we're gonna do all week. We're gonna look as to how can we break barriers? Breaking barriers is a thing. And look, there are moments in history when humanity ran into a wall. If you study history and you look back, you'll see that humanity has always run into a wall. A wall of sound. A wall of prejudice. A wall of gravity. A wall of biology, a wall of doubt. You name it. And for a long time, when experts run or ran into these walls, what would we hear? It can't be done. This can't be done. It's impossible. And then someone breaks through. Someone breaks through the wall. This week, sweet spotters, we are studying those moments. Those moments when someone dared to do the impossible. Someone broke through a wall. And we're going to learn from them. We're going to draw lessons from them. Not to admire them, but to understand them. Because barriers, you see, barriers don't exist in in isolation. They come in clusters. And this week we're going to focus on various breakthroughs where folks broke through several barriers that were happening at once. Today's episode is called Breaking the Sound Barrier. When turbulence feels like a wall. I'll repeat, breaking the sound barrier when turbulence feels like a wall. Now, lest you think I'm only talking about airlines and aviation, barriers don't just exist in aviation, they exist everywhere. In baseball stadiums, in basketball arenas, in space programs, wherever you on the in the hospital, the law, the law firm, at work, wherever you work. Barriers don't just exist in physical spaces, they exist in our nervous system as well. And that's a point we're gonna just get right into. Because barriers exist in our habits. Did you know that your habits could be a barrier? Another obvious place that barriers love to live and exist is in our fears. What are you afraid of? What gives you anxiety? A third place is in exhaustion. When you're tired, when you're fatigued. Did you know that that could be a barrier too? A barrier could also exist in the quiet story you keep telling yourself about what you can and cannot do. You see, if the mind isn't examined and controlled in some way, form, or fashion, if we don't get a hold of these thoughts. Oh, they'll identify barriers for us and they'll even create barriers and they'll perpetuate barriers. So on Monday, we're gonna look at something that we haven't looked at, which is the sound barrier. When was the last time you thought about the sound barrier? I know I didn't, but I prepared it for you today. Oh yeah. What happens in the brain when pressure builds up before the breakthrough? That's what we're gonna try to figure out. We have to figure out what's going on inside our heads when we feel pressure. And then how does that lead to a breakthrough or not lead to a breakthrough? Because here's the truth every barrier feels permanent until it isn't. Now let's go back to the sky for a minute. Uh let's go back to 1947. For years, pilots believed there was a literal wall in the atmosphere, and as aircrafts approached the speed of sound, they shook violently back then. The planes buffeted, the instruments were malfunctioning, it felt like super unsteady and unstable. So the feeling was that when you hit Mach 1, when the plane was going fast enough, the aircraft would literally come apart and literally tear itself apart. They call that back then the sound barrier. But there wasn't a wall, there was no wall, it wasn't an actual wall, it was instability, and this got proven in 1947 when Chuck Yeager, the pilot, climbed into a Bell X1 and literally flew through it. Now, two days earlier, Chuck had fallen off a horse and broke two ribs. He said nothing because he didn't want to be as a be grounded as a pilot. Every breath he took must have hurt. You know when he breaks ribs, that's not a that's very painful. And he had to overcome that, and then he would saw off a broom handle to help latch the cockpit door because he couldn't even move his arms properly enough to to maneuver in there. So when his aircraft began to shake near Mach 1, that wasn't just aerodynamic turbulence, that was physical pain he was feeling, layered on fear, layered on uncertainty, as he was going through what everybody believed was going to be a disaster, where his plane was just gonna come apart because he was coming up against the impossible sound barrier that no plane could go past, because that was the belief. Now we can't know every thought that crossed pilot Chuck Yeager's mind in 1947. We we don't know what was in his mind, obviously, but we can assume that his body would have activated because that's what bodies do when they hit limits or thresholds, when you hit barriers, when you approach something that's uncertain, a bold conversation, a leadership step, a task that feels really big, maybe it's a health problem or a health decision, something that risks is involved. Your brain doesn't pause for a philosophical reflection, my friend. It just activates protection. And you know by now, if you've been listening to the sweet spot, what part of the brain is going to be flagging danger? You got that right. It's the amygdala. We talk about the amygdala being the threat detection center here on the brain, here on the sweet spot, and uh, it's in your brain. It it's uh it's a wonderful friend to help you out of danger, but it can be a real pain if you're not in danger and you're just dealing with some anxiety or unrealistic fears. And when the amygdala fires, it's just doing its job in your brain to help you navigate what it thinks is a major threat to your survival. And just because I want to be complete with you, the amygdala isn't working by itself. It's not that just the amygdala, it's not just that the amygdala fires in your brain. No, those neurons are just part of it. There's something called the HPA axis that it works very closely with that we haven't talked a whole lot about. We've talked about it a little, but there's something called the HPA axis inside your body that's tied into what this amygdala is going to do, right? So when the amygdala fires, and give me a minute, I'm just gonna run you through this. The amygdala fires in your brain, and this HPA axis, which is your hypothalamus, your pituitary gland, and your adrenal gland, they form this axis, right? They they're like a team. The HPA team, they get lit up too. And so the hypothalamus signals that's the H. It signals the pituitary, that's the P. And then the pituitary signals the adrenal glands. That's the A, the HPA access, the hypothalamus signaling the pituitary, and the pituitary signaling the adrenals, and then you know what gets into your bloodstream? That's where your adrenaline is coming from, my friend. Yeah, your adrenaline and your cortisol, the stress hormone, they get released into your bloodstream after this amygdala says, Hey, we have a barrier here, we have a threat here, we have a problem here. And when that cortisol and adrenaline get into your bloodstream, let me tell you what happens. Your heart rate increases, your muscles, they tighten, your breathing starts to get shallow and quick, and your focus, your eye, you just narrow your focus because you're ready to either fight or you're ready to run, you're ready to take some kind of action to protect yourself. All from this amygdala and the HPA team working together to help you. Why does this system exist? It's to help us, it's to help us survive, it mobilizes energy. That cortisol and adrenaline that's energy, it sharpens your reaction time, it prepares you to move. If you're in a competition, if you're doing some task that requires a lot of energy and concentration, and you're under pressure, this HPA access, this amygdala system, it's gonna be firing. And it helps you in dangerous situations, it helps you in competitive situations. It's good to know what's going on. So you're not just reacting, you can say, Hey, my amygdala is firing, hey, my HP access is is really kicking in today. All right, you now you know. But here's the thing: the same system that can make you strong and give you survival skills and help you fight off lions, tigers, and beards and all those things, is the same system that could make you anxious as you don't know what. Because you hear a sound around the corner and you don't know what it is, and it's the same system it's gonna kick in. And if you don't have a control on it, man, you got problems. So, our boy, our guy in 1947, alright, Chuck Yeager, 1947, alright, he's in this Bell X-1 aircraft, he's trying to break through the sound barrier. Now you know his amygdala was firing. You had you know, either you could only imagine what his heart was doing, and you now know how. You now know why. You see, the thing is, that's the right time for the amygdala and for the HPA access to fire when you face a barrier. Like it's a real barrier, it's a real threat, it's really the airplane shaking, okay. But here's the thing: you've got to interpret that correctly when it happens. When your amygdala fires and your HPA access is going nuts, you gotta interpret that a little bit. You gotta interpret that. Most people interpret the surge as a stop sign when they feel it. But biologically, for top competitors, for top pilots, for guy like Jaeger, uh, this guy running through this thing here. Oh, they're interpreting it differently. Chuck Yeager wasn't interpreting this feeling as, oh, I gotta run, I gotta jump out of the plane. No, no, no. A clutch athlete when he feels his amygdala or her amygdala firing and the HP axis going, oh, they're not running away from that. No, they're interpreting it differently. They're not interpreting the surge of cortisol, the surge of adrenaline as a stop sign. You feel that anxiety, you feel that pressure, but they call it fuel. Yeah. The turbulence doesn't mean destruction in this case. He interpreted differently. That means some kind of activation. So that's what happens in situations where you feel fear, you feel anxiety, you feel stress. Could it be that it's just your major hypothalamic uh pituitary adrenal axis, your HPA access team just doing its thing? And could all of what you're feeling the cold hands, the shaky feet, the shallow breathing, all that is that just activating you? Could you use that? Could you, if you're in a game, can you actually reinterpret that and say, hey, I'm not gonna call this fear, I'm gonna call this activation. I'm ready to fight, I'm ready to do my thing. Just allowing your PFC, your prefrontal cortex, the other side of your brain, the thinker, to reinterpret what you're feeling can help you break through the barrier. And this is where ancient wisdom supports what neuroscience is explaining here. In the message Bible 43.2, it says this when you're in over your head, I'll be there with you. And when you're in the rough waters, you will not go down. Now, the importance of this is that it's not saying that things are gonna be calm. I wish it did. I wish it said something like, Hey, don't worry, everything is gonna be great. Don't worry, there'll be no problems. Don't worry, life is just gonna work out perfectly for you, and you ain't got no problems today. I wish it said that. But no, no, no. It said, when you're in over your head, I'll be there with you. When you're in rough waters, you won't go down. Now, hmm. Yeah, it's a promise, but it doesn't tell you that the conditions are calm. It promises steadiness within the rough times. And what does that mean for us? What does that mean for you? It means that the presence of something steadying in the middle of the turbulence gives you evidence that you're not falling, that you're not crashing. Maybe you're getting evidence here that you're crossing into something significant, which is what was going on with Jaeger as he was taking this shaky plane past what was the uh impossible barrier through the sound barrier. That's what he was doing in 1947. Look it up. I think it's October 14th, 1947. Look up what he did there, it changed how we would fly forever because he was brave enough to overcome his amygdala HPA axis, because he was willing to suffer through the turbulence and not interpret turbulence as the end. Just because things are shaky, just because things aren't going well, is no reason to stop. That's how he was thinking. And I don't know what his faith or his belief was, I have no idea. But I'm telling you that sometimes what you need is a mental or spiritual anchor that tells you, just like what the ancient wisdom just said here, that look, if you're in over your head, I'll be there with you. If you're in some rough waters, you're not gonna go down, you're not alone. Just that feeling of something bigger than you anchoring you, maybe good enough to calm you or Megdila down a bit, so that you can stay online, so that you can get through the barrier. Yeah, in Buddhism, they teach us something similar. The Dhammapada, in Buddhism, an ancient collection of Buddhist teachings, the Dhammapada, it teaches this mental discipline. Verse 81 of the Dhammapada says, just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not moved by praise or blame. Different tradition, similar insight. The storm doesn't affect you one way or the other. What the storm does is it reveals your formation. Are you a rock? Because if you're a rock and you're in rock formation, if you're holding the line, listen to what we did last week or the week before, whatever. If you're holding the line, you're solid. The storm is not gonna shake you. In fact, the storm doesn't disqualify you at all. The storm, the turbulence, the shaking as you cross through the whatever barrier you're you're you're going through, it's gonna reveal your formation. That's what it does, it doesn't disqualify you. The storm reveals your formation. Jaeger, our friendly pilot, 1947, breaking through the sound barrier, did not eliminate the shaking on the plane. He endured it long enough to pass through it. That's what he had to do in the physical realm. Do you get what I'm saying, right? Because in a way, he did that physically, but you get what we have to do mentally, you get what we have to do psychologically, you get what you have to do emotionally, you get what you have to do spiritually. Don't back down, endure the shaking, get through it. Jaeger did, and he broke the sound barrier. Wow, how powerful is that? Somehow you have to take what's happening, take the pressure, and convert it, change it, make it work for you. Like that's what he did. That's what breaking through a barrier involves turning it, turning to it and facing it. Marcus Aurelius in Meditations, stoic philosopher, stoic writer, had this amazing quote. And it's really good for us here on a Making Moves Monday to understand this one. The blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that's thrown into it. I want that to land. I want that one to land with us this Making Moves Monday as we think through how we're gonna break through barriers. Maybe we have to be like a fire. Let me let me let me repeat that. The blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that's thrown into it. You know what I'm gonna say? Everything is thrown at it. Sometimes things are just, you know, when they say everything but the kitchen sink is thrown at you. Some days you have everything and the kitchen sink thrown at you. But if you're a blazing fire, hey, you can make flame and brightness out of whatever they throw at you today. Pressure, right? Pressure thrown at a fire becomes brightness. Look, pain was thrown at Jaeger with his broken ribs as he was trying to break through the sound barrier. Pain thrown at Jaeger became history. And stress thrown at you, sweet spotter, can become one of two things. Paralysis or performance. The barrier wasn't the speed of sound as they were thinking back in 1947. It was the interpretation they had of it. It was the interpretation of the instability that planes felt when they got to a certain speed, and they called it a barrier. What are you calling it? When the turbulence hits, when it doesn't work out like you want it to work out. When you get into these arguments, or you get into this like negative criticism, or you get the bad news. The barrier wasn't speed back then. It was the interpretation of the instability. A stoic writer Seneca wrote, We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Let that land. Just think about that. I know that's true for me. Cuz goodness knows my imagination. Holy cow, man. I can think about all the potential disasters. They used to call me the disaster police when we would go on cruises, my friends, and and and they were because you know I would be on the cruise, you know, I'm a physician, so I brought all kinds of medications. I brought, I mean, I was thinking, like, hey, you know, this this could go around, that could go around. You know, you can get to that place where the imagination just takes over. They were like, well, dude, why are you even on the cruise, man? Just watch it, watch a boat on TV, you're safer in your living room. And I was like, you know what? That is a possibility. But nah, nah, nah. You don't want your imagination to run the show, right? Because you can imagine a thousand different things. There's so many what-if monsters. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if those are what if monsters? And many of them are not even real. So when Seneca writes, we suffer more in our imagination than the reality. What he's talking about is a barrier issue with the imagination. Don't let your imagination, imagine fears, be the barriers that make you not achieve today on making moves Monday. And when you are even in imagining when your imagination is creating a fear, your body still activates. Your mind assigns a meaning to that. And that meaning, whatever meaning you give it, is going to determine whether you're going to back down or you're going to move through. That's a decision. So today, sweet spotter, I want you to examine one area of turbulence in your life. We're going to crack through one sound barrier today. Where the sound barrier is just really turbulence, it's not a barrier. Is it career uncertainty? Is it financial instability? Is it a health worry or anxiety? Is something going on in your relationship that's creating all this turbulence? Is your leadership under question or are you having problems in the leadership role that you're in? What is it? Sometimes it's just the grief, like if you've lost someone, it can be so overwhelming that you can't get anything done. Just notice what it is. Maybe it's the grind of having to get up one more time and face this drudgery or whatever it is that you're dealing with. Notice what your body is doing when you think of it that way. When you feel the anxiety, when you feel the stress, it's not weakness, that's just your HPA axis pumping the cortisol, pumping the adrenaline in because it's getting a signal from the amygdala, because the amygdala interpreted the environment as um a barrier, right? And and this can be a threat. And the question becomes will you let this surge that the HPA axis is doing and the amygdala is doing control you, or will you regulate it and continue past it? And that's what we're talking about today. Here's the practical move when activation rises, when you feel that surge in your body of anxiety, stress, whatever it is, I want you to take a deep breath. I'm telling you, this sounds like nonsense, but it is so important because you are regulated by your nervous system, and your nervous system will respond when you take a deep breath in, and then a slow, long exhale out. Trust me when I tell you that that long exhale out will relax you. It will send a message to your amygdala, it'll send a message to your vagus nerve, your parasympathetic nervous system, it will send a message to your inner machinery that you've got this. Lengthen your exhale, relax your jaw, unhunch your shoulders right now. Drop those shoulders, relax, let go for a second. You don't even know how tight you are. Okay? Widen your gaze, don't be so narrowly focused right now. Don't let this amygdala like put you in threat mode. It's just turbulence, we'll get through it. I do a lot of flying, a lot of flying, right? And um, man, I've flown a lot over the years, and I used to hate turbulence, but then I met a friend, and he's a pilot, and I was sitting with him, uh, he was in the back of the plane. Don't worry, he wasn't the same pilot flying the plane. We were on a plane where there were real pilots, other pilots flying too. But we were in the back, and uh, I was telling him how terrified I was because the plane was really shaking, it was really bad. You ever been on an airplane and it looks you're like, all right, this is it, we're going down. The plane had dropped a few feet. It was just a lot to take in, and I'm not I'm not good with that kind of stuff. And he told me that this is actually common, pilots expect it, it's actually not a bad thing, it's okay. Planes are built for the same. I mean, I was just looking at how he was talking to me. I mean, I'm I I was holding on, my jaw was tight, everything I'm telling you to do, like I was shallow breathing, because I was interpreting this as a really big barrier, like this could be it. And he had a different interpretation. His prefrontal cortex was online, my amygdala was online. We had two different experiences, and that's what I'm trying to get across to you. Your nervous system has to be like under our control, under your control. We have to control it. You have to tell your nervous system this is a challenge, it's not a catastrophe. And then what you're doing is you're converting the protection mode. You're converting the problem into a protection, you're making the obstacle the way. That's the Ryan Holliday book we've been talking about every week. We talk about Ryan Holliday in this book called Obstacle is the way. You gotta so you see, Ryan Holliday put it best: the impediment to the action advances the action. What stands in the way becomes the way. And that's how you have to be. The shaking is not proof that you should stop. Jaeger taught us that from breaking the sound barrier. The shaking is proof that you gotta get through this. It may be proof that you're near Mach 1, that you're getting ready to go to your next level. So this week, as we close, we are breaking barriers. Just like Chuck Yeager in 1947, October 14th, broke through the sound barrier. This week we're breaking through our barriers too. Not by pretending they don't exist. He didn't turn the plane around or try to go under it or go around or go back. No, we're not gonna pretend our barriers don't exist. We're gonna understand what they are. We're gonna call them thresholds. You're at the threshold of going to another level of speed. You're at the threshold of getting your breakthrough. You're at the threshold of this determining your own strength, seeing that you have control over this. And when the pressure is thrown at you, you will be the fire. You will be the fire, you will be that fire that makes it bright, that burns, right? That burns and makes it so bright, but blazing fire that makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. That's who you are this week. You are fire this week, okay? You're fire, be that fire. You know, when your prefrontal cortex accepts this and your amygdala hears it, and you're like, oh, you're throwing this at me, I'm gonna consume it with my fire, you're totally different. You've crossed the threshold. You just did that with me right now. You're listening to the sweet spot. It is making moves Monday. If this helped you recognize what it feels like, what it feels like when a wall or barrier is at your doorstep, and you recognize that this is not a barrier, it's just turbulence, and I can get through it. I'm gonna hang on, I'm gonna hold on, I'm gonna persevere. If you felt like that, this is the time to subscribe to this channel, to this podcast, and and it's totally free. There's no barrier here for that. You can just subscribe and also share it with someone who is standing at the edge of their own threshold and may not even recognize it. You will hear this week that people talk to you about walls, about barriers, and you can help them reinterpret it as thresholds that they can get through. Thank you for listening to The Sweet Spot. Tomorrow we're gonna go deeper. We're gonna we're gonna crack DNA tomorrow. We're gonna examine how the brain's um default mode network, another system in the brain, right, has some kind of internal story that messes with our identity. We're gonna tackle that tomorrow. We're not gonna be limited by anything, we're not gonna let biology limit us, we're not gonna let psychology limit us, we're not gonna get let anything limit us this week because this is the week we are breaking barriers. I'll see you tomorrow for Take Action Tuesday. For science, for soul, and for success. This is the sweet spot.