MMS_JuneEp02 - What We Absorbed_Audio
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Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:00:00] The brain doesn't just remember facts, it remembers feelings. And the feelings that got attached to money, safety, fear, guilt, pride, shame, freedom, control, those feelings got coded, encoded deeply into us early, quietly, and folks, without even our consent
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. Hi, I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness medicine. And we are in the middle of something this month, something quieter than most people talk about, something that doesn't always have a name, but tends to have a feeling attached to it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This month's series is called Enough: What We Earn, How We Rest, and [00:01:00] Whether We Deserve It. And the through line, the thing connecting every single episode, is the relationship, the one we have with money. Not a spreadsheet version, not a budgeting version, the internal one, the one that was shaped long before we ever had a paycheck, a credit card, or a financial decision to make.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Last week, we looked at the relationship itself, how it operates underneath the surface, and how it influences things we don't even connect to money, and why most of us have never actually sat down and looked at a relationship with money This week, we go back further. Because before there was a relationship to examine with money, there was the beginning of the relationship with money, the origin, a starting point, a set of impressions or feelings and conclusions that got laid down quietly in [00:02:00] the homes we grew up in and in the dynamics we watched, in the things that were said, and the things that weren't said, in our religion and culture, all these things with which we were raised, before we had the language or even the awareness to question any of it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Well, that's where we're gonna go today. And here's something I've been thinking about. We spend a lot of time trying to change our relationship with money. We get new budgets, new habits, and new strategies, new apps that track every dollar and then send notifications, and then all of a sudden, we get little notifications about everything we've overspent on, including coffee.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And folks, man, a lot of people spend a lot of money on coffee. And, and those things do help, these systems and processes. They really do. But what most of them skip entirely is the part that actually is running the show, the part that's already formed before we were even old enough [00:03:00] to open a bank account, before we had opinions, and before we had options.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's a field in neuroscience called emotional memory, and what it tells us, in the terms that most humans seem possible, is this: the brain doesn't just remember facts, it remembers feelings, and the feelings that had got attached to money, safety, fear, guilt, pride, shame, freedom, control. Those feelings got coded, encoded deeply into us early, quietly, and folks, without even our consent.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: They just happen. And here's the thing about encoded patterns: They don't wait to be invited. They just show up. And it shows up in how we might react when a bill arrives. It shows up in how we feel we need to check our balance, [00:04:00] or in whether we can actually enjoy what we've earned, or whether something just won't let us settle into.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Like, we get all these little behaviors in and around encoded patterns around money. Most of us didn't learn about money through formal instruction. We learned it through absorption, through watching, through feeling the temperature in a room change when the topic of money comes up, through what was freely given to us or what required negotiation from us, through who held the financial power and who didn't, and what that meant for everyone else.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: We didn't choose any of it, but we're still living inside a lot of it, and that's exactly what today is about. We're gonna talk about absorption. Let me paint a picture here. Imagine you are approximately seven years old. You're not thinking about money. You're thinking about whether there's going to be a snack after school, or whether your best friend can go to the pool with you on [00:05:00] Saturday, or whether wearing a red sock and a purple sock together counts as a fashion statement because honestly, at seven years old, it kind of does.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But somewhere in that background, I mean the actual background, like wallpaper you stop seeing because it's always there, these things are happening, and conversations are being had, and tones are shifting, and certain topics made by the adults in the room just quietly become an issue, whether it's a tension or a subject gets changed too quickly around money and you see that maybe this isn't a comfortable topic.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the thing, when you're seven, you don't have a framework for any of it. But your brain, your brain is taking notes, and it's not the kinds of notes that you put in a notebook. It's the kind that gets filed underneath everything labeled, "This is how the world works." [00:06:00] And then it stays there, mostly untouched for decades.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Now, that's not a flaw in this system. That's actually the brain doing what it's designed to do, learning from our environment, cataloging what feels safe and what doesn't, building a map on how things operate so you can navigate life without having to figure everything out from scratch every single day.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The problem isn't that the brain learned. The problem is that it learned from whatever was in the room at the time, and none of us got to curate what was in that room when we're children I grew up watching a particular dynamic around money that I didn't have words for up until much later. My mother grew up in a large family with seven siblings, and her father owned a gas station, which meant that they had more than a lot of their neighbors did in Londonderry, Ohio.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But more didn't mean lavish. It meant that her [00:07:00] mother was exceptionally skilled at making things stretch. They had some income, much more than a lot of people in that area And her mother got really creative to make things stretch and giving a sense that there was always enough. And my mom said she never did feel like she lacked for growing up for things or stuff, and I believe her because her mother was that good.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But she often says a lot of unique things about how her mother stretched food or stretched clothing. She was, you know, really good at it. But here's what's interesting. That skill, that stretching, the managing, the quiet vigilance over every dollar, that got passed down, too. Not as a lesson, not as a conversation, just as that's the way things were done.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That was the tone of the household, the unspoken understanding that money was something you held very carefully, [00:08:00] not something you moved through freely. Asking for money, even for something as small as a few dollars to go grab a snack at the pool, carried a lot of weight to it when I was growing up. My mom knew how to stretch things, not because anybody made it dramatic, just because that's what she did.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's how she absorbed things, and that's how patterns work. They don't need a speech, and they don't need repetition and proximity. They just are. And guess what? I absorbed it without realizing I was absorbing anything at all. So fast-forward to my adult life, my mother's tendency and shifts were mine.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the deal. I'm a physician. I earn well. I don't have an actual financial crisis in sight, and that's a blessing I am deeply grateful for. But here's the fun thing. The moment my paycheck would arrive, I had already mentally spent it before it [00:09:00] cleared. I had divided it up. I had allocated it. I had shifted into different accounts for bills paid, retirements.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Everything is accounted for. I separated things out. I started a car account for my future car. I had a savings account for vacations. I just divvied it away. And here's the thing. There wasn't really a problem. And for the record, I wasn't a mess or, and I wasn't struggling. But my nervous system didn't know that because I'd engineered the appearance of scarcity so consistently that my brain had no evidence to the contrary.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I was essentially lying to myself with spreadsheets I'm really organized, and here's the deal. It was something I learned that you had to stretch things out, and that scarcity became my modus operandum to work hard. It came from motivating to me. So even though I'm in [00:10:00] abundance and I have these accounts for these things, my checking account, the second that the check would come in, got divvied up so it always looked low, and that kept me motivated.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So that was my little emotional memory coming from my mother and then coming from her mother. And I say this with complete affection for the version of me that thought that this was a reasonable strategy. That part of me was just working with what I absorbed. We all are. Let me tell you about someone I worked with.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: She'd done everything right, and I mean that with every single drop of sarcasm because here's the deal. She had genuinely, legitimately done everything right. She had a great career, a real one, the kind you get up on Monday morning and you actually don't mind going in because the work means so much to her.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: She was contributing financially to a life that she and her husband had built together, a house, a future, children, and [00:11:00] a future that looked from the outside exactly what you're supposed to be looking like. Her husband managed the finances, and here's the thing. That's not a red flag. That's just how they operated.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A lot of couples divide responsibilities that way. One person might handle the insurance. One might handle the taxes. One might take care of the bills. One person knows where the spare key is, and one person knows where the money goes, and it's not naive. It's just a division of labor. It's a practical arrangement between two people who are supposed to be a team, and she trusted him completely.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The way you trust the floor to hold you up when you step out in the morning. You don't think about it. You just step. She trusted him, and then she found out about the affair, and then came the divorce, and then in a particular kind of slow-motion devastation [00:12:00] She discovered that while she had been depositing her paycheck, going to work, living her life, trusting the floor, he had been building something else entirely, not for both of them.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: He had a retirement account, a very healthy retirement account, built in no small part with the money that had moved through their shared life, and she was the higher breadwinner. She had nothing. Not because she didn't work, not because she hadn't contributed, but because she had trusted someone with a map, and he had been drawing a different destination the whole time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: She told me later what haunted her the most wasn't even necessarily the betrayal of the affair. It was the realization that her trust, the very thing she considered a top virtue, a sign of a healthy partnership, had been the mechanism of her own [00:13:00] financial erasure. She didn't have a savings account. She didn't have a retirement account after all these years of being married.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Think about that for a second. The thing she'd done right, her trust, her relationships, her marriage, was the thing that cost her the most, and she had children watching this all the time, children who were absorbing the temperature of those rooms, the kitchen table conversations, the quiet panic of a mother doing math on what came next, without anyone handing them a framework for what they were witnessing Now she has a stable career, a new marriage, one with actual mutual love and support, the kind that doesn't require her to leave a financial backdoor open just in case out of fear.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But by every measurable standard, she is safe. And yet, she had to learn to take vacations, not because she didn't want them, she desperately wanted them, but because in her [00:14:00] previous marriage, getting him to pack a bag and actually show up for a trip with her and her kids was a negotiation. It was hard. It didn't happen much.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: In its own small defeat, more often than not, she just stopped expecting being able to go on vacation. She stopped planning for it. She put vacations under the category of things that sounds nice, but don't really happen for us. Well, with her new partner, now they can. This is a partner now that says yes.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Now there's a budget and a bandwidth and an organization that they both collaborate with, and he shows up for her, and she's having to learn consciously, deliberately, one beach trip at a time, how to actually enjoy it now. But here's what her nervous system learned. Not a metaphor, not a figure of speech even, as a deeply encoded biologic conclusion, her nervous system says, "Don't trust when it comes to money.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Do not trust." Not because she decided that's how [00:15:00] she wanted to believe, not because she sat down one afternoon and reasoned her way to that position, but because her brain did what brains do. It took the most painful, most significant financial experience of her life and filed it under, "This is what happens when you let your guard down And now that file opens automatically every time, even when the situation in front of her has nothing in common with the one that created it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Folks, that's emotional memory doing exactly what it's designed to do, to protect her, even when there's nothing left to protect her from. So let's look what we actually have here. Three completely different people, three completely different lives, three completely different ways of arriving at the same exhausting destination.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: A woman who grew up watching her mother quietly perform what I can only describe as a financial miracle on a daily basis, my [00:16:00] mother, her seven siblings, a careful budget, enough love and resources to make everybody feel like it's enough. Nobody sat her down and said, "Money is something you have to hold carefully and guard with everything you have."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It was just Tuesday. It was just how the air felt in their house. Now, take the other woman, a woman who did everything right, contributed, trusted, built life on good faith along someone who was apparently building a slightly different one on the side. This woman surfaced from a divorce with children to raise, no retirement to speak of, and a nervous system that had learned something it was never going to unlearn quietly Do not trust when it comes to money.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Do not trust. And then there's me, a physician's daughter in a small town, which sounds straightforward until you've lived it. What came with that, alongside whatever genuine advantages it provided me, was a particular kind of [00:17:00] social tax that nobody warned me about. People made assumptions about me and about who I was, about what I had, because my dad was a doctor in a small town, about that I was spoiled, whether I learned anything or just earned it because I was just part of the family.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Here's the thing. I was just a little quiet introvert who desperately wanted to be liked and had absolutely no idea how to make that happen when so many people had already decided who I was before I opened my mouth. So I learned to make the abundance invisible, not as a strategy, just as a survival. And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, I became a physician myself, which meant the abundance got bigger, and the urge to make it invisible got bigger right along with it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's how it actually worked in practice. The moment my paycheck would hit, and I mean the actual moment, like I could feel it arriving, [00:18:00] there would be this immediate rush of giddiness, of genuine joy, a little bit of relief, the kind of feeling that makes you want to do a small, undignified, happy dance in your kitchen because you've worked so hard for that money, and here it is, and it's real, and it's approximately forty-five seconds of everything that's wonderful.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And then my monopoly brain kicked in And here's how it went. "Ooh, we get to play with this. Let's put some over here. Let's move some over here. Maybe this account. Oh, maybe this account. Oh, what about the vacation fund, the car fund, the..." Fill in the gaps, right? I would divvy it up, shuffle it around, watch it move with very specific sense of satisfaction and control that I didn't really understand at the time, but I absolutely recognize now.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: There was something genuinely fun about it. It was like being the banker in Monopoly, except the money was real and [00:19:00] the stakes were significantly higher, and nobody was buying Boardwalk. And here's the thing, then I'd go to bed, right? And wake up in the morning, and I'd look at the checking account, and the checking account would look right back at me and say, like, "What'd you do?"
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because now it's like hardly anything in my checking account, and I just got paid. My brain wasn't processing all the other accounts. It was processing scarcity that I had intentionally, the day before, created. And the adult version of me, the responsible, board-certified, fully licensed adult, would look at that balance and feel this wave of frustration and irritability, almost like I'd done something wrong, like I had overspent, like I needed to course-correct immediately and get back to work and refill what I had apparently just squandered.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Except I hadn't squandered anything. I had just moved it. It was all still there. Just [00:20:00] put where I could not see it. But that didn't matter to my nervous system. The nervous system saw a low balance, and it filed it under danger, danger, danger. And then my inner adult would tap that inner child on the head and say, "Look what you did.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You created scarcity again. Time to get working." And the cycle would begin again. Now, I will tell you that this pattern showed up in more areas of my life than just the checking account. And for most of my adult life, I had what I could only describe as a footwear situation. You see, I wear a whopping size two children's shoe, or a size four women's adult, on a good day, if I can find it, if the brands even carry them, which most of them do not.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if you have never tried to find professional adult non-light-up shoes that didn't have pink on them, well, let me paint you a picture. The children's shoe aisle is [00:21:00] enthusiastic. It commits fully to its aesthetic. There's pink, there's glitter, and there are the light-up shoes when you walk. Which, I will be honest, I found genuinely delightful in a way at work with my scrubs.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: For years, I wore light-up shoes, and it got a lot of giggles and laughs. But here's the thing. Meanwhile, my sister, blessed with a completely normal size six and a half, had been floating through life in beautiful, professional, grown-up shoes that came in her size at every single store on the planet. It was casual for her.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It was normal for her, like her feet were supposed to be like that, and I was envious. But then Zappos arrived, and if you don't know about Zappos online store, whoo, I heard angels singing, literally angels singing, because suddenly, suddenly there was an entire website of adult shoes in my size [00:22:00] with free shipping and free returns and twenty-four-hour delivery I went a little hog wild.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'm not gonna lie. The shoes would arrive, I would try them on, I would feel a particular joy of a person who had spent my whole life, like 40 years, in light-up children's sneakers, finally wearing something on my feet that belonged on an adult. I wouldn't wear dresses because I didn't have shoes that didn't look like children's shoes.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So I'd get these brand-new shoes that looked like adult, mini version of adult's, but adult shoes, and I'd put them in my closet where they would live practically in witness protection for several days because I had adult shoes. And then the Visa bill would arrive, and I would look at it and think, "Oh. Oh, no."[00:23:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And the adult in me would tap the child on the head again and say, "Look what you did. Time to send some back." So I'd return them out of guilt, out of the sight of the balance, out of the very specific, very familiar feeling of having created scarcity where scarcity didn't actually need to exist. But here's the part that makes the whole thing make sense, because it does make sense once you see it clearly.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I had spent so many years unable to find shoes that fit, so many years feeling dowdy and unprofessional in footwear that wasn't designed for me because they were kids', so many years watching my sister look polished and put together while I was quietly doing my best in whatever I could find. And when access finally arrived, when Zappos showed up like a gift from whatever deity is responsible for tiny feet, my nervous system did not respond with, "Wonderful, now I can shop thoughtfully and [00:24:00] buy what I need."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Oh, no. It responded with, "Get it now. Get it now. Get it now while you can. You don't know when this might disappear." So I'd buy the same shoe in three colors just in case because what if they discontinued it? What if next season it's gone? What if this was the last time? And that's not irresponsibility.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's a nervous system that learned scarcity, that learned access is temporary, that learned if something fits emotionally, financially, literally, you hold onto it with both hands because the evidence of your life suggests it won't always be available. All right, so we talked about three completely different people, three completely different stories, and the same thing running underneath it all.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Our brain found an environment. It literally took every little bits and pieces of our [00:25:00] history and filed them under this is how the world works, and then we begin operating from those conclusions as if they are permanent facts about reality, not temporary observations, not working theories, fact. And here's the part that makes emotional memory so particularly fascinating.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It doesn't update automatically. You can change everything, a new city, a new career, a new partner, a new chapter, a new journal with a new font, and the emotional memory just comes with you. It's packed neatly into your carry-on, and your nervous system is never gonna let that bag out of its sight, no matter where you go.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's ready to be applied to whatever situation is in front of you, whether or not that situation has anything in common with the one that's created it. The woman whose mother stretched seven children's needs across a careful budget with the kind of skill that [00:26:00] deserves an award, my grandmother, she can be earning six figures and still feel a quiet internal flinch when she spends money on something that isn't strictly necessary.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not because she couldn't afford it, but because somewhere in her nervous system, spending freely still carries the ghost of a household that simply wasn't an option. My mother still carries that from her mother, and she taught me that. The woman who lost her financial footing in a divorce, who now has a stable career, a genuinely loving new marriage partner, and one that actually takes vacations with her, she's still having to learn one beach trip at a time how to relax and enjoy it, how to let herself receive something good without waiting for the floor to give out on her again.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because the last time she felt this safe, it cost her everything, and her nervous system filed that under permanent policy, not an [00:27:00] isolated incident, until she works it out and pays attention. And me, I can look at my bank account and see actual evidence of financial health and still feel the pull to redistribute it to all corners where I can't see it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I still have that because visible abundance still trips a little something weird in me, a little old wire, some early conclusion drawn by a quiet little girl in a small town who just wanted to be liked and learned instead that having more than others could make you a target for negativity. Now, none of this is irrational, none of this is weakness, and none of this is evidence that any of us are broken or behind or somehow doing life wrong.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It just means we're human. It means our brains did their job, and it learned from what was in the room growing up. It encoded the emotional temperance of our earliest experiences and built a system designed to keep us [00:28:00] safe based upon the data that was available to us at the time. The data just was, period.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the quiet truth underneath it all. Most of us as adults are still making financial decisions and emotional decisions and rest decisions and permission decisions based upon conclusions that we drew before we were old enough to know we were drawing them, before anyone else handed us an alternative belief, before we had language to question what we absorbed That's not an indictment of anyone.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's not an indictment of our parents, or our partners, or even ourselves. It's just an honest look at where these patterns actually come from. And once you see where these things come from, it starts to have a little less authority over where you're going. So let's talk about emotional memory replay. [00:29:00] I wanna pause here for a second, because what we just walked through, those three stories, those three completely different origin points arriving at the same exhausting pattern, that didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen because any of those people were weak, or unintelligent, or somehow less equipped than everyone else walking around out there, right?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Nobody's actually probably paid attention to this. We haven't all figured this out. These things happen because something the brain does automatically, quietly, and without asking. So let's talk about what's actually going on here. Again, your brain has one primary job, not creativity, not problem-solving, not generating interesting podcasts, right?
Dr. Julia Bowlin: No. Its primary job is to keep you alive. And one of the most efficient way it does that is by learning from experience, from emotionally charged experiences. Because the brain is not a filing cabinet that treats [00:30:00] every memory equally. It is more likely a very opinionated editor that decides what's important based on how much feeling is attached to it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: High emotion? That memory gets flagged, highlighted, stored with extra detail, and retrieved at extra speed. Because the brain's logic is simple. If it felt that significant at the time, it probably was significant at the time, and if it was significant once, we should probably be ready for it again. That's emotional memory, and the structure responsible for it is the amygdala.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It doesn't distinguish between memory from 1987 and something that happened last Tuesday. It just knows what it felt, and it knows what conclusion it drew, and when something in the present environment even remotely resembles the original story, the same feeling, the same tone, the same financial temperature, the amygdala [00:31:00] fires fast, faster than your prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking, reasoning part of your brain Faster than your thinking brain, which is why you can know intellectually that your banking account is fine and still feel the anxiety of someone who is unexpectedly one expense away from disaster.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Which is why you can know intellectually that your new partner is trustworthy and still feel your chest tighten when they ask about your finances. Which is why you can know intellectually that you are allowed to enjoy this vacation, this purchase, this moment of genuine abundance, and still feel like you're getting away with something and you're going to get caught.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The knowing doesn't touch it because the emotional memory isn't stored where the knowing lives. The knowing is prefrontal [00:32:00] cortex. The emotional memory is the amygdala. The amygdala gets stored deeper in older architecture, in the part of the brain that's been running long before you even had vocabulary to describe what you're feeling, let alone question it And here's the part that I find genuinely fascinating, and also, if I'm being honest, a little inconvenient.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The brain doesn't replay emotional memories like a movie you watch from a safe distance on your couch. It replays it like a method actor who's completely lost the plot. What do I mean by that? When the trigger arrives, the brain doesn't just remember the original feeling, it recreates it physiologically in the body right now.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The chest tightening, the breath gets shallow, the shoulders come up, the stomach does that particular flippy-floppy thing when you're [00:33:00] unsafe, right? Even though you, by any other reasonable measure, are absolutely fine, your body is not overreacting. It's responding to a memory as if it's happening as a current event, because to the amygdala, it is, and that's not a malfunction.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's the system working exactly as designed. The problem isn't the mechanism. The problem is that the mechanism is running on old data. Data that was accurate once. Data that made complete sense in the environment when it was collected. Data that has simply never been updated because nobody told the brain it's allowed to update.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: So think of it this way. Imagine you have a very devoted, very literal personal assistant, and on their very first day, let's say maybe around nineteen eighty-seven, give or take, you gave them a set of instructions. This is how we handle money. [00:34:00] This is what safety looks like. This is what happens when we trust, and this is what happens when abundance arrives.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And they're writing it down carefully, completely, and filing it under the permanent operating procedure. And they have those following instructions ever since. Every single day they've been following them without once stopping to ask, "Hey, has anything changed? Because it's kinda been a while, and you seem a little different, and the situation seems a little different.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I just wanna confirm that we're still doing it this way." Right? Does that make sense? So this assistant is your amygdala. Your amygdala is devoted, it is efficient, and it is completely literal, and working from a memo that is several decades old, and in my case, four decades. This isn't who you are. It's what [00:35:00] you absorbed before you had words for it, before you had answers to questions, before anyone told you that the instructions were even up for revision.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the micro shift I want to offer. It's not an instruction, it's just an invitation. The next time you feel a financial reaction that seems bigger than the moment calls for, the anxiety, the tightness, the urge, in my case, to shuffle things around and send shoes back or check the balances every single day or maybe even four times a day, get curious about it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not critical, not frustrated, not here we go again. Just get curious. Huh, that's interesting. What just got triggered? What does this remind me of? What did I absorb some way along the way that's showing up right now? And you don't [00:36:00] have to have the answer. The questioning is enough because awareness, real awareness, the kind that lands in your body, not just the brain, is the first thing that gives the nervous system permission to consider that maybe, just maybe, that memo needs a little updating because this isn't who you are.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's a pattern your brain learned, and once you can see it clearly, it will start to loosen. So here's where we take everything we just walked through and bring it to something practical. Not a checklist, not a homework assignment, just a little different way of looking at it because that's what mindset medicine actually is.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's not about fixing something that's broken. It's about seeing something that's been invisible, and once you see it, really see it, not just intellectually acknowledge it, but actually recognize it on your own, in your own life, in your own patterns, in your own particular version of the Zapose [00:37:00] spiral.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: All right, call myself out. Something shifts quietly, the way the light shifts in the room when someone finally opens a window. Most of us have been treating our financial patterns like character flaws, like evidence of something fundamentally wrong with us. She's bad with money. He can't hold anything that he earns.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'm just not someone who can enjoy what I have. But here's what's actually true. They were never character flaws. They were adaptations. Intelligent, efficient, completely reasonable adaptations to the environments and experiences that shape us before we had any say in the matter. The woman who learned to hold money tightly was just adapting to a household where holding tightly was the responsible thing to do.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The real lesson, the right lesson, right? It just never got updated to the present environment. The woman who learned not to trust when it comes to money, she adapted [00:38:00] to betrayal that was real and devastating and completely not her fault. Her nervous system built a wall that made perfect sense given what happened behind the last open door, and it just doesn't know, her nervous system just doesn't know yet that there's a new door in front of her that's different.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The physician daughter who learned to make abundance invisible was adapting to a world that made visible success a liability. She just wanted to be seen as a person, me. Her nervous system found a way to make it possible, and it just kept the strategy running over and over and over, long after she left the small town behind.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Adaptations, not flaws. And here's why that distinction matters. You cannot shame a pattern into changing. Frustration won't touch it. White-knuckling won't reach it, because shame doesn't update the older architecture. It just adds another layer of emotional charge on top of a system that's already running [00:39:00] hot What actually creates the opening for change is something much more quiet, recognition.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The moment you look at a pattern and instead of thinking, "What's wrong with me?" You think, "Oh, where did that come from?" That shift from verdict to understanding is where personal awareness medicine begins its work. Recognition changes your relationship to the pattern, and when your relationship to the pattern changes, when you can observe it with curiosity instead of shame, you create just enough space between the trigger and the reaction for something new to sneak in and be possible, and that space is where choice lives.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The quiet kind, the kind that says, "Ah, I see what's happening here. I know where it came from, and I get to decide what to do with it now." You don't need another prescription, [00:40:00] another medication, or another lab test. So oftentimes in my medical practice, what many people just needed was a prescription for personal awareness medicine, and the same thing can be applied to our beliefs, and our functions, and autopilots around our relationship with money.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And today, just by listening, just by recognizing even one thread of your own story with what we've talked about, you've already taken the first dose of personal awareness medicine. So I wanna stop here for just a second and slow down. Not to give you something to do, not to send you off with a list of action items or a quiz.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I just wanna sit here with something because we've covered a lot of ground today. We talked about where these patterns come from, the homes we grew up in, the dynamics we watched, the religion, the culture, the social environments. All these things taught us what having more or having less meant about the people [00:41:00] we were around and who we are now.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if any of this part landed today, if you heard something today and felt even the faintest flicker of recognition, I want you to know that that flicker is not nothing. That flicker is actually everything. So here's what I wanna leave with you, right? Just something to carry with you to the rest of your day, to let percolate quietly in the background Think about one financial behavior, just one, that you've never fully understood about yourself.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's the way you feel when you check your balance. Maybe it's the tightness that arrives when someone else has access to information about your money. Maybe it's the way you can earn well and still feel like it's not enough. Maybe it's the way you can look at something genuinely good in your financial life and still be waiting, waiting just a little bit for the other shoe to drop.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Don't try to [00:42:00] fix it. Don't try to track it back to its origin. Don't turn it into a project. Just notice it and ask yourself very gently, with absolute zero pressure to have an answer, "Where did I learn this?" Not, "What's wrong with me for doing this?" Not, "How do I make it stop?" Not anything negative or shameful.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just, "Where did I learn this?" Not a blaming situation. Because that question, the single, quiet, genuine, curious question, is the beginning of something. Not a dramatic transformation, not an overnight shift, just a first honest look at a pattern that has been quietly running in the background for a very long time.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And honest looks, the kind without shame, have a way of changing things. Slowly, quietly, and then one day you notice you responded differently than you used to, and you can't quite point to the moment when it changed. [00:43:00] It just did. I invite you to sit with me for a second to review things and maybe rewire our bodies a little bit.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: This is not hypnosis in a dramatic way. It's just a little bit of, you know, turning our awareness inward and becoming fully present with a few things. All right? It's an invitation to slow down, to turn the volume down on the outside world just for a few minutes and let your inner awareness do what it already knows how to do, if we give it a little space and permission.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Because this is your unicity moment. Find a position that feels comfortable. Not perfect, just comfortable. And if you're sitting, let your feet find the floor. And if you're lying down, let your body settle into whatever is supporting you. And take one slow breath in through your nose. Let it out through your mouth[00:44:00]
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just one easy breath that tells your nervous system we are not in a hurry right now. And notice where you are, the temperature of the air around you, and the sounds in the background, close ones but distant ones either way, and the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the weight of your body being held right now by whatever is beneath you.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You don't have to go anywhere. You don't have to become anything different than what you already are in this moment. You're just here, and here is enough. I want you to imagine a place outside, somewhere that feels open and peaceful and safe. It doesn't have to be somewhere you've been. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just let your mind go somewhere quiet and natural and trust wherever it [00:45:00] lands Let yourself arrive there fully. Notice what's beneath your feet Notice the air on your skin Notice the quality of light, whatever time of day it is in this place, and the sounds that are here. Let your body recognize that this place is safe.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not because I'm telling you it is, because something in you already knows And as you settle into this place, notice that somewhere nearby there's water, moving water, quiet and steady, the kind that's been flowing for longer than anyone can remember. And make your way toward it, unhurried, and just, just find a comfortable place to settle beside it [00:46:00] And as you look at the surface of the water, you notice leaves floating through.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Some are moving quickly, some are turning slowly, some are barely moving at all, just resting, held, and going wherever the water goes. You don't have to do anything, just watch And as you sit besides this water watching the leaves move, I want you to think about one thing that you absorbed about money before you had words for it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not a huge dramatic memory, not necessarily a specific moment, just feeling, a tone, a conclusion that something got made in your household or in your community, in a relationships, in a moment you may not even be able to fully name. Whatever arrives, [00:47:00] let it arrive without judgment. Maybe it's the feeling of tightness, of holding carefully, of never quite releasing.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's the feeling of trust that got broken in a place their trust should have been. Maybe it's the feeling of making yourself smaller around abundance so other people stay comfortable Whatever it is, just let it be there And then take that feeling, that conclusion, that old absorbed piece of information that has been running quietly in the background for longer than you realized, and place it gently on one of these leaves You don't have to force it.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You don't have to perform. Just set it down the way you set something heavy on a table when your arms have been carrying it too long, and watch the leaf take it, [00:48:00] and watch the water receive the leaf, and watch it move. Slowly at first, maybe turning a little, finding a current, and then beginning to travel away from where you're sitting, carried by the water that has been doing this for longer than any of us have been here.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You don't have to know where it's going You don't have to make sure it gets anywhere The water knows what to do And as you watch it go, as that leaf with its particular cargo moves further and further away, notice what's left in the space where it was. Not emptiness, something quieter than that. Just a little more room.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Room that was always there, that was always yours, that had just been occupied for a very long time [00:49:00] by something that was never meant to be permanent And take a breath here, a real one, the kind your body wants to take when something has been set down that it's been carrying for a while. A nice breath And bring your attention back to the place beside the water.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: The sounds around you, the quality of the light, the feeling of the ground beneath you. You absorbed a lot before you had words for any of it, before you had the awareness to question it, before anyone told you that what you were taking in was shaping something significant inside you. And you carried it all, the way we all carry things we absorb before we know that we are absorbing them.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: But here, beside the water, in this quiet, you [00:50:00] get to decide what you carry forward. Not all at once, and not even dramatically, but just a little more consciously than before
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Whenever you're ready, in your own time and without hurry, bring your awareness back to the room you're actually in The sounds around you presently. The feeling of your body in the chair, your seat, wherever you are. Let's wiggle your fingers if that helps. Take another breath, and let your eyes open slowly if they've been closed.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Or simply let your focus soften back into the present moment as if they've been there this whole time. And take a moment before you move on, before you pick up your phone, or you merge back to whatever the day has waiting for you. Just sit with yourself for one more breath. You've done something today that most people [00:51:00] never do.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: You looked at where a pattern came from, without shame, with just enough curiosity to let the light in, and that matters more than it might feel right now. May the patterns that have protected you know that you are grateful for this service. May the conclusions that were drawn in harder times begin to soften in the presence of new evidence.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And may you move forward into your day, into your week, and into your life with just a little more room than you had before. Not because you fixed something, but because you saw something. And seeing is where everything begins. So here's what today was really about. Not about money, not budgeting, not a strategy or a system or a smarter way to manage your checking account.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Today was about origins, about the quiet, invisible curriculum we all received before we were old enough to enroll [00:52:00] in it. The lessons that arrived not through instruction, but through absorption, through the temperatures of the room that we grew up in, through the social environments that taught us very early and very efficiently that visible abundance might have been something to manage carefully around other people.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And what I hope that lands from today, really lands, not just an interesting idea, but something that you actually feel is this. The pattern isn't a problem. The pattern was a solution to an environment, a moment, and a set of circumstances that called for exactly that response at that time, and it kept running.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: And now, because you can see it, because you know where it came from, because you understand what it was actually trying to do, you have something you didn't have before. A little more room, a little more choice, a little more of the quiet authority that comes from knowing your own story well enough to decide which parts of it [00:53:00] you're still willing to live inside of.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: Next week, we go somewhere that might feel a little uncomfortable at first in the best possible way. Because if today was about where patterns come from, next week is about what happens when the pattern runs the whole house Not just the checking account, not just the financial decisions, the whole house.
Dr. Julia Bowlin: How we rest, how we work, how we give ourselves permission, or how we withhold it. The way scarcity as a system doesn't stay in one lane, it expands quietly into every area of our house. This is how we're gonna look at this, right? That next episode might be the one that makes everything finally click. The one where you hear something and you think, "Oh, that's what's been running in the background the whole time."
Dr. Julia Bowlin: I hope to see you there. Thank you for spending time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.[00:54:00]
Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
