MM_Oct2026 - E1 100th Episode Why do we react before we even decide to_AUDIO
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[00:00:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Somewhere in your life, there's probably a reaction that beats you to the punch. It shows up before you do, before thinking, before choosing. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It could just be a sigh when somebody asks you a question like, "Ugh."
[00:00:22] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness. So I invite you to take one deep breath and let whatever you've been holding onto just loosen up just a little bit just for this episode. Before we get into this month, I want to pause on something I'm kind of excited about.
[00:00:43] Dr. Julia Bowlin: This is episode number 100. 100 weeks, not consecutive and certainly not always easy, since I sat down in January of 2023 and hit record for the first time. In the years since, I left a medical practice I built for [00:01:00] over 30 years. I walked with my husband through years of treatments, and then I lost him, and I became a hospice physician instead of a family medicine doctor.
[00:01:11] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I have sat a lot with dying patients, and I also let myself be vulnerable in a way that my professional training never really made room for. I wanted to take the veneer off just a little bit. Somewhere in all of that, I did evolve, the same way anybody evolves when they live long enough and they pay attention.
[00:01:33] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I have picked up new wisdoms, new guardrails for new behaviors, new expectations of myself especially, and I built something entirely new out of what was left standing. My hope through all of these 100 episodes is that Mindset Medicine has helped someone find their way through whatever their own version of this has been.
[00:01:56] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And somehow, the 100th episodes lands on a month [00:02:00] about thoughts and feelings and behaviors that we inherited without ever choosing them, and then asking ourselves what still fits I didn't plan that. It just happened to be true. So this month we're calling it Outgrowing Hand-Me-Downs. Not all of our thoughts and feelings and actions truly belong to us, because some of it's more reflexive and automatic than chosen.
[00:02:26] Dr. Julia Bowlin: We may have absorbed them, or they handed down to us in ways that we needed to learn to survive. And this month we're gonna be questioning how our stories in our head, and the reflexive behaviors that come with them, still actually fit and serve us, and what doesn't, and that's the key thing. We're gonna do four episodes, four different rooms in that same house of topic, and we're gonna review how we react and what our bodies remember, and why we keep going back to what we know, and what it actually [00:03:00] looks like to choose, on purpose, what actually stays with us.
[00:03:05] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Okay, here's something most of us know, even though we've never said it out loud, something might happen. What do I mean by that? Someone uses a certain tone with us, or asks us for something in a certain way, and our reaction is already built in. It's instantaneous, without even having to think about it first.
[00:03:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It comes out fast, our behavior, faster than our thinking. And it's not that we sat down and chose to feel a certain way. It's a feeling can just show up because it's already been formed fully from something in the past, like it's been sitting there waiting for us to just jump out That's where I wanna start this month, not with the big obvious things that we inherited, but the fast ones, the quick reactions that show up in us long before we make a decision to say or behave in that way.
[00:03:58] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Those are automatic [00:04:00] responses, and this month we're gonna start right there, 'cause I wanna start to tell you about a story about my mother. She's a spitfire. Anybody who knows Dottie, she's a spitfire. She's 90 years old, and like a lot of people her age, she wants and enjoys telling the same stories over and over, the same handful, kind of on rotation or depending on what triggers her to think about it, and sometimes it happens over coffee.
[00:04:24] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Sometimes it's when we take her out to eat. Sometimes, if I'm honest, it's over a margarita together. But I wanna be clear about something first. This isn't memory loss. It's not Alzheimer's disease. It's not dementia. My mother knows exactly what she's telling me and why, and my first instinct every time, it's the same one.
[00:04:45] Dr. Julia Bowlin: My brain says, "I don't have enough time for this. My life is already so full." That thought doesn't arrive alone either. My, my body goes into a tightness in my chest, a squeezing in my f- throat, and then a [00:05:00] flash of impatience that I get. It's a low current of irritability, of restlessness, like my whole body is being pulled out of being productive or busyness that I built my life around and asked instead of me to just sit in presence and connection.
[00:05:18] Dr. Julia Bowlin: So my brain, my thought, my body is like, "No, this is waste of time. We've done this before. I'm sick of this." But the truth of the matter is I've just built my life around productivity and busyness, and that skill served me for decades. But in this exact moment with my mother, that doesn't serve me. But my body doesn't know that yet.
[00:05:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It just reacts like it always does, like rapid heart rate, irritability, tight throat, right? So I have to take a breath, which I teach you all to do periodically, and just settle into my body so that I can prepare for a trip down memory lane. [00:06:00] And here's what happens next every single time. Her eyes light up.
[00:06:05] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Her voice steadies. She's not just filling in silence. She's back into a version of herself and her life where she felt significant, where she was... had real contribution, where love and connection ran deeper than what's available to her now at 90. It's a version of her life with more mobility, more growth, more stability, and respect of her as an RN who ran a floor on her own back then in the hospital So I've come to believe that these story are tethers to her worthiness, to who she is still underneath everything, even though that her body has changed.
[00:06:45] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And what she needs in those moments isn't a fact check like me saying, "I don't have time for this. You've already told me this," et cetera. Instead, she just wants to be seen and heard and witnessed in [00:07:00] that time of her life that mattered so much to her, and she has so few years left with us to witness her in that.
[00:07:08] Dr. Julia Bowlin: So my first reaction, the fast one, the one that shows up before I've chosen it, was always getting in the way of something that actually mattered and something that she needed, right? And once I saw I was reacting that way, in that original intent, the moment with my mom, I started to notice it everywhere else in my life, too, those quick reactions without really thinking, because I learned those somewhere.
[00:07:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it wasn't really about her stories. It was really about how often my body reacts before my mind gets a vote. It's a quick correction. It's a reflexive interruption, right? And I'm sure you have had moments in your life where you're doing something and somebody inserts themself or something comes across, and your instinct is to move that conversation along, [00:08:00] right?
[00:08:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Before it's even finished, because you wanna get back to what you, quote, "needed to be doing." These are skills that I am- have probably built over the years to improve efficiency, the speed, the ability to keep a dozen things moving all at once without dropping them, and they made me good at what I do, right?
[00:08:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'm a highly productive individual, someone who gets things done. But somewhere in all that building, presence and joy got quietly left out of that skill set. I got so good at moving through things that I forgot how to stay in them. Does that sound familiar? And here's the part that catches me. My mother taught me the first half of that, the efficiency, the get it done.
[00:08:52] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And now in her stories at 90, she's teaching me the second half, the part about staying, about [00:09:00] witnessing, about patience, and not rushing the moment just because I've already extracted information from it in the past. Here's where the meaning actually shifts in the mindset. That reflexive correction, the I know that story, you've told me that a thousand times, was never a character flaw for me.
[00:09:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It wasn't impatience for its own sake, and it wasn't lack of love for my mother. It was a skill doing exactly what it was built to do to move things along, to get to the point, to be efficient, to protect a schedule that typically I had no room left in. And that skill kept me functioning through decades of a very demanding life.
[00:09:44] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it's not wrong. It's just a little incomplete, and many professionals have this. Because presence isn't the opposite of efficiency. And I wanna slow down on that 'cause this is a key point for this episode. [00:10:00] Presence isn't the opposite of efficiency, because it's easy to hear that and miss what it means.
[00:10:09] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Efficiency asks one question: How do I get through this? Presence asks a completely different one: What's actually here in front of me? And they're not fighting each other. They're not even doing the same job. You see, efficiency is built for tasks, for getting things done, the laundry, closing medical charts, getting the kids fed, getting out the door on time.
[00:10:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Presence is built for people. And the mistake that I made for years wasn't choosing efficiency. It's the other way around. It was only having one tool and using it for everything, including the moments that were never meant to really be gotten through, but to be present instead. So I didn't fail to learn presence the first time [00:11:00] around in my life.
[00:11:01] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I just hadn't needed it yet, not in the way that I need it now, sitting across from my mother while she's still here to tell me these stories. And this isn't about becoming a different person either, or even throwing out a skill that got me this far or you this far. It's really about adding the second half of that skill set that started decades ago, updating it to the half where my mother's teaching me now one repeated story at a time In other words, I can still be efficient and productive and present.
[00:11:38] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I wanna slow down here for a moment, because what happened with my mother, that flash of irritability and tightness in the words, the reflex to hurry along, none of that's unusual, and none of it means that something's wrong. It's just actually one of the most ordinary things that the mind does. The mind shows up in places for [00:12:00] lower stake things, right?
[00:12:02] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It wants to manage on autopilot the lower things, and that oftentimes would include conversations with people, including my mother. Here's a version of that same reflex that still makes me laugh when I think about it. Imagine a mosquito landing a little too close, one that causes total chaos in what I was doing.
[00:12:23] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Up until that second, I was having a completely quiet moment with my coffee in hand, my cat curled in my lap, watching the beautiful sunrise. It's about as relaxed as a moment can get, right? But then the mosquito came near. Wasn't even biting me. It wasn't even landing on me, but I heard it in my ear, and before I decided anything, my hand was moving.
[00:12:45] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I swatted so fast and so hard, I sent my coffee flying. I launched the cat straight off my lap, and the mosquito wasn't even trying to bite me, yet. It didn't matter, though. My body had [00:13:00] already run to the calculation and assumed if I didn't act fast, it was gonna bite me, right? So chaos erupted. Well, coffee everywhere, cat pissed off, me cold, and the sunrise forgotten now.
[00:13:12] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I had to move on, right? But here's the plain version of what's going on in those moments. For a long time, people assumed that emotions were like separate little switches in the brain. We had one for anger, one for fear, one for irritation, and something would flip that switch depending on what happened in your life.
[00:13:33] Dr. Julia Bowlin: But that's not exactly how it works. The brain doesn't have a switch for irritated by my mom's repeated stories or being alarmed by a mosquito. My brain doesn't have a switch for those things. Instead, our brains are constantly building reactions in real time using everything it already has on file, everything in the past moments that may have felt a little familiar, every belief of that we have about [00:14:00] time and safety and what a moment is supposed to look like.
[00:14:04] Dr. Julia Bowlin: So when something happens, a story starting for a third time with my mother, an insect landing too close, our brains don't pause to think about them. It reaches into that file cabinet, grabs the closest match, and it's firing a reaction built from a history before thinking even gets to take a seat at the table.
[00:14:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Reaction, right? Immediate That's the same mechanism both times. It's different settings with my mom versus the mosquito, different stakes, same architecture though. A reaction built and fired before thinking happens. And it's not just mine. Maybe it's the flash of irritation that shows up the third time a co-worker walks in late before there's even been a chance to hear why.
[00:14:55] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's the split second surge behind the wheel when somebody cuts [00:15:00] you off too close. Not full road rage, but just a quick jolt of heat, right? A hand tightening on the wheel, a word said out loud perhaps. Or maybe it's snapping at a question that on any other day would've not been irritating at all.
[00:15:17] Dr. Julia Bowlin: None of that is a decision in the moment when it happens. It's just a filing cabinet reflex. It's just history in your past matching to the present moment happening faster than you can think it through. And here's the shift in meaning. A fast reaction isn't a character defect, and it isn't proof of anything about who I am underneath or about who anyone is underneath when we have those fast reactions.
[00:15:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just our brains doing the one thing it's built to do, to protect, to predict, to react quickly using whatever history's been put on file. The mosquito reflex, the I know that story reflex, the coworker who's late [00:16:00] again, the hands tightening on the wheel, it all comes from the same place. None of it was a decision.
[00:16:06] Dr. Julia Bowlin: None of it is a flaw. So my invitation to you right now isn't to catch every reaction before it happens, because that's not realistic, and it's really not the goal that I'm talking about. It's just I invite you to start noticing after the fact and without judgment Reactions that came from somewhere.
[00:16:26] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just reflex, right? That alone, becoming aware of your reactions before you, like, or even after you've had a reaction, you're like, "Wait a minute, that was a instinctual physical reaction." Because again, it's not a character flaw that's showing up. It's just a pattern that our brains built a long time ago running as designed.
[00:16:46] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once we start to recognize that we're doing automatic reactions, once it's just information instead of indicting ourselves, then we can start to soften, right? That's when I realized that with my mom, I had to, [00:17:00] "Woo, calm it down. Breathe it out." That's just an old reaction of my brain saying, "Be faster, be productive.
[00:17:07] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Go, go, go," right? So what do I do with this? Now that we th- with this knowing that much of what fires first, especially in me, was just built, not chosen, right? I don't think the answer is to try to outrun a reflex. We're not gonna be able to do that. I tried it for years, and it doesn't work, right? You can't force your way out of a common reaction that fires before you're thinking.
[00:17:32] Dr. Julia Bowlin: What actually helped, however, isn't catching the reaction before it happens. It's what I say to myself after I've done it, right? The old line in my head used to be, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I just be patient?" That one says that something's broken, right? But the new line that I do now is closer to this.
[00:17:52] Dr. Julia Bowlin: "There's the old skill again, the old pattern doing its job. I'm gonna honor you. Thank you for doing this, but I'm still practicing [00:18:00] trying to get more patient and calm, and I'm not great at it yet." But it points me in a better direction, right, if I do that. One tells me to feel bad. The other tells me I'm building on this skill for the better, right?
[00:18:12] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I get to decide right now how I'm going to move forward in the future. Here's the real shift, though. Efficiency and productivity were never the problem. Those skills built my career. They ran my house. They kept everything moving for years. The problem was using them everywhere, all the time, even in moments that were really never asking for speed, right?
[00:18:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: My mother's stories weren't asking me to be productive. They were asking me to sit still and listen. The mosquito wasn't asking for anything at all, and honestly, that one still makes me laugh, right? It just was present, right? So now, right after that fast reaction fires, I now ask myself a simple question.
[00:18:57] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Does this moment need me to get something [00:19:00] done, or does it just need me to sit here and be present? So here's something to sit with if you're brave enough. Somewhere in your life, there's probably a reaction that beats you to the punch. It shows up before you do, before thinking, before choosing. It doesn't have to be dramatic.
[00:19:19] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It could just be a sigh when somebody asks you a question like, "Ugh," or a tightened jaw, maybe a word already halfway out of your mouth before your brain even clocked in for the day, such as no, right? I talk about that on my reel. It's like the no came out of my mouth before I even had a chance to think about it.
[00:19:39] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And just for a second, I want you to sit in this. No fixing, no judging, no turning it into a whole therapy session. Just I want you to be curious. What is that reaction actually protecting you from? And what was it built for back when you needed it [00:20:00] in a whole different moment than you do right now? So before we move into the next part, let me tell you what it is.
[00:20:07] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The Unicity moment is a short guided experience. It's a chance to slow down, turn inward for a few minutes, and it's not therapy, and it's not a replacement for it. If you're working with a therapist or a doctor, just keep doing that. This is meant to just sit alongside that support, not instead of it.
[00:20:26] Dr. Julia Bowlin: You're in control in this moment. You're... The entire time, you can open your eyes whenever you want. You can shift your position or just listen without participating at all. There's nothing you have to do here. Just take what's useful and leave the rest, okay? All right. And if you're driving or operating any kind of machinery, don't close your eyes, folks.
[00:20:45] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Stay present with what you're doing, okay? You can always come back to this later. And if it feels right, find a position where your body can settle. Seated or lying down, wherever you are, there's no wrong way to do this. And if it feels comfortable, [00:21:00] just let your eyes close gently, and just notice for a moment whatever sounds are nearby.
[00:21:07] Dr. Julia Bowlin: My voice, the room around you, however quiet or busy it happens to be. Nothing here needs to change, and each sound might simply be a reminder that everything out there is already being taken care of, which means just for the next few moments, there's nothing pulling on your attention except for this.
[00:21:31] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Picture, if you're willing, a porch. Yours or one you simply borrow in your mind for this moment. Doesn't matter. Just picture a porch. There's a gentle rain falling. Just beyond the edge of the roof, there's some more clouds rolling in. Not really a storm, just a soft, steady cloud, and somewhere down a hill, there might be some water moving, [00:22:00] like a creek or even a lake.
[00:22:03] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's quiet under the sound of the rain. The air is humid and warm against your skin, very comfortable rather than heavy. Somewhere nearby, the sweet smell of honeysuckle or flowers, just something's drifting through the air, and you can hear insects singing and birds calling out. And nothing is asking anything of you here.
[00:22:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's nowhere to go, nothing to finish. It's just the rain and the water and the air and you safe on this porch for as long as this moment lasts
[00:22:54] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And as you sit here, notice how different this feels from a reaction that [00:23:00] fires fast. There's no rushing in this rain. It falls exactly as slowly as it falls, and the creek doesn't hurry either. It's just moving at its own pace the whole day through Let yourself wonder without needing an answer. What would it be like to let one thing today move at the pace of this rain instead of the pace a reflex wants to set?
[00:23:37] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not everything, just one thing. Maybe an image comes, maybe a moment or a person, a place where a little more of this pace could live. And there's no pressure to find it. If you find the place where this pace fits better in your life, let it arrive on its own, [00:24:00] the way the rain does. And if a fast reaction comes, one that comes to mind, one that shows up recently or in the future uninvited, there's no need to judge it here.
[00:24:17] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It might simply be something that got handed to you a long time ago, doing exactly the job it was built for, and it doesn't have to be fixed on this porch. It just gets to be seen, the way the rain is seen without anyone needing to stop it Whatever showed up or didn't, let it simply rest here for a moment because the porch can hold it, and nothing needs to be decided or solved right now
[00:24:56] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And when you're ready, let the sound of the rain begin [00:25:00] to soften and the porch to fade. It's still here wherever you want to return to it, this porch, this pace. Just start to notice the surface beneath you now again and the sounds in your present room around you. And in your own time, let your eyes gently open with a soft gaze Sometime today or sometime this week, a fast reaction might show up for you the way they always do.
[00:25:34] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And in that moment, you might remember the rain, not the rushing. No need to prove anything, just falling rain exactly as it falls. That's the whole practice, not stopping the reflexive reaction, just remembering that there's another pace that's available to you whenever there's room for it. [00:26:00] So if there's one thing worth carrying out for this episode, it's this: The reactions that show up first, those quick reactions, the quick correction, the flash of irritation, or the swat before the thought, was never proof that anything's broken.
[00:26:16] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just an old skill that we have doing exactly what they were built to do. And once we see those, instead of judging those, let's just start to loosen its grip a little. This month, we're looking at what got handed to us without ever being asked. And next time, we're gonna go a little deeper, not just what shows up in the moment, but what the body has been holding onto long after a moment's passed.
[00:26:45] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if something in this episode stirred something loose for you, I'd love to hear about it. You can always find me and reach out through the links in the show notes. Thank you for spending time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be [00:27:00] fulfilled.
[00:27:07] 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
