241: Still Your Lizard Brain with Steve Scanlon

01
Sep

Steve Scanlon, CEO and Co-Founder of Rewire, Inc., is passionate about helping still your lizard brain and achieve authentic transformation through neuroplasticity.

We discuss his REWIRE framework, which includes Rest, Enjoy, Wellness, Integrate, Release, and Execute. Steve emphasizes the importance of stilling the lizard brain, a concept he explores in his book, Still The Lizard, to transcend survival mode and foster sustainable positive change. His insights on the significance of sleep, wellness, and integrating coaching into the process provide valuable strategies for individuals and organizations looking to enhance their mental and emotional well-being.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Still Your Lizard Brain with Steve Scanlon

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest is Steve Scanlon, the CEO and co-founder of Rewire, where they develop people by helping transform the way they think so that they may experience authentic and sustainable positive change. Steve, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Steve. Great to be here. It’s nice to have someone named Steve. Makes it easy for us.

Yeah, we have very unique names, don’t we? So let’s start with your personal “Why.” So what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?

Yeah, I have to be honest with you and tell you that I learned something from one of your podcasts not long ago because you interviewed somebody who talked about their “Why” changing. I thought that was super interesting and it actually helped me identify with the fact that I don’t think my “Why” has been static at all. And so I have to consider what that is today. And it really is in that little introduction, how do we help people? And by that, I also mean the man in the mirror, me, right? How do we help people genuinely transform in the way that they think? When I say genuinely, not because we read something, not because we get excited, but how does the human brain actually change. This is a field in neuroscience called plasticity, how the human brain changes. And my “Why” is effectively, if you wanted to talk about it, I guess scientifically, is how can I bring neuroplasticity to bear in individuals so that they can have authentic transformation in their life, in their business, in their relationships. And so, yeah, I think that’s my “Why” today.

Yeah, love it. It’s a very interesting context and kind of framing that to change the neuroplasticity of the brain, because it kind of gives you a tangible, I don’t know if you can call it tangible, but at least something to visualize that what’s going on in this process. So what I love about your approach that we actually created an acronym for the framework you’re using to do that, which is the acronym is REWIRE. So it’s very easy to see what you’re trying to achieve here. You’re trying to rewire people and to actually quiet their lizard brain. So let’s talk first about this whole concept of the lizard brain, what it is and why do you need to quiet it?

Well, I published that book on The Lizard Brain, I don’t know, 8 years ago now, and I will tell you that if you lined up, I don’t know, 10 neuroscientists and you ask them, what is the lizard brain? You would get 10 different answers. So we should start with that. And by the way, 2 out of the 10 would say it doesn’t exist and it’s a fabrication. How about that? I’ve actually had some people write to me and the internet these days, people will write you all kinds of stuff and one person was particularly upset because they thought I was spreading misinformation by even talking about the lizard brain. First of all, the lizard brain, as I understand it and as I have worked with it as a framework is a construct in the mind. It’s more of a construct and less of a biological feature of the brain. So when somebody says, hey, what’s the hippocampus? What’s the thalamus? What’s the amygdala? What are these features of the brain? These are biological features in the brain, and so when someone talks about the lizard brain, there are some neuroscientists would say, oh, well, you’re referring to the amygdala, fight or flight, or something like that. Others would associate it with different parts of the brain. I look at it and say, if we considered it a construct, and the construct is primarily there, Steve, for survival. Your brain, and specifically maybe as we refer to the lizard brain, is there to keep you alive. So, every day you get up and your lizard brain gets active and says, keep Steve alive. Through my schooling, I guess this was more than a decade ago, I was actually in a course where one of the professors brought the attention to the idea that there were four characteristics of this lizard brain, and so we can go through all those four.

The reason I got so interested in it is because I realized as we were going through the characteristics of the lizard brain that if one could understand those characteristics, be aware of those characteristics, that in and of itself could help… Share on X

There was a correlation to learning to quiet or still your lizard brain, right? I say that because when the lizard brain gets really active, it’s really interested in protecting survival. And when we’re in survival mode, you know this, when we’re in survival mode, we say a lot of things, we do a lot of things because we’re so in ourselves and we’re just trying to survive. When we still our lizard brains, we can effectively transcend survival mode and we can use our prefrontal cortex and we can actually make better changes and stuff. When we’re in survival mode and the lizard is loud, it’s very difficult to change. That’s why we say, how can we still the lizard?

So maybe this is an aside, but doesn’t the brain know it better than we do, when we have to work on survival? Could it be that we get the signal that we need to focus on survival and that’s what we should be doing?

I think the brain does know better than we do, especially if you actually need to survive. If you’re walking out into the street and you’re about to get hit by a car, your brain or your biology will know better than you do what to do if we’re actually trying to survive. It’s so funny to talk about, doesn’t your brain know better than you? Well, that’s an interesting question because they’re both us. I am my brain and my brain is in me. Now, what I have found interesting is there are a lot of things that we do in business, in our lives, in our personal lives, that the perception that our brain gives us is that we need to survive, but they’re not actually survival situations. And so the difference between our perception of like, so as an example, when you really worried about your job or your kids, and we keep cortisol, the stress hormone high, cortisol was primarily designed to help us get out of a threatening situation. A ferocious animal attacks you, you better have cortisol and adrenaline. That’s a survival situation. But when you worry about a test or a job, that’s not technically survival, well, maybe in the end, but in that moment. And so there’s been a distortion of what we perceive to be survival, and that’s part of why I’m so interested in the lizard brain, because so many people, a lot of us, we get distorted in what’s survival and what isn’t. And so if you’re walking around this earth with the perception of constant survival, it’s really hard to be the best version of you you can be. And so therefore people struggle with relationships and jobs and all kinds of other stuff. And that comes back to my “Why.”

Yeah. Okay. That’s great. So thank you for explaining this. And maybe it’s because our life has become much safer in some respects. We don’t have to worry about tigers attacking us and dying of exposure most of the time. Whereas there are maybe long-term things that, sometimes I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, and it’s probably a survival instinct. I realized I made a mistake, I’m doing something wrong, which has a long-term impact on my career. It’s not something that’s going to happen this day, but still it doesn’t allow me to sleep because now I became aware of it and now I have to find a solution to it. So I guess that’s what the lizard brain kind of gets a little bit messed up because you’re trying to solve something with a solution that doesn’t fit that problem.

Yeah, and that gets back to the construct. When you tell that little anecdote, the four in the morning, well, there’s something really interesting about four in the morning or three or two. Some people get three, two. Many people know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night and panic, worry, fret, fear, whatever it is, pick a word. The lizard brain is very active, but part of that is because the prefrontal cortex is not fully activated. That’s, you know, we come out of sleep, we’re not reasoning. And that’s why you can sit there and worry about, oh my gosh, did I turn the oven off? And you panic, or did someone say that? And then two hours later, if you wake up, you can almost be like, God, that’s so interesting that I was so worried about something once your prefrontal cortex starts to activate. But the problem is, if you activated it four in the morning, then you’re fully awake. And so there’s a balance between waking yourself up enough to realize this isn’t that big of a deal and losing sleep, which is tremendously important to the brain.

Yeah. It’s a complex problem. I got it. Let’s talk about your framework. What is REWIRE? What does REWIRE stand for? What are a couple of the elements? I don’t know if you can go through all six of them.

I can go through all six of them, just to the length of which we need to pause, I can tell you what they are. In order to go through the six, very briefly, I would tell any listener of yours, Steve, the four characteristics that the lizard brain looks to, and it’s so funny to reference the lizard brain because some people begin to talk to me about it like it’s that thing in us, and I have to remind people, it is us. It’s part of us. And so the lizard brain, yes, it’s this construct, but it’s also us. And so the four, quickly, the four characteristics is the lizard really, really, really is attracted to familiarity. And you can imagine that if what you did yesterday, Steve, you’re still alive today, you’re dressed, you showed up for your podcast, the lizard in you is going, hey, whatever you did, I don’t care if it’s good, bad, do it again, because it will protect you. You’re still alive, and so that’s why. So familiarity. The second is the lizard loves to be right.

I want you to know that everything you think and the moment you think it, you think you're right. Share on X

And so being right, if you think about that anthropologically or biologically being wrong, maybe in our ancestry literally meant death. We’ve carried that forward. A lot of people, every moment, if you think a thought, I want you to know you think you’re right. Now, if you give the prefrontal cortex a few seconds, you could go, ooh, I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have done that. We know we’re not always right, but at the moment, we think the lizard likes being right. The lizard loves habits, loves to make habits. Habits protect our brain because it is a lack of energy that the brain has to expend to conduct itself. Anytime the lizard can go, go make a habit. By the way, good, bad, it doesn’t matter to the lizard brain because all it’s trying to do is protect survival through this idea that the autonomic ways that our brain acts, just they basically, we don’t have to, there’s not a lot of dedicated energy towards that. And lastly, the lizard brain loves to control. So when we feel out of control, the lizard gets really loud because control feels like a threat or a lack of control feels like to a lot of people, a threat to survival. Familiarity being right, habits and control. So once I understood that these are the four characteristics that this construct is pointing towards, we created the REWIRE acronym, which was effectively six strategies to help still our lizard brain. And so I can give them to you in order, but frankly, the number one way to still the lizard brain, believe it or not, is rest. That’s the R, and the first R is rest. That I’ve understood there’s no greater way to reduce cortisol and get the brain relaxed or whatever than sleep. Sleep’s the number one thing that we can probably do for ourselves. When I say that to people, I mean, we live in a culture right now, we’re not very rested.

Yeah.

I don’t know that sleep, so many people in business and in life that we just, I don’t know, it’s taken a back seat and we do it because we have to. But I can tell you that if people want to still their lizard brains, improve their lives, probably learning how to rest might be the number one thing that I would educate people how to do.

Yes, Steve, we talked about this, but you also talked about that many of the other REWIRE ideas, they contribute to good sleep. So sleep is the first one, but it’s also the product of many other things.

Well, that’s exactly right. So the W will go out of order just because for creativity, how’s that? The W is wellness. So but people listening to your podcast are going, well, that’s not that novel or genius. Like being in good physical health, working out, eating well, nutrition, wellness. Now, I don’t share that, I don’t have an exercise program or a nutrition program. I primarily concern myself with wellness as it pertains to the lizard brain. And so, much of like, let’s just take exercise, like you said. Actually, when we exercise, we increase some neurochemistry, like cortisol. You’re stressing the body, but there’s so much evidence that says once we get into an exercise routine, you know what it helps us do? Sleep. Some of the huge benefit to exercise, yes, it’s good for us. We reestablish certain biological patterns and cell structures. All that’s good. I care about it as it pertains to your point about how it helps us sleep better.

Okay, so that’s the W. So that is important.

Let’s go back. E is enjoy. Like literally plan on putting joy in your life. The lizard is not really concerned about having any fun or enjoyment. And again, I’m not doing that to be like, yes, just have fun and enjoy. When our brains are in a state of relaxed with serotonin and different things because we’re enjoying life, we actually, and it’s called the parasympathetic nervous system, we’re activating part of our brain that allows us to be transformed and to change and to think better and stuff. You’ll have many listeners that are in their jobs and work, and sometimes the older people get the less they actually plan for enjoyment. Literally put it in your calendar, and it doesn’t matter what you do. You could like fishing or hunting or reading or playing with the kids. Put it in your calendar specifically because it is an active agent in reducing the lizard brain’s activity when you’re in an enjoyment thing. So rest, enjoy wellness. The I has changed in REWIRE. We used to say invest, and now we say integrate. I don’t know that it matters. We’ll just take integrate. We built this one in because it’s very difficult to integrate any part of the lizard brain alone, if you’re listening to this and you’re going, that’s it, I’m going to still my lizard brain, my suggestion to you would be get a coach. That’s why we own a coaching company. And if it’s not us, get somebody else or get a friend. Because if it’s your lizard brain, Steve, that’s been trying to protect your survival, I think it was Einstein that said we cannot create solutions with the same consciousness that created the problem. So we need other consciousness. And that’s part of, back to my “Why.” I have a coaching company, and we’re asking very targeted questions to help people still their lizard brains, because trying to just still your lizard brain, remember, it’s you. And so integrating these concepts in is a huge element of what we do. So rest, enjoy wellness, integrate. The second R starts to get a little bit interesting, but we say release. And release is actually the act of forgiveness. How can we be great forgivers? Release. Now, that one takes a turn for the weird when I’m in public settings and businesses because it feels like I’m about to start wearing a robe and I don’t know, maybe there’s some spiritual elements to that. There’s actually some phenomenal, and by the way, if you hear that with some spiritual element, that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not really how I intended it. We intended it more from a sense of, from a neuroscience perspective, if you go back to those four characteristics, familiarity, being right, habits, and control, the be right thing is interesting because if you’re walking around the world and you have to be right, or you were right and someone else wronged you, if you’re holding onto that wrong for a long time, you’re feeding the lizard brain.

It’s just poison. You’re taking poison. Yeah.

When you learn to release, you sort of let go of right and wrong together, and it effectively stills the lizard brain. And so a lot of people don’t realize that, and there’s a lot of people walking around with you were right, you were wrong, I was right, and when you do that right-wrong thing a lot, you don’t practice releasing, you’re just holding onto food for this survivalistic part of the brain, and it’s contrary to the productivity that we’re trying to get the brain to do.

Essentially, you don’t get closure on things, and then you keep chewing on things that you cannot change anyway, or you just have to accept it, and you can release the bandwidth, the mental bandwidth for productive activity by just letting that go, right?

Well, yeah, but just letting things go. There’s a lot of people that will listen to this and go, wow, that’s kind of… Just let it go? I’ve been trying to do just let it go for 20 years. So, actually, when we get into release with people, I mean, we did a two-day workshop on just release because if it were just you and I saying, oh, just release, well, a lot of people would do it, but it’s actually somewhat complex, and that’s why working with someone in coaching and asking some good questions and helping people see some stuff. But yes, when we let go and when we release, which is not an easy thing for a lot of people, but when that happens, you effectively free the brain to dedicate energy to more positive things. But that’s a fairly complex thing for a lot of people.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. That’s awesome. So what’s the number six? What’s the last one?

Yeah, we got to get into it. The last one, believe it or not, is execute. This is funny, but I sometimes think I have to change the ease because I get to execute. A lot of people think, can I execute that person I need to release? Because that would be pretty good if I could do that, which isn’t release at all. What we mean by execute is, these other five concepts, if they remain concepts and don’t actually evidence in your life, then none of it really matters. We didn’t design the REWIRE acronym. I didn’t start speaking and writing about the lizard brain because we wanted some ethereal concept that people could understand but not go do. Does that make sense? If you hear this and you’re going, oh, I get it. Well, this is really funny. I mean, frankly, I mean, it sounds kind of rude. I don’t care if you get it. What I care about is if you listen to this, at least in the work that we do, like when my clients go, I totally understand the lizard brain. Wonderful. How are you executing on understanding the lizard brain? Are we actually changing sleep patterns? Are we actually looking to behavioral things that we’re concretely going and doing? Because if we don’t go and execute things, then people hear this work, they read the stuff we do, they come into coaching and they’re like, I get it. And some people even really love it. Ooh, I love that. And I tell you, Steve, loving it and totally understanding it are still detached from going to do it.

You have to make it a habit. So I don’t know if I can say differently, maybe if I misunderstand it, but I get it that you have to execute the first five letters of the acronym. But I’m also thinking about action as an elixir for depression, for example. So recently I went to this Chinese restaurant, I got this fortune cookie and this is what he read and it kind of stuck with me. I thought it was actually smart. It said, for worry, work is better than whiskey. So it’s kind of this idea that if you’re worried, take action and you’re going to feel better and you’re going to move things out. You can get out of your funk. It’s not just you. Some people want to wait to get out of the funk to be able to have the energy to do work. But sometimes you can just pretend that you have the energy and just do some things and it’s going to make you actually more productive and feel better about yourself.

Yeah. We could do an entire podcast episode on that fortune cookie. We’ll call it the Fortune Cookie Podcast. So again, you brought up two things that might be worthy of our discussion. Number one, I disagree with the fortune cookie. I want you to know that.

Okay. Whiskey is better?

And who am I to, I don’t know, I hope Confucius actually did, I hope that was just somebody making stuff up because who am I to disagree with some, but I appreciate its intent, which was to go and execute. However, when we invite worry, is that better than whiskey? Yes. The whole thing was saying, get off your butt and go take some action. I understand that, which is good. When we invite worry as a catalyst, worry itself increases, if you think about what worry is, I’m worried about whatever it is, my work. When we use worry as a catalyst for action, it’s often not long, it doesn’t sustain for very long because worry is an increase in cortisol. And cortisol actually impedes the prefrontal cortex, right? It doesn’t shut it off, meaning the part of our brain that uses logic and language and reason, when we worry, we’re actually impeding that. So yes, it can worry and fear. Again, if you’re walking across the street, cortisol, get out. Yes, it’ll help you take action. Some of the action that people need to take is, I need to be a kinder human. That’s not get out of the street. That is a long-term transformational thing and worry will not serve that. It’ll actually hinder it.

Yeah, I think worry is not the trigger. It’s the work is the trigger. So if you’re worried, let’s say I get up at 4 a.m. in the morning, maybe a thing to do is to take some action on what I’m worried about and try to move away from the danger that my lizard brain is perceiving. But I can also see that sometimes people can overdo it and they can overwork themselves or they can, they run into workaholism and then they’re going to destroy the relationship. So it can be very destructive too.

I think you’ve done a good job at pointing out, there’s a little bit of a vicious circle and you’ve pointed it out. If you and I conclude, you know what, just take action. But the problem is, a lot of times our lizard brain is the thing that is precluding us from taking action. It’s the hindrance to our action. So if that’s like saying, okay, just take action. Well, I hope people listening to that have a, well, wait a minute. If I could just take action, yes, I get it. That’s why we, in our company, have actually argued that if you first start by stilling your lizard brain, understanding it, then action becomes more plausible. With a loud lizard, if you’re worried, if you keep going back to familiar ways, if your habits are a certain thing, right, familiarity, being right, habits and control. If we keep resorting, just letting the lizard go, action that we want to take sometimes becomes very difficult because the lizard’s controlling more than even our free will. That’s why if we can learn to still the lizard at that point, hey, execute. Now let’s go take action. But if your lizard’s really loud, telling someone to take action, your survival is stronger than your free will. How about that?

Yeah, I get it. Yeah, it is a very deep conversation. So I would have more questions to ask, but then we’re running out of time here. So I love this concept of stilling the lizard brain. You actually wrote a book about it, didn’t you? Still The Lizard Brain. So is it available on Amazon?

All the normal channels. Amazon, you can get Still The Lizard. It’s actually a very simple story. When you try to define neuroscience, it started when I was writing that book, it kept going towards more and more complexity. It’s one of my “Why’s,” I suppose.

Even as a core value in our company, we value simplicity. So when you’re talking about these things that are in the brain and stuff that gets complex, how can we simplify it? And so I ended up just telling a simple anecdotal story about a person who needed to still their lizard brain and then going through this simple journey of learning about familiarity, being right, habits and control. And then obviously I was trying to tell the story how they worked out, rest, enjoy, wellness, invest, release, and execute or integrate, release. So we actually worked that through a simple little story. I was trying to make it as simple as I could. So the book isn’t this, the book is this.

I love it. I think it’s very good to keep in mind that sometimes we have to create some space between our avarice, perhaps, and do and take care of ourselves. You put the oxygen mask on ourselves and to make sure we get the rest and we have some fun and then we can look at the problem and maybe that’s not so difficult or creative juices will start flowing and we can figure things out. So definitely I think it’s great. So if people would like to still the lizard brain, maybe they run a business and they are running around, there are lots of fires to put out and they feel like it became the culture that drives them. I see many companies where the adrenaline is driving them. They have this stop-go cycle that they’re putting out the fires, that’s the driver and as soon as the fires are out, they basically kick back and relax and then everything starts sliding until there’s another crisis as opposed to having their vision, for example, drive them. So this kind of stuff. So where can people go and how can people learn more about what you do and where can they connect with you guys?

So, when I created the company, I guess, 11 years ago now, Rewire, Inc. Rewire, Inc. is our company. So pretty easy to find us online, www.rewireinc.com. We had to throw the Inc on there because, frankly, last time I looked, rewire, the domain of rewire was owned by an electrical company in New Jersey. But I find that interesting because actually, the brain has electrical signals. That’s what neural responses are, right? So it’s not that dissimilar. But rewireinc.com is where to find us. And to your point, very briefly, Steve, about companies, one of the applications of all of this work is around the concept of employee engagement. If you own a business or if you’re in leadership in a business, it isn’t about one individual learning to still their lizard brain. What would it look like culturally if the collective lizard brain was stilled. Because cultures are nothing more than the individual responses inside an entity, right? And how people respond to things. And so that’s why we bring this to bear through coaching, one-on-one coaching. Sometimes we do group coaching, live coaching, and we educate people on this. We give them this language. That’s one of the things is when we’ve done this with people, we literally have watched employee engagement rise and then results. At the end of the day, let’s be honest, we’re not just doing this as a mental exercise, we want better results. We want better relationships, we want better results. And so that’s what this whole thing points towards. So rewireinc.com, I’m not hard to find on LinkedIn personally. We give a lot of resources away for free like a lot of people do these days if you find us on rewireinc.com. Buy the book, again.

All right. Awesome. So thanks, Steve, for sharing with us this whole construct, Lizard Brain, and how it can impede us and prevent us being more productive and more fulfilled. Steve Scanlon, CEO and co-founder of Rewire, Inc. Check them out, check out his book, Still The Lizard Brain, on Amazon. And stay tuned for further episodes here with entrepreneurs who have great frameworks that they discovered. Thank you, Steve, for coming and thanks for listening.

 

Important Links:

This entry was posted in . Bookmark the permalink.
kristine