The Hidden Gatekeeper: Why Your Nervous System Decides What You See, Attract, and Become

Your “reality” is not what you see, like a camera recording the world. It's a controlled hallucination assembled by a nervous system that decided what you're safe enough to see, receive, and become.

In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the hidden gatekeeper shaping every opportunity you notice, every connection you allow in, and every version of yourself that shows up. Drawing on polyvagal theory, neuroscience, and the ancient wisdom traditions that said the same thing two thousand years ago, this is a deep dive into why your nervous system is the real architect of your reality, and how to finally teach it a new blueprint.

Use my free guided sleep meditation: Rewire Your Reality While You Sleep: A Nervous System Reset Meditation https://youtu.be/qSVWd9u1LEs

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What if the reality that you want to be living has been right in front of you this whole entire time and you just didn't see it? And if that's true, which it is, what then becomes possible for you when you can finally see it? Here's a piece of information that has the power to change your entire life from this moment forward. When you look around and perceive the world, what you see and perceive as your day-to-day reality is not fixed and it's not even an accurate representation of reality. Yet, here it is, controlling what you can or cannot bring into your life. What you are seeing is a model, it's a rendering, a controlled hallucination that your brain assembles in real time out of a handful of electrical signals that it decided to trust. Now, this isn't a metaphor, it's not spiritual woo-woo. The phrase controlled hallucination actually comes from a neuroscientist named Anil Seth. And in 2021, he published a book called Being You that makes the case for this in plain English. So we tend to think that our brains are like a camera, just recording the reality that's in the outside world. But it turns out that it's actually a prediction engine guessing what is out there. And we are all living within this thing I call the guess the whole time, not even realizing what's going on. So here's the part that rearranged my whole entire life. And my hope is that by learning this today, it will rearrange yours as well. That guess is never made by some neutral, objective computer living in your skull. It's actually made by your nervous system, which at any given moment is either calm, scared, open, or braced. And whatever state that that nervous system is in bleeds into every single frame of this guess that your brain is putting together for you. Which means you never actually live in what's happening. You live in what your body, your nervous system, and your brain decided is happening. So as we're going to dig into here, you'll soon see and understand the nervous system is the hidden gatekeeper. It's what creates your reality, and I'm saying that with air quotes. And so once you understand the system, then you can understand how to fine-tune it naturally, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities for you. So, of course, most of us were raised being taught the old materialist story that the world is out there, fixed and solid. Our senses are just reporting it back to us. We have eyes that are like windows and ears that are like microphones, and you just walked through this finished piece of reality like an observer in a museum. And what the science now tells us is that that story is wrong. It's always been wrong. It's just that nobody told us. So, what actually is happening here? Let's begin with the perspective from Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's a neuroscientist and a psychologist. In 2017, she published a book called How Emotions Are Made. And this is basically 400 pages of evidence of a much wilder and much more empowering idea than what we had been spoon-fed. So the brain doesn't wait for the world and then react to it. Your brain is actually predicting what's coming. It's using your past experience as a script, and then it filters everything through a prediction, and it decides what you see and what you don't see. You are not deciding that. Your brain and your nervous system are working together to decide what you see in your reality. So here's the kicker, and the one that really matters to you and me. The raw material that your brain is using to build those predictions isn't even in the outside world. It's in your body, your heartbeat, your breathing, your muscle tension, the acid in your stomach, how tight your jaw is. That internal readout also now has a scientific name, and it's called interoception. And I like to think of this as the paint that your brain is dipping its brush into before it draws you a picture of reality. A calm body paints a world that has lots of room in it, room to grow, possibilities, supportive people. A scared body paints that very same room with exits and threats, so you can get out quickly, so you can pay attention to what might be there to harm you. The exact same experience, two different perceptions of reality. Your brain is dipping its brush into this paint. The paint is, in fact, your nervous system. I like to call it the gatekeeper. And a researcher by the name of Stephen Porges spent decades mapping this out. In 2011, he published a work that became polyvagal theory. You've probably heard of that. And the short version of that, which actually matters to us in the context of this conversation, is that we don't have one nervous system. We actually have three that are stacked on top of each other. And each one of those nervous systems creates an entirely different world, an entirely different reality. There's the safety state. This is where you have connection, curiosity, creativity. This is literally where all of the good stuff happens. Then we have the threat state, and this is where you have fight or flight. Your attention narrows focus just to look for danger. Everything else absolutely disappears. Your body is primed to move and protect you, and you are not going to see all those things that come along with curiosity and connection and creativity. And then thirdly, there's the shutdown state. And this is where you absolutely freeze. You collapse, you go numb, the world is gray, and so are you. You are not going to see anything that's going to bring positive possibilities and experiences into your life in this state. He gave this a name too. He calls it neurosception. It's in your nervous system's constant, unconscious scanning, where it's acting as your security guard, right? Your nervous system is already patrolling the building before you even wake up in the morning. And the thing that sucks about this is that your nervous system doesn't check in with you first, right? It just decides we're in a safe state or we're in a dangerous state. In split fractions of seconds, completely beneath your awareness, and hands you the verdict and works with your brain to come up with this perception of reality as fact. So in any given moment, we are not choosing our reality at that moment. We are receiving a predefined verdict, and then we're thinking that this is my choice or this is my reality, this is how I see the world or what happens in my life. And that's exactly why you can have two people that walk into the exact same room with the same people: a party, a meeting, an office. And one of them can leave completely energized, full of creative ideas, excited about the future, and the other can leave drained, fearful, feeling like there's a threat and perhaps they were disliked. You have the exact same room or reality, but it is painted by two different nervous systems and brains working together to perceive that based on the underlying nervous system of each individual. So they each experience a different reality in the same situation. Now, if you're anything like me and you enjoy reading about ancient wisdom, spirituality, you might be having the same realization that I did when I first started learning about polyvagal theory. I said to myself, wait, this sounds an awful lot like as within, so without. And the more I reflected on these things, I realized these are all just parallel ways of sharing the same insights and information so that we as human beings can put it into practice in our own lives. So, just for a few examples in the Yoga Sutras, the second line of the whole thing really says that yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. That's not poetry, that is describing a nervous system that has stopped scanning for danger. And they just did it in the vocabulary that they had at the time. Another one I love is the Buddhist principle known as the two arrows. And the teaching there is that the first arrow is what happens, and the second arrow is the suffering that our reaction adds to it. So, with that second arrow, we replay the rumination, the imagined catastrophe, and all of that is not our reality. That is literally our nervous system, our nervous system's response. And of course, Lao Tzu opened the Tao Te Ching by telling us that the truth that can be spoken is not the real truth. And to me, this is just a profoundly beautiful way of saying that you're always looking at a map, not the territory. And then we'll go to the Bible. Psalm 46 comes right out with the simple instruction: be still and know that I am God. All of these sayings and principles are telling us the same thing, that the answer lies in being still. This is where you can see the possibilities that will create your reality. They're not saying think harder, take more action, start manifesting your ass off. They're just saying be still. And this is the pivotal point right here, because to even be able to see the possibilities and the opportunities, our body, our nervous system, has to be in the state that will allow the brain to let those in. If we are in a brace state, the exact same opportunities and possibilities are going to be there. We are not going to be able to see them. And of course, if you can't see something, you're not going to believe in it. You're not going to have the things available to you to take action to make these things happen. I like to remind myself that, you know, all these ancient things that I love to read about, they weren't being vague at all. They were just describing a biological state centuries ago when we talked about it in different terms and understood it in different ways. And so now it's kind of really cool that we have this, the ancient insights as well as the modern scientific understanding, both aligning so we can understand, like, oh wow, this is just a system. This is how the human experience works. And now I'm beginning to see how I can actually shift my own reality. Why then is this deciding what you can actually attract into your life? This concept should absolutely be reframing everything that you have ever thought about or known about with manifesting. You literally cannot draw yourself closer to a situation that your nervous system currently reads as a threat. It doesn't matter how many times you write down your affirmations, how hard you visualize, if part of you, deep under the thinking mind, has decided that, for example, attention is dangerous or money is dangerous, or being seen is dangerous, then that part of you will filter out all of the very things in your reality that would draw you closer to those. And this is all happening without your conscious mind ever getting a look at any of the opportunities that would bring you closer to these things. The opportunity shows up and your body reads it as a threat. So the person who loves you shows up and your body braces instead of opening. The money shows up, and your body, which doesn't trust financial safety yet, finds a way to spend it, sabotage it, push it away. Not because you're self-destructive, simply because this gatekeeper never got the memo that, hey, now it's safe to receive. We can have the love, the support, the success, the money. It's still doing its job. When I reflect back on that Hermetic principle, as above, so below, as within, so without. In the context of viewing what we can manifest into our lives based on our nervous system, you could just say you are not going to create a world that your nervous system is not yet prepared to meet. Let's talk about how your nervous system is deciding who you can become. We tend to think of ourselves as just having this one fixed self. I'm Kristen. I have good days and I have bad days. However, the biological reality is that myself is state dependent. So, for example, the version of me who might write a novel, lead a group, be in a wonderful relationship, take risks, follow through. That version of me can only show up when my nervous system is in the safety state. So if I'm in a threat state, literally that version of me is not even available. I might be completely surrounded by abundance, opportunities, all these cool things. But the version of me that could see that isn't even in the room. If I'm in the threat state, I am never going to see all of the things that lead to those things. And the absolutely fantastic news is that every single one of us is capable of changing our state. We understand that very well now with modern science. Whatever state you practice, you are wiring in. So maybe you've been rehearsing threat for 20 years, and that braced version of you has become the default that just literally cannot even see the opportunities and the possibilities. That's okay. Just start practicing safety. Even if it's just for 20 minutes a day, you're going to start opening up the version of you that can see the options, that can see the possibilities, that feels safe, that gets creative, that takes risks. And then that will begin to become your default state. Just keep in mind that repeated states become traits. And that's the whole game. So the question is no longer, oh gosh, how do I fix my broken self, right? The question is simply, which version of me am I currently wired to be? And how do I teach my body to let the other version through? Let's talk about how to recognize when you are in a state where your nervous system is not going to allow you to see any of the opportunities or possibilities. When your nervous system goes into threat, you don't just feel scared. It actually hands you a specific distorted lens of reality. We've already established that. And there are four primary lenses. When you learn to recognize them, then you can interrupt and you can change your state. The first one is fight. When you're in this fight mode, everyone feels like a competitor. Every conversation is a contest. Everyone else's success feels like it's just a reflection of your failure. The world starts to look like a place where I either have to win or I'm going to totally get crushed. Then there's flight. Flight turns everything into an emergency escape. I gotta get the hell out of here, right? The inbox, conversations, commitments. And my body is just saying, I want out. And all of a sudden I'm inventing reasons to run away or sabotage opportunities, even when my conscious mind will swear, like, oh no, this makes sense. This is logical. That person is a threat. Then we have the free state. And this is when you feel like everything is something that you just can't take action on. Like the idea is there, it's fully formed. I know exactly what I have to do to make this a reality. But I also have to fold laundry, right? And we might sometimes call this procrastination, but it's really just this state wearing a mask. And lastly, we have the fond state. This has only recently uh gotten a lot more attention. I definitely recognized a lot of my prior states in this. And when you're in the fond state, you are someone who is actually abandoning yourself to keep the peace. So you might overgive, over-apologize, agree to things that later you resent or you regret agreeing to. So when you are in the fond state, your brain is looking for patterns that align with staying in this state, with keeping this state. I hope that by learning about these different states, you have the same liberating experience that I did, which was to realize, like, wow, these are physical states. This is not a character trait, this is not a personality trait or flaw as we are often taught to believe when we're growing up, that oh, this is just how you are. No, it is the physical state that you were in that is working together with your brain's prediction model to create your reality. And if you want to read more about that, there's a really good book called The Body Keeps the Score and just really reframes how you understand yourself as a biological being that, you know, thank you, nervous system, it's just doing its job. And thing is, it doesn't know that it can turn off the alarm. So we have to teach it. We have to tell the nervous system or teach the nervous system how to be in this new state. And to speak to that, I want to touch on relaxation. I love getting massages. There was definitely a time where I thought, you know, if it weren't for my massages, I don't think I could keep going, right? They're just wonderful. However, relaxation is not the same thing as release. So it's wonderful to relax, but you can relax for 20 minutes and still have your nervous system be just as stuck as it was before you got that massage. So it's an important distinction to look at. I want to touch on this and give you some information that will help you. A nervous system release is an entirely different thing than relaxing. When you do a nervous system release, you are actually creating a new baseline. This is your new default. You're walking around like this all day long in a state that can see the opportunities and the possibilities that is open to receiving. In looking at the many ways that you can actually rewire your nervous system, this is where it truly gets so incredibly fascinating, interesting, and empowering. I love this thing that the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolski says. Um he wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ucers. And he says, you know, a zebra sees a lion and runs for 30 seconds and then goes back to grazing. A human would relive that lion for 15 more years and then worry about a lion that's never even gonna come for another 30 years. And our body, our nervous system, doesn't know the difference between the memory and the moment. It's firing the alarm in just the same way. And this is really important. You start asking yourself, well, how then in rewiring my nervous system, I'm not just gonna relax and go get my massage. I really want to rewire my nervous system. What role do my memories play and what can I do about that? And there's a lot of things you can do. One of my favorites is reframing. I am constantly looking at situations, both challenging and empowering, and saying, okay, where's the wisdom in that? And I shift my attention to the wisdom. If there's parts about it that are painful or challenging, give myself an opportunity to actually recognize and feel and release those emotions and shift my focus to the empowerment from it. And there's this whole other thing called memory reconsolidation, which absolutely fascinates me. And this is based in neuroscience and how the brain actually works. With this, what they have discovered is that when you activate a memory, there's a brief period of time where it actually becomes changeable physically in the brain, right? And in that little window, they can teach your body the ending to an old story. So when you rewrite these threats, then you are changing the state of your nervous system. You're not just pushing things down or trying to manage what's going on with your nervous system, you are physically changing your state. And now you know your nervous system has been the gatekeeper to your reality this whole time. And the truth is, you have always been doing your best. You have just been working within a system that you probably didn't even know existed or how it worked, that was running program that you certainly didn't choose for yourself. It's important to keep this in mind. You were never failing, you were never broken. You were literally just trying to survive in this nervous system reality that was built without your consent. It was filtering what you could see, what you couldn't see, what you could receive or not receive, and who you could become. But now that you see it, now that you know the nervous system is there, the role that it plays, that makes all the difference in the world because when you understand the system, you can see it, you can change it and work within it. The sages told us for thousands of years to be still. And modern science tells us the exact same thing. When our nervous system is in an open, calm, default state, our brains can see all of the possibilities and opportunities, and we become creative and energized. This is the state in which the world that you have been looking for suddenly shows up and you start to realize it was there the whole time. You just couldn't see it. Be sure to check out my nervous system reset guided meditations, hypnosis, and sleep meditations on YouTube. You can find me by going to YouTube and searching for Krista Becker, and I'll also put the link in the show notes. Have a great day, and I'll see you in the next episode.