The conversations we host here are grounded in lived experience, and this live with Alex Katsulis was exactly that. Alex spent years climbing toward — and arriving at — a career as a patent attorney, until a full-life burnout culminating in 2023 made it impossible to keep climbing. He left law in February and is now training as a life coach and writing the Substack do selfish well.
What he came to over those years of unlearning is what he calls a biological fundamental truth: your brain is self-serving — and that’s a good thing. Your brain is connected to you and only you. Its emotions, feelings, and automatic thoughts are chemical signals doing one job: trying to keep you alive and well. That doesn’t mean those signals are always helpful — brains run on programming from childhood, school, media, every experience you’ve ever had. Alex put it this way: picture the difference between a friend who’s genuinely trying to help and one who’s purposefully undercutting you. Most of us have been treating our brains like the second friend, when really, it’s the first.
The deeper move underneath that is what Alex calls the third foundational piece of his framework: you are not your brain. There’s you — your consciousness — and there’s your brain, and there’s your body. Three different things. The thoughts and feelings that arrive aren’t you; they’re information your brain is sending. You’re the one who decides what to do with that information. Alex draws another distinction we have discussed before: automatic negative thoughts (ANTS)— the ones that fire within a hundredth of a second after a trigger — are not in your control. Voluntary self-talk, the things you actively choose to say to yourself, is. Once you can tell the two apart, you stop arguing with your own mind for producing thoughts you never chose.
What lives on the other side of this distinction is the line that had the chat at a loss for words:
“A refusal to be selfish means you are selfishly depriving people of the truest form of yourself.”
Alex unpacks the whole framework across his three-part series, The Gateway to Understanding Your Brain: Part 1 — Why You Must Accept That Your Brain is Self-Serving, Part 2 — Your Brain Is Trying to Help, Here’s Why It Might Fail, and Part 3 — You Are Not Your Brain (And That Changes Everything). Start there.
Be sure to watch the full replay and subscribe to Alex Katsulis. The question that opened this week’s live is the one his work keeps asking too: when did you realize you are not your thoughts? We’d love to hear your answer.
Thank you Stefanie, Dido Torchi, Colleen Kenny, Jeff Long, Chris Young, Steve | Sage-Outlaw-Caregiver, and many others for tuning into my live video with Alex Katsulis! Join me for my next live video in the app.
