The Elmyra Complex: Suffocating the Leader Within

“I'll take you home and lock you in a nice little cage, and never never ever let you out.” Said the little girl Elmyra
She kept saying
“except to pet you" she kisses the squirrel "and love you and hug you and squeeze you all up!"
She hugs the squirrel, who by this point is losing his breath.

Elmyra is a little girl who loves animals a little too much, so she cages them and never lets them out.
She is a Disney cartoon that lives beyond the television world more than we think she does and she knows us more than our dearest.
Elmyra, our negative inner voice.

According to the Harvard psychologists Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010), her cage is a trap, a trap that steals 46.9% of our waking hours. Please, do the math. That means spending 25 entire years of your life trapped inside a cage.

25 years just gazing into life instead of living it.

When she is in control daring, just doing, is a foreign concept. Because she over analyses, turns life into an arena full of danger, turns a gleamy golden sun to a burning red cosmic entity, and makes us feel as if nothing is safe except her cage.
She is also quite a creative manipulator, forcing us to make life miserable for ourselves.
Whoever you are? she'll always find a way.

Do you remember that day? That moment where you just stood there as a deer caught a headlight?
I am sure you have, especially in a high pressure moment
Maybe you were about to present a speech?
Maybe you were sitting in front of your future boss to be, for an interview.
But, you froze. But why? Even the science says that whatever skill you practiced for days is eventually moved by your brain from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind.
That speech already has become automatic and happily for you, whenever you want to perform it your brain will operate on autopilot, which is fluid and fast.
But you stood there seconds before, you remembered every single word. But the moment you stand up to present, Elmyra steps in starts over-analyzing how you are doing, she forces your conscious mind to interfere with things that should be automatic(things that are already in your unconscious mind) which causes you to freeze during critical performances.
Isn’t this upsetting? To lose something important because of her?

Would you judge a butterfly for what it did when it was a caterpillar?

I’m sure you wouldn’t, and you shouldn’t with Elmyra. Why? Because Elmyra wasn’t Elmyra in the beginning.
When you were three years old, it was just you and your voice, out loud.
At that age, talking to yourself was the only way your brain functioned, it was biologically impossible for you to talk inward. By narrating every single move out loud, your toddler brain figured out how to focus, command your hands, and navigate a massive world.

But then you turned seven. You met people, saw them and heard how they are with themselves and others, then you learned how to be a human-being.
And so thinking out loud wasn’t what they did and you mimicked them.
To survive, your brain forced that voice underground. It suppressed the physical mechanics of your voice, your tongue. Your speech flipped completely inward.
And then? Elmyra was birthed.
She tore free from the womb as an ugly infant crying into your once-peaceful world.

And you turned 13, the world grew teeth. You experienced social rejection, and environmental criticism. That is when the infant opened her eyes.
Turns out elmyra was never your enemy she was just extremely alert of the surrounding danger.

Can we find a way, will we find a way? To regain the years we lost trapped in there? 46.9% of our waking hours in a day? Or can we make sure to not lose what’s left of our life?
Disclaimer this article by no means tries to silence the inner voice, or the negative voice but it will certainly introduce you to ways of dealing with Elmyra.

If I tell you, "Don't think of a pink elephant," your brain has to keep looking for the pink elephant to make sure you aren't thinking about it.
When you scream at Elmyra to shut up, you are actually forcing your brain to focus entirely on her. You trap yourself in a whole other deeper cage by trying to fight your way out, now that won’t be nice for you will it?
So how can we break the cage?

1. Name what she’s doing (Label what’s happening)

The thing is we treat our thoughts as absolute realities. When Elmyra screams, “You are going to choke,” your brain reacts as if you have already failed, flooding your body with physical panic. What should we do then?
You just let her talk, but you don't believe her. Label it. Say internally exactly what is happening: "I am having the thought that I am going to mess up." This simple saying pivot shifts you from Elmyra's slave to just an observer from being the panic to the person watching the panic.

2. Drop the “I”

They-the scientists() once put panicking people inside brain scanners and watched the brain's alarm system instantly flare up the exact second a person used the words "I" or "Me" in their own thoughts
So you drop the "I" entirely. You step out of your own skin and talk to yourself using your own name, like a friend checking in on you from next door.
You ask yourself internally: "Why is [your name] anxious right now? What does [your name] need to do next to do this?"
This way you treat your panic as if it belongs to someone else, so your autopilot can take over and let you speak again.

Not certain if it is a good news or not but Elmyra will never leave. Elmyra will be there. Your heart rate will elevate, your hands might shake, and that internal voice-Elmyra- will say things. Because she is just a protective survival mechanism in your nervous system since you were thirteen years old. You cannot delete her. But the certainly good news tho you do not need her permission to move or to be. Neuroscientists distinguish between the amygdala (the emotional alarm system where Elmyra lives) and the motor cortex (the physical part of your brain that controls your vocal cords and hands). Panic is just a chemical signal flooding your brain; it does not physically lock your jaw or paralyze your vocal cords unless you let the conscious mind interfere with your automatic skills.