The science
What is happening in your brain when you get stuck
A reference to the brain science this work is built on. The regions, the chemistry, the stress system, the thinking traps, and how a habit is actually changed.
Not an article to finish. Dip in where you are curious, and come back to it.
Matilda Martins-Ojo · Brain-based coach for high-performing women · Registered nurse
Start here
Why a coach is talking about the brain
Most coaching starts with your goals. My training started with the brain and the body. More than ten years as a registered nurse and NHS leader taught me to ask what is actually happening in someone’s system before asking what they should do about it.
The patterns that keep capable women stuck, the freezing, the over-preparing, the second-guessing, the talking yourself out of the room, are not character flaws and they are not fixed by insight alone. They are learned responses held in the brain and body, and they change the way any learned response changes: through repetition, in the right conditions.
This page is what I work from. Where a popular idea is shaky, I have said so. If you are the kind of person who wants to see the reasoning before you trust the method, this is that reasoning. Nothing here is medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care where that is what is needed.
For the same mechanisms framed around specific leadership situations, being challenged, evaluated, uncertain, visible, or holding a line, see the neuroscience of leadership library.
The patterns that keep you stuck are learned responses in the brain and body, not flaws in your character. Under pressure, the reflective part of the brain gets weaker and the automatic parts get stronger. Insight shows you the pattern, but only repetition, practised somewhere you feel safe, changes it. That is what the method is built to do.
Who this is for
Why the most capable women often run these patterns the hardest
If you are reading this, you are probably good at your job. That is not a coincidence. The same traits that make someone effective also make these patterns more likely, and more intense.
- You hold a high bar. The distance between “finished” and “good enough” is always visible to you, and the part of the brain that watches for errors and mismatches has more to flag. The standard is an asset. The constant flagging is the cost.
- You read the room. Strong social awareness makes you a good colleague and a good leader. It also means you pick up more of the signals the brain treats as social threat: a shift in tone, a raised eyebrow, being talked over, a delayed reply.
- Your worth got tied to your output. When you have been rewarded for performance since school, your sense of value attaches to the last result. That is why rest can feel unsafe, and a finished piece of work can feel like a test you are waiting to have marked.
- Your environment rewards overfunctioning. You work in places that quietly rely on the people who do more, right up until those people run out. The pattern gets reinforced every week.
None of this is a flaw to fix. It is the cost side of a set of real strengths. The work is not about becoming less driven or less ambitious. It is about keeping the strengths and lowering what they cost you.
Quick facts
Fifteen things about the brain
Short, well-established, and worth knowing. The ones that connect to this work have a line saying how.
Your brain runs on about 20 per cent of your body’s energy, while being roughly 2 per cent of your body mass.
Herculano-Houzel, 2011
The adult human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. This replaced the older figure of 100 billion.
Azevedo et al., 2009
Working memory holds only a few meaningful pieces of information at once, with about four often used as the estimate.
Overload is a capacity limit, not a discipline failure.
Cowan, 2001
Stress makes the prefrontal cortex work less effectively, impairing working memory, attention and self-control.
This is why “think harder” is the wrong instruction under pressure.
Arnsten, 2009
The adult brain keeps changing in response to learning and experience. This is neuroplasticity.
The pattern that was built can be rebuilt.
Lövdén et al., 2010
Your brain constantly processes signals from inside your body, from the heart, lungs and gut. This is interoception.
Learning to read the body signal early buys you time to choose a response.
Barrett & Simmons, 2015
The insula is one important hub for sensing the body’s internal state, but it does not do it alone.
Barrett & Simmons, 2015
Dopamine is not simply a pleasure chemical. It signals reward prediction and drives motivation and learning.
Schultz, 2016
Sleep actively consolidates memory. The brain is not just switched off.
A bad night shows up fast in mood and judgement.
Rasch & Born, 2013
Memory is reconstructive, not a recording. Remembering rebuilds an event, and can distort it.
It is what lets safe reflection re-file an old experience with adult context.
Schacter, 2022
What you perceive is shaped by what your brain expects, not only by what your senses take in.
The same situation can be read two ways, and the reading can change.
Summerfield & de Lange, 2014
Habits are learned through the striatum and wider basal ganglia circuits, becoming more automatic with repetition.
Yin & Knowlton, 2006
Putting an emotion into words changes how the brain responds to it. This is affect labelling.
Naming a feeling accurately is doing something, not avoiding it.
Lieberman et al., 2007
The amygdala is not simply the brain’s fear centre. It learns about anything biologically or emotionally significant.
LeDoux, 2012
The brain signals with both electricity and chemistry: electrical impulses within neurons, chemical messengers across the gaps between them.
Purves et al., Neuroscience
Full references are at the foot of the page.
The regions
Six parts of the brain worth knowing
You do not need to read all of this. The brain works as connected networks, no single part “does” anxiety or confidence, and each of these does many jobs. But these six come up again and again in the work. Tap each to read what it does and how the coaching uses it.
Prefrontal cortexThe reflective brainPlanning, holding a thought while you weigh it, resisting an automatic response, taking another person’s perspective, and steadying your own emotion. It is also the region most sensitive to stress.When your mind goes blank in a hard conversation, this is what has gone quiet.In the work →
In the work. Under uncontrollable stress, chemical signals weaken the connections here within minutes, while the alarm and habit systems get stronger. This is why “just think clearly” does not work under pressure. You steady the system first, then the reflective brain comes back and you use it.
Anterior cingulate cortexThe conflict monitorNotices when something is wrong: an error, a gap between what you expected and what happened, or two options pulling against each other. It also registers social distress, being left out or judged.The naggy “something is not right here” feeling in a meeting is this at work.In the work →
In the work. That signal is information, not a verdict. Part of the work is learning to treat the discomfort as data worth reading, rather than proof that you have done something wrong or that you do not belong.
Basal ganglia and striatumThe habit engineRuns learned routines automatically once a cue appears, with little input from the reflective brain. It also tracks reward and drives motivation. Efficient, and hard to interrupt by decision alone.Reaching to check your phone before you have decided to is this system.In the work →
In the work. This system does not learn from insight. It learns from repetition tied to a cue. Changing a pattern means spotting the cue and rehearsing a different response in the real moment, enough times that the new response becomes the automatic one.
InsulaThe body senseTracks the internal state of your body, heartbeat, breath, gut, tension, temperature, and turns it into a felt sense. A large part of what you call intuition or a gut feeling is read here.Knowing something is off before you can explain why starts as a body signal.In the work →
In the work. Learning to notice the body signal early, and to read it accurately, gives you more time to choose a response before the story about the feeling takes over.
AmygdalaThe salience alarmFlags what might matter, fast, especially possible threat, before you consciously register it, and attaches emotional weight to memories. Not the “fear centre”, and emotions do not live here, but it sets the volume on urgency.The jolt before an email has finished loading is this system moving first.In the work →
In the work. You cannot stop it firing, and you would not want to. What you can change is what happens next: whether the alarm runs the rest of your response, or whether the reflective brain gets a say.
HippocampusMemory and contextForms new memories and supplies context: whether you are actually in danger now, or the situation just resembles something from before. It is dense with stress-hormone receptors, so sustained stress hits it hard.A present-day situation that feels far bigger than it is often has an old memory attached.In the work →
In the work. Safe, reflective attention lets you re-file an old experience with adult context, so a familiar cue stops triggering the full original response.
The chemistry
The chemical messengers
Neurons signal each other with chemicals. Popular writing tends to give each one a single job and a mood label. The real picture is broader and more interesting. Tap each to open it.
Dopamineprediction and pursuit
Signals the gap between what you expected and what you got, then drives the wanting and seeking that follows. Central to motivation, movement, focus and learning from reward.
Myth: the pleasure chemical, and you should do a dopamine detox.
It is more about wanting than liking. It teaches the brain what predicts a reward and pushes you to chase it. You cannot detox a signalling system you need to function, though you can change the cues and loops that are training it.
Serotoninmood, sleep, appetite, patience
Involved in mood, sleep and waking, appetite and digestion, and social behaviour. Most of the body’s serotonin is in the gut, not the brain.
Myth: the happy chemical, and low serotonin causes low mood.
The simple “chemical imbalance” story is outdated and was never quite the scientific claim. Serotonin’s role is broad and not reducible to happiness. This page makes no claims about clinical depression, which is a medical matter.
Noradrenalinealertness and vigilance
Sets your level of arousal and alertness, sharpens attention, and is part of the fast stress response. It also acts as a hormone when released from the adrenal glands.
There is a sweet spot. Too little and you are flat and inattentive. Too much and you are wired and scattered. The middle is focus.
GABA and glutamatethe brakes and the accelerator
Glutamate is the main excitatory messenger, essential for learning and memory. GABA is the main inhibitory one, damping activity down. Most of what the brain does depends on the balance between them.
Alcohol and anti-anxiety medication act on the GABA system, which is why they calm and sedate.
Acetylcholineattention and encoding
Flags “this matters, remember it”, supports focused attention, and helps open the window in which the brain can change. Also runs the connection between nerve and muscle.
Endorphinspain relief and reward
The body’s own opioids. Blunt pain, produce the calm after hard exercise, and support social bonding.
Oxytocinbonding, in context
Acts as both a messenger and a hormone. Involved in trust, bonding, childbirth and breastfeeding, and buffering the stress response in safe relationships.
Myth: the love hormone.
Its effects are context-dependent. It can increase trust and warmth toward people close to you and, at the same time, wariness toward those outside the group. It is not a simple cuddle switch.
The stress system
What happens when your body reads a threat
A threat, physical or social, sets off two responses on different timescales: a fast electrical one and a slower hormonal one.
The amygdala flags something as threatening and signals the hypothalamus, before you have consciously decided anything.
The sympathetic nervous system fires and the adrenal glands release adrenaline and noradrenaline into the blood. Heart rate and breathing rise, blood moves to the large muscles, pupils widen, glucose is released. This is the jolt.
The hypothalamus releases CRH, which tells the pituitary to release ACTH, which tells the adrenal cortex to release cortisol. Cortisol mobilises energy, sharpens focus in the short term, and quietens systems the body treats as non-urgent: digestion, reproduction, parts of the immune response.
Cortisol feeds back to the hypothalamus and pituitary and switches the axis off. In a healthy response, the system returns to baseline. This negative feedback loop is the part that matters.
Repeated or unrelenting activation produces allostatic load: the wear from systems staying switched on. The daily cortisol rhythm flattens, the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are impaired, and downstream effects reach the cardiovascular, metabolic and immune systems.
The hormones involved
Adrenalinethe fast one
Released within seconds of a threat. Raises heart rate and breathing, sends blood to the muscles, releases glucose, widens the pupils. It is the physical jolt of fight or flight, and it clears quickly.
Cortisolthe sustained one
Released over minutes by the HPA axis. Mobilises energy, sharpens focus in the short term, and quietens digestion, reproduction and parts of the immune system. Follows a daily rhythm: highest within an hour of waking, lowest around midnight.
DHEAthe counterweight
Released by the adrenal glands alongside cortisol, with broadly protective, restorative effects. The balance between cortisol and DHEA is sometimes used as a marker of how well someone is coping with sustained stress.
Oxytocinthe buffer
Released with warm contact, trust and a sense of safety. Dampens the stress response and supports the “tend and befriend” side of how people handle pressure, alongside fight or flight.
Melatoninthe timekeeper
Released by the pineal gland as light fades, setting the timing of sleep. Suppressed by light, especially in the evening. Sleep is when much of memory consolidation and cellular clearance happens, which is why short sleep shows up fast in mood and thinking.
A note on the menstrual cycle and later transitionsfor women specifically
Oestrogen and progesterone shift across the menstrual cycle and change substantially in perimenopause. They modulate mood, stress reactivity, sleep and aspects of memory and attention. A pattern that feels harder at a particular point in the month, or through a life transition, is not a failure of effort. It is worth tracking and taking into account.
Cortisol is not a “bad” hormone. It follows a daily rhythm, highest in the first hour after waking and lowest around midnight, and you need it for energy, alertness and metabolism. The problem is not cortisol. It is a stress response that does not switch off.
The thinking traps
Cognitive biases that show up in this work
Biases are systematic shortcuts in judgement. They are not stupidity, and everyone has them. They matter here because a few of them quietly shape how a capable woman reads her own performance.
Researchers have catalogued more than two hundred cognitive biases. Many overlap, some are contested, and a few do not replicate well. This is a short selection of the ones that come up most often in coaching, not a complete map.
Negativity biasbad weighs more than good
Negative events have a stronger, longer effect than positive events of the same size. One piece of critical feedback can outweigh ten pieces of praise, and stay with you longer.
Confirmation biasnoticing what fits
You seek and give more weight to evidence that fits what you already believe. If you believe you are behind, you notice everything that confirms it and skip past what does not.
Spotlight effectoverestimating the audience
You overestimate how much other people notice and remember your mistakes. The stumble you replayed for days is something almost nobody else registered.
Catastrophisingoverrating the risk
Overestimating both how likely a bad outcome is and how bad it would be. “If this goes wrong it is a disaster”, when it is a small chance of a manageable setback.
Planning fallacyit will not take that long
Underestimating how long tasks will take, even when your own track record says otherwise. It drives overcommitment, and then the stress of running late.
Sunk cost fallacytoo far in to stop
Continuing because of what you have already put in, rather than what the future actually holds. Staying in the wrong role or project because of the years already spent.
Availability biasvivid feels common
Judging how likely something is by how easily an example comes to mind. Vivid failures feel frequent, quiet successes are forgotten, so your sense of your own record skews negative.
Attribution asymmetrythe impostor engine
Many people credit their successes to themselves and blame circumstances for failures. For high-achieving women with an impostor pattern it often runs the other way: success was luck or help, failure was me. That asymmetry is what keeps the evidence of competence from ever landing.
Hindsight biasI should have known
Once you know the outcome, it feels like it was obvious all along. It makes past decisions look more foreseeable, and past mistakes more blameworthy, than they actually were at the time.
Fundamental attribution errorcharacter versus situation
Explaining other people’s behaviour by their character and your own by your circumstances. Applied inward, it turns one rushed piece of work into “I am careless” rather than “I was stretched that week”.
Myth busting
Popular ideas about the brain, and what the evidence says
Some of these are repeated by coaches and in training rooms. If a page claims to be evidence-led, it has to get these right. Tap to see the evidence.
You are “left-brained” or “right-brained”.
The two hemispheres do specialise for some processes, but people are not one type or the other. Almost every real task uses both, in constant communication. There is no logical person whose right brain is switched off.
You only use ten per cent of your brain.
You use effectively all of it. Different tasks recruit different networks, and the brain is metabolically expensive, so there is no large dormant reserve waiting to be unlocked.
Under stress your emotional brain hijacks your rational brain.
The older three-brains model, a reptile brain inside an emotional brain inside a thinking brain, is outdated. The regions are collaborative networks, not layers at war. The effect people mean is real: under uncontrollable stress, prefrontal connectivity genuinely weakens while the alarm and habit systems get stronger. It is a shift in balance, not a hijack by a separate creature.
Neuroplasticity means you can rewire your brain quickly.
The brain stays plastic for life, which is the hopeful part. But meaningful change is slow, effortful, specific to what you actually practised, and needs repetition. “Rewire your brain in a week” is marketing, not neuroscience.
Dopamine is the pleasure chemical.
Dopamine is mostly about prediction and wanting, not liking. It teaches the brain what predicts a reward and drives you to pursue it. A “dopamine detox” is not a real thing, though changing your cues and loops is.
Venting your anger gets it out of your system.
Catharsis does not reliably reduce anger. Rehearsing the grievance, out loud or in your head, tends to keep it active. Naming the feeling and stepping back from it works better than discharging it.
Your brain is fixed by your mid-twenties.
The prefrontal cortex does keep developing into the mid-twenties, but learning and structural change continue across the whole lifespan. There is now good evidence that the adult human hippocampus keeps producing new neurons into old age.
It takes twenty-one days to form a habit.
The twenty-one day figure has no real basis. In the best-known study, automaticity took a median of about sixty-six days, ranging from eighteen days to well over two hundred depending on the person and the behaviour. Missing one day did not undo the progress.
You can multitask.
For anything that needs attention, you are switching rapidly between tasks, not doing them at once. Each switch has a cost in time and accuracy, and the cost rises with how complex the tasks are.
The mechanism
How the brain does the things coaching cares about
Six processes sit under most of the work. Each one is a plain claim you can check. Tap to open.
Emotions are built in the moment, so the build can change
The older view was that each emotion has its own fixed circuit that fires when something sets it off. The evidence has moved. A leading account now describes emotions as constructed from three ingredients: signals from your body, the situation you are in, and the concepts and words you have for what you are feeling. The same racing heart can be read as dread before a meeting and as readiness before a race.
Why it matters: if an emotion is assembled, the assembly can change. Separating the body sensation from the story about it is working at the point where the emotion is put together.
Naming a feeling turns its volume down
Putting an emotion into words, called affect labelling, reliably lowers activity in the amygdala and raises activity in part of the prefrontal cortex. A review of more than twenty years of this research found the effect holds across many study designs. It works better when you are trying to describe accurately rather than trying to feel better.
Why it matters: “I notice I am anxious about how this will land” does more than “stop being anxious”. The first sentence engages the system that turns the volume down.
How I use it: in almost every session. When a client says “I am fine, just busy”, we slow down and get specific, because “fine” does not engage the system that settles it.
Habits do not learn from insight, only from repetition
A large share of daily behaviour is habitual: a cue appears, a routine runs, with almost no involvement from the reflective brain. That is why understanding a pattern often does not shift it. The habit system learns from repetition tied to a cue.
Why it matters: changing a pattern means working at the level it lives on: the cue, and a different response rehearsed in the real situation until it becomes the default.
How I use it: I do not let a client leave a session with only an insight. We name the specific cue and rehearse the new response, out loud, before we finish.
Stress weakens the exact abilities you need under pressure
Short, controllable stress can sharpen focus. Uncontrollable or chronic stress does the opposite. It weakens the prefrontal networks you rely on for working memory, flexible thinking and self-control, and strengthens the alarm and habit systems. Sustained, it produces measurable structural change. Recovery is what restores the capacity the pressure takes away.
Why it matters: when someone cannot think clearly under load, the answer is rarely “try harder to think”. It is to steady the system first.
How I use it: when a client cannot think in a session, we stop and regulate before going on. Pushing through it wastes the hour.
Insight comes from stepping back, not pushing harder
Studies using EEG and imaging show an “aha” moment is the end of a longer process. Unconscious associative work happens first, mostly in the right hemisphere. Just before the insight the brain briefly reduces sensory input, almost a blink, then produces a burst of high-frequency activity in a right temporal region. Insight is more likely in a calm, mildly positive, slightly unfocused state, which is why pushing harder blocks it and a walk or a night’s sleep unlocks it.
Why it matters: good coaching creates the conditions for insight rather than trying to argue you into one.
If you do not feel safe, your brain will not do its best thinking
Social threats, being judged, excluded, treated unfairly, or losing status, recruit circuitry that overlaps with the response to physical threat and pain. When people feel evaluated or unsafe, the same stress cascade narrows their thinking, and they contribute less, admit less, and take fewer useful risks. The framework I trained in for this at the NeuroLeadership Institute names the common triggers as status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.
Why it matters: the first job of coaching is a space where you can be honest without managing how it looks. Nothing useful happens before that.
How I use it: the first session is mostly listening. I am not trying to fix anything yet. I am trying to make it safe enough that the real material comes out.
Habit formation
How a habit is actually built, and rebuilt
Repetition is the part of change most approaches skip, because it is slow and unglamorous. It is also the part that holds. Here is how it actually works.
Every habit has three parts: a cue that triggers it, a routine that runs, and a reward that tells the brain the routine was worth keeping. With enough repetition the cue alone is enough to start the routine, and the reflective brain is barely involved. This is efficient. It is also why you can know a habit is not serving you and still do it.
The reward strengthens the link back to the cue, so next time the cue fires the routine starts faster.
Behaviour runs in two modes, and stress, tiredness and sheer repetition all shift control from the first to the second.
Goal-directed
Deliberate, flexible, effortful. Run by the reflective brain. You weigh the options and choose.
Habitual
Fast, automatic, cheap. Run by the striatum. The cue fires and the routine runs, whether or not it still fits.
Under load, you fall back on whatever you have practised most. That is why a new response has to be rehearsed to the point of being automatic before you can rely on it in a hard moment.
How long it takes
There is no twenty-one day rule. In the study most often cited, reaching automaticity took a median of about sixty-six days, with a range from eighteen to well over two hundred, depending on the person and how complex the behaviour was. Simple actions land faster. Missing a single day did not break the progress.
What actually builds a new one
Same cue, same contextrepetition only counts when it is anchored
A repetition builds a habit when it is tied to a consistent trigger. “After I sit down at my desk” works. “When I get a chance” does not, because there is no reliable cue for the brain to attach the routine to.
Make the new behaviour smallsmall enough for a bad day
Set the bar low enough that you will still do it when you are tired, rushed or flat. A version you only manage on good days never becomes automatic. You can grow it once it runs on its own.
Reduce the frictionlet the environment do the work
Put the new behaviour on the path of least resistance, and add friction to the old one. Environment design does a lot of the work that willpower is usually asked to do, and it does not run out.
Plan it as if-thendecide the response in advance
Deciding ahead of time, “if X happens, then I will do Y”, makes the response far more likely. You have pre-loaded the link between the cue and the action, so in the moment there is nothing to decide.
Attach it to something you already doborrow an existing cue
A stable routine you already have, making coffee, closing the laptop, the walk from the car, is a reliable trigger for a new behaviour placed right after it.
Do not rely on motivationit is a state, not a plan
Motivation shows up unevenly. A cue and a small action do not need you to feel like it. Build the structure so the behaviour happens on the days you are not inspired, because those are most of the days.
In coaching this is the slow middle of the work. We find the exact cue, design the smallest version of the new response, tie it to a context, and rehearse it until it does not need deciding. Insight got you to the plan. This is what makes it stick.
In practice
How the coaching is built around this
The method follows the mechanism, in order.
Insight tells you what to change. Repetition is what changes it. The work is built to do both, in that order.
The mental fitness page → covers the daily practices this rests on.
Honesty
A note on rigour
Neuroscience is a young field and the tools are coarse. Brain imaging shows correlation, not proof of cause. Every region does many jobs, so “the part of the brain for X” is almost always a simplification. Some findings that once looked solid have not held up, and some of what is on this page will be refined as the research matures.
I use this as a lens, not a laboratory. It shapes how the work is designed and gives you a clearer way to read your own reactions. It is not a claim that coaching has been proven by neuroscience.
Go further
Further reading
Accessible books by researchers behind the ideas on this page.
- Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
- Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits.
- John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor.
- Matthew Lieberman, Social.
- Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization.
- Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Do Not Get Ulcers.
- David Rock, Your Brain at Work.
References
Sources for the quick facts
- Azevedo, F. A. C. et al. (2009). Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 513(5), 532–541.
- Herculano-Houzel, S. (2011). Scaling of brain metabolism with a fixed energy budget per neuron. PLoS ONE, 6(3), e17514.
- Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.
- Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
- Lövdén, M. et al. (2010). A theoretical framework for the study of adult cognitive plasticity. Psychological Bulletin, 136(4), 659–676.
- Barrett, L. F. & Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(7), 419–429.
- Schultz, W. (2016). Dopamine reward prediction-error signalling: a two-component response. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(3), 183–195.
- Rasch, B. & Born, J. (2013). About sleep’s role in memory. Physiological Reviews, 93(2), 681–766.
- Schacter, D. L. (2022). The seven sins of memory: an update. Memory, 30(1), 37–42.
- Summerfield, C. & de Lange, F. P. (2014). Expectation in perceptual decision making: neural and computational mechanisms. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(11), 745–756.
- Yin, H. H. & Knowlton, B. J. (2006). The role of the basal ganglia in habit formation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(6), 464–476.
- Lieberman, M. D. et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. See also Torre, J. B. & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124.
- LeDoux, J. E. (2012). Rethinking the emotional brain. Neuron, 73(4), 653–676.
- Purves, D. et al. Neuroscience (textbook), electrical and chemical signalling chapters.
- Kounios, J. & Beeman, M. (2014). The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 71–93.
The takeaway
If you read nothing else
- The patterns that keep you stuck are learned responses in the brain and body, not flaws in your character.
- Under pressure, the reflective brain gets weaker and the automatic systems, alarm and habit, get stronger.
- The most capable people often run these patterns hardest, because the traits that make you effective also amplify them.
- Insight shows you the pattern. It does not change it. The habit system only learns from repetition tied to a cue.
- That repetition works only when you feel safe enough for the reflective brain to stay online.
- So the method is: safe first, see the pattern, steady the system, step back from the thought, then practise the new response until it holds.
Work with me
If this is the level of thinking you want behind your coaching
I coach high-performing women privately. The work is practical and repeatable, aimed at the pattern rather than only the story, and built on what is on this page. We start with a free thirty-minute clarity call to find the specific pattern keeping you stuck and see whether working together is the right fit.
“She created a space where I felt comfortable reflecting honestly, while challenging me to think differently. I came away with clarity and strategies I could actually apply.”Dami, Mental Health Nurse, NHSBook a free clarity call
Thirty minutes, no charge. No pitch.
About Matilda
I am a brain-based coach and a registered nurse. For more than ten years I led teams in the NHS, including as a safeguarding nurse leader. I trained in brain-based coaching and conversation skills with the NeuroLeadership Institute, and in mental fitness through Positive Intelligence.
I coach high-performing women privately, using how the brain learns and changes to help them spot the patterns they keep missing, rebuild self-trust, and respond differently when it counts.
Registered Nurse · NHS Leadership Academy · NeuroLeadership Institute · MSc