The Petulant Little Toddler Running Your Life

We've all seen it. Or if you have kids, you've had the humbling experience of living it.

There's a kid at Target absolutely losing it. Full meltdown. They want a toy, a piece of candy, some form of dopamine hit, and when the parent says no, the little turd erupts into a torrent of crying, wailing like a banshee, kicking, screaming, and becoming a menace to everyone within a thirty-foot radius. And in a moment of pure exhausted embarrassment, the parent just gives in.

When my son was about two or three, he had one of those overtired, over-sugared meltdowns in the checkout line at Target. Full-blown fit about a Lego or something. We leaned in and whispered, "If you don't stop, I'm going to spank your butt." The wail immediately transformed into a tearful "don't spank my butt." Over and over. DON'T SPANK MY BUTT. My wife was mortified. It was the most awkward checkout I have ever been through in my life.

The best part came about a week later. There was another kid having a similar meltdown nearby, and my son looked up and asked: "Is THAT what I sounded like?"

Yes, buddy. That is exactly what you sounded like.

Here's the thing. That same toddler is running the show in your head. It's screaming to get its way. It catastrophizes. It replays old arguments at 2am. It tells you you're not good enough, that the worst-case scenario is the most likely one, and that whatever is happening in the news is a direct personal threat to your survival. It pulls out the full victim narrative: everyone is out to get you, life is too overwhelming, nothing is ever going to get better.

Or worse, it's not even a toddler anymore. It's grown into a teenager who has never once been told no, throwing a full Dudley Dursley meltdown when reality doesn't deliver exactly what it wants.

And then there's the hardest version. The one nobody talks about. That wounded toddler isn't screaming anymore. It's frozen. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for executive function and long-term problem solving, gets completely shut down by the stress response and you land in the freeze of fight-flight-freeze. You can't move. You can't act. Someone hands you a clear A-B-C-D plan and you still can't execute. Or you spend your life waiting for someone to come rescue you: a white knight, a new supplement, a government program, a spouse, something outside yourself to fix what's happening inside.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: no one is coming. Not the government. Not the gadget that stimulates your vagus nerve. Not even me. I can't save you. You have to save you. Draw a circle around yourself. Take care of what's inside that circle. In my experience, it's just you and God in that circle. That's it. And it's time to figure it out and move. Storm the castle at daybreak. That's the energy we're after.

That stupid whiny toddler voice is dramatic. It is relentless. And it is absolutely not you.

So if it isn't you, what is it?

What the Default Mode Network Actually Is

The default mode network (DMN) is a set of brain regions that activate when you're not focused on a specific task. It's your brain's so-called "resting state," except resting is a terrible description of what it's actually doing.

When you're not present, not actually paying attention to what's right in front of you, the DMN fires up and gets to work: scanning for threats, replaying social interactions, comparing you to other people, rehearsing future catastrophes, and dragging up old wounds to pick at. The yogis and meditators have been saying this for centuries. They just used different words: be present.

Neuroscientists used to think the brain was relatively quiet when you weren't doing anything. Then they started measuring it and discovered the DMN is burning enormous amounts of metabolic energy constantly. Your brain isn't resting when you're not focused. It's running threat assessments in the background like a program you never remember opening and can't figure out how to close.

The real you is the one feeding this toddler, handing over all of your power, one stress hormone spike at a time. You wake up and scroll (scrolling is a dopamine hit, by the way: the rapid eye movements and quick-cut content are engineered to stimulate the same reward circuits as a slot machine). You read the news. You absorb whatever flavor of outrage your preferred source is serving today. You get spun up. I do too, for what it's worth. Social media and news are designed to hit your emotional centers, because that's what keeps you engaged.

That ends when you realize the toddler is not in charge. You are.

Where the Programming Came From

Here's the part nobody talks about: most of what the DMN processes was installed before you had any meaningful say in the matter.

Your parents' fears. Your early experiences with failure and rejection. Every piece of news you've consumed since you were old enough to watch TV. Every comment a teacher made that stuck. Every relationship that ended badly. Every time you were told to be afraid of something.

I spent 42 years unwinding one teacher telling me I would never read at a normal level. That was the story the DMN kept running: not smart enough, not good enough, have to prove it every minute of every day. What I finally realized, after a lot of work, is that if she hadn't said that my life would be a shadow of what it is. My parents pulled me from public school because of it. I went to a small Baptist school where they got me on the honor roll. When I got back to public school to play sports, I could handle the academics. That honor roll led me to science and chemistry, which led me to Marshall University, which led me to Parker and chiropractic school, which led me to Dallas and Applied Kinesiology, which led me to teaching AK nationally, which led me to my wife, which led me to my kids, and that petulant toddler screaming about a Lego in a Target checkout line.

The story I had was shame. Turning it toward gratitude is what unraveled it.

That's the programming the DMN keeps running. Over and over. As if it's still useful. As if it's still protecting you.

Most of the time, it isn't.

Then the news took over and poured gasoline on the whole thing.

Modern media is engineered to keep your DMN activated. Threat, outrage, uncertainty, and novelty are the four things that guaranteed survival in ancestral environments. They are also exactly what media companies discovered keeps your attention locked to a screen. They are all dog whistles. Pavlov figured this out over a century ago. We are the dogs.

You are not getting information. You are getting your DMN stimulated on a continuous loop, fed by confirmation bias and echo chambers, so that advertisers can sell you things and platforms can harvest your attention. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a threat on a screen and a threat in the room.

Every time you scroll through the news, your amygdala fires. Stress hormones surge. The toddler gets louder. Your adrenals take another hit. And you do it again twenty minutes later because the DMN has convinced you that staying informed is the same as staying safe.

It isn't.

Why It Gets Louder Under Stress

Here's where it gets clinically relevant.

When your HPA axis activates, your adrenal medulla fires first: epinephrine and norepinephrine hit your bloodstream within seconds. Heart rate spikes. Tunnel vision kicks in. Your body is ready to fight or run. Then the adrenal cortex follows with cortisol, the sustained response that mobilizes glucose, suppresses immune function, and keeps you on high alert for hours.

Both systems are designed for short-term survival threats. The problem is the DMN doesn't distinguish between a bear in the woods and a news headline. It keeps the alarm going, which means your adrenal medulla and cortex both keep getting tapped, long after there's nothing left to fight.

Elevated cortisol also suppresses the prefrontal cortex. The long-term decision-making, rational problem-solving part of your brain goes offline. The hyper-alert survival brain ramps up. The executive function brain checks out.

Chronic stress doesn't just exhaust your adrenals. It keeps feeding the toddler. And the dysregulation becomes self-reinforcing: stress amplifies the DMN, the DMN generates more anxiety, anxiety triggers more epinephrine and cortisol, those hormones amplify the DMN, and the frontal lobe stays suppressed the whole time.

This is why "just calm down" is useless advice. The toddler is being chemically amplified. You cannot out-think a physiological loop.

You Are Not Your Thoughts

Here's the thing about the DMN that changes everything once you actually get it.

You can hear the voice.

Which means you are not the voice.

If you can observe a thought, you are not that thought. If you can notice the internal narrator catastrophizing, you are not the catastrophizing. Something is doing the observing, and that something is your actual self. And that's exactly where the real you can change the story.

Viktor Frankl wrote about this from inside a Nazi concentration camp. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is your freedom. The DMN is the stimulus. Your reaction is the response. The space between them is where you actually live.

Eckhart Tolle spent years writing books trying to explain the same thing. The pain body, the ego, the constant mental commentary. Different words, same concept. The voice in your head is a program. You are the programmer.

Or at least, you can be. If you practice.

The First Step

You cannot fix something you can't see.

The first step is just noticing. Not suppressing the voice, not arguing with it, not replacing it with affirmations. Just noticing that it's there, that it has a particular character, and that you are the one noticing it.

That gap, however small, is the beginning of everything.

If you struggle with meditation the way I do, there are tools that make it more approachable. Headspace, 10% Happier, and HeartMath are all worth exploring depending on how your brain works. The goal isn't to empty your mind. It's to practice noticing where your attention is and choosing where it goes.

The next post covers what happens in your body when you find that gap: the physiology of presence. Because this isn't just psychology. Getting out of the DMN and into the present moment has direct, measurable effects on your stress hormones, your nervous system, and your adrenal function.

The toddler doesn't just wreck your peace. It wrecks your health.

If you're caught in a stress loop that won't respond to anything you try, it may be more than psychology. Dr. JJ Gregor evaluates adrenal function and nervous system regulation at his Frisco, Texas practice. Schedule a consultation to find out what's actually driving it.