I Can’t Get No Satisfaction: Cynthia Coufal Of ‘Better Regulate Than Never’ On Why So Many Of Us Are Feeling Unsatisfied & What We Can Do About It

An Interview With Drew Gerber

Gratitude from abundance, not scarcity: It is important to find things to be grateful for every day. It can change your brain chemistry.

From an objective standpoint, we are living in an unprecedented era of abundance. Yet so many of us are feeling unsatisfied. Why are we seemingly so insatiable? What is going on inside of us that is making us feel unsatisfied? What is the brain chemistry that makes us feel this way? Is our brain wired for endless insatiable consumption? What can we do about it? In this interview series, we are talking to credentialed experts such as psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, brain science experts, as well as spiritual and religious leaders, and mind-body-spirit coaches, to address why so many of us are feeling unsatisfied & what we can do about it.

As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Cynthia Coufal.

Cynthia Coufal is the CEO and Podcast Host of Better Regulate Than Never. Cynthia works as a Life Coach for young adults. She has 31 years’ experience working with young people of all ages. Cynthia specializes in emotions and how to regulate them.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to know how you got from “there to here.” Inspire us with your backstory!

As a child, I was very shy, and then became an awkward teen. I wanted to look like I had it all together, but that wasn’t happening. After high school, I had no idea what I wanted to study in college, but after taking some education classes, I discovered that teaching was what I should be doing with my life. I just knew that I could reach young people, and I wanted to be the adult that they could go to for anything. After teaching a few years, I discovered that becoming a school counselor was really the path for me. This would allow me to work closely with more students on more personal matters. After finishing my counseling program, I worked with all ages in the public school system K-12 for 31 years. At one point in my counseling career, I started listening regularly to podcasts and realized I had to become a life coach. This was a natural progression for me, because I felt like I’ve been a life coach my whole life. During the pandemic, when schools were closed, I saw a huge need to help young people deal with their emotions, but I had limited ways to reach them. That was when I decided to start a podcast for teens about emotional regulation and became certified as a life coach in 2021. I retired from education this summer to pursue life coaching full time. Right now, my focus is on students in college, but everything I do can easily be tailored to any age group.

What lessons would you share with yourself if you had the opportunity to meet your younger self?

Oh, there are so many, but the main ones would be that it is normal to feel ALL emotions. I wish I had known that there wasn’t something wrong with me because I felt angry or confused. I didn’t have to do what others wanted just to get them to be my friend or like me. It was OK to be me, just as I was, and I didn’t need to be smarter, more athletic or skinnier. I would tell my younger self that everything turns out amazing and I shouldn’t worry about it so much about what everyone else thinks!

None of us are able to experience success without support along the way. Is there a particular person for whom you are grateful because of the support they gave you to grow you from “there to here?” Can you share that story and why you are grateful for them?

I really can’t pick out one person in particular because there have been so many at every stage of my life. There were teachers that believed in me, bosses that were helpful, and friends that have been supportive my whole life, and family members who believed in me. I’m grateful that I had two wonderful parents who loved me and provided for me. Even at 88 years old, my mom still shows me she loves and supports me. My parents didn’t understand me when I was younger, or know how to handle me, but they always loved me and let me know they were there for me. I was very lucky, because without all of those great people in my life, things could have easily turned out differently.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think it might help people?

I’m currently working on a program that will help college students become more successful by learning how to better manage their emotions and figure out how to create the lives they dream about. We all have hopes and dreams as we grow up, and then something happens when we get to late high school and early adulthood. Many young people really start doubting themselves. Especially nowadays, with the influx of social media, I think we all look around too much and compare how we are doing to all those around us. There is so much hype about what is successful, that we begin to think we don’t have what it takes to fulfill our dreams. When that happens,many of us give up on the big dreams and settle for average, never realizing our potential. I think the stress and anxiety that young people are feeling is because they want something more, but think they can’t have it. I want every young person to realize they have the ability to create the life they want.

Ok, thank you for sharing your inspired life. Let’s now talk about feeling “unsatisfied”. In the Western world, humans typically have their shelter, food, and survival needs met. What has led to us feeling we aren’t enough and don’t have enough? What is the wiring? Or in other words, how has nature and nurture played into how humans (in an otherwise “safe and secure” environment) experience feeling less than, or a need to have more than what is needed for basic survival?

I am not a brain science expert, but I think all humans have this need for more. I think that is where our motivation comes from, figuring out how to get “more”. Inventions such as the wheel, flying in airplanes, computers, cars, and millions of others, were all created because someone wanted “more”. Cavemen could have just stayed content in their caves, but as humans, they were unsatisfied with how things were wanted something else. This feeling of being unsatisfied and wanting to improve their lives has led to the progress of everyone. I feel unsatisfied with how young people are taught about their emotions and how to feel them, so I spend time talking to them and test the best ways to help and create podcast episodes that will benefit them. I think that kind of “unsatisfaction” is different than, “I am not good enough or have enough even though I have everything I need”. We need to pay attention to our thoughts and realize that we feel unsatisfied because we are thinking unsatisfying thoughts. If we are thinking “I am not as capable as that person,” or “I won’t make it in this business because I am not smart enough, cute enough, thin enough, etc.”, it makes us feel terrible. We think the thoughts are true and believe the story that we are not enough, and we don’t even know to question it. I just learned this a few years ago in a podcast. Now I know this concept isn’t new, it is ancient, but no one is teaching this in school and most adults are not aware of it.

Our brains are wired for that needing more, but it can also be a learned response by how we are parented. Because adults haven’t been taught how to regulate emotions, most of them have no idea how to help their kids understand and manage their own thoughts and emotions. It isn’t their fault they can’t teach their own kids about it because they never learned how to do so. It becomes a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

How are societies different? For example, capitalistic societies trade differently than communists. Developed nations trade differently than developing nations. In your opinion, how does society shape a human’s experience and feelings of satisfaction?

I only know about my American experience, but when I think about how a developing country might trade, I think they would be looking at the world as a community, an awareness of how all humans are somehow connected. Everyone needs to be aware of how helping others benefits the entire community (world). If that were the case, I strongly believe people would feel more satisfied with what they have and feel more inclined to help others as well, thus benefiting the entire community. Unfortunately, our present society seems to be all about “me” to get all we can for ourselves, and do whatever we can to be better than someone else.

With a specific focus on brain function, how has the brain and its dominion over the body and beliefs been impacted by the societal construct?

The social construct has created concentrated forms of everything our primitive brain needs. We have processed food, alcohol, drugs, social media, streaming services, video games, etc that provides concentrated doses of what our brain wants most. All of these items feel amazing to our brains and our brain tells us we need more of it. If we overeat, or drink alcohol or watch Netflix all day, we can escape our feelings of unrest or unsatisfaction and we think we are beating the system. If we have negative consequences from overeating or alcohol, we might decide to try something different, but when we try to eat less or not drink as much, we feel terrible and just keep repeating that behavior. It’s necessary to look at how thoughts are fueling emotions, how that plays a part in our dissatisfaction, and what we can do about it. Our thoughts definitely guide our life results, whether to the negative, or to the positive.

Do you think the way our society markets and advertises goods and services, has affected people’s feelings of satisfaction? Can you explain what you mean?

All marketing tells you that you are not enough (of something) and you need their product to finally have everything you want or to be. That kind of thinking is so ingrained in our society and very few realize it’s a manmade concept. Earlier you mentioned survival needs like food, water and shelter, and being connected to others is also a survival need. As humans, we feel a natural need to belong to the group. That concept guided survival in the beginning because you needed the group to stay alive. In modern times, we don’t necessarily have the same needs of the group for actual physical survival. But, as modern human beings, we want status. We want people to like us and look up to us, so having THINGS falsely provides that status we are craving.

How is the wiring of the brain, body, and beliefs shaped by marketing, language, and how humans trade?

I have just started to study marketing because of my business. I had no idea how much marketing reaches out and grabs our most primitive needs. With that knowledge, I’ve been working on the words I need to use to make sure that people know I understand and care about them. My career in education was just about helping the students who showed up in my office. I didn’t have to “market” to them because they were assigned to me. I did have to create a relationship with them, but I did that face-to face. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world are shaped by our parents, school, our neighborhood and then of course society at large. It’s obvious that experts in marketing and trade have studied the brain and are always creating techniques that exploit how our brains are wired, but our “beliefs” are shaped largely by our close environment. When we are babies, we love ourselves, our bodies, etc. We don’t know we are fat, stupid, slow, uncoordinated, etc.. As soon as we are school age, and maybe sooner, we start looking around and measuring ourselves up to others. A tiny bit of that could be the belonging to a group or instinct, but MOST of it is because our parents, our teachers, our peers, social media, etc all have a huge influence on us and how we think of ourselves.

I work in marketing so I’m very cognizant of this question. In your opinion, how do you think marketing professionals can be more responsible for how their advertising shapes humans’ health and experience of happiness overall?

I am not sure it would help sales, but telling people that it is OK to be themselves would be a big step; that they don’t have to be more of something to be worthy. Marketing should focus on how we can all work together or that the world is one big, connected community. Recently, I’ve seen a lot more diversity in advertising, and I believe that’s a huge step in the right direction. Models are all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities now. It’s going to take time and a lot of work on society to change how marketing works. Best practice would be to teach our children how marketing works and that we don’t need to follow those standards.

For you personally, if you have all your basic needs met, do you feel you have enough in life?

I do feel like I have enough. Even with that said, I do want to improve and make my business successful. I look forward to seeing what it can become. My life’s mission is to help as many young people as I can to find and develop their own tools to create happier lives. I believe doing so will also trickle down into education so that changes in how they handle social emotional learning can occur. If my life doesn’t change at all from the way it is now, I am fine with that, but why not try to be the best version of myself I can be, and take it to the next level.

Okay, fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview: Can you share with our readers your “5 things we can each do to address the feeling of not having enough.” Please share a story or example for each.

1. Become Aware of your Thoughts: Our thoughts create how we feel every time, so we need to know what our thoughts are. We have thousands of thoughts a day and we have since very early in our lives, so we become desensitized to it. We need to take 5 minutes each day to write down everything we are thinking. If we are feeling unsatisfied, what thoughts are fueling that feeling. Take time to become familiar with your thoughts. Once you are aware of them, you can start to work with them and reframe them in a way that fuels more satisfaction.
2. Being of Service to your community: When we get out and help others or become part of our community and world, we are focused on others and not ourselves. When we are focused on making our corner of the world better, we can’t help but feel better about our own situations. I used to take students into a care homes for the elderly or developmentally delayed adults. Sometimes the students I took with me had a lot of trauma from their own homes. They also had learning struggles or maybe they were behaviorally challenged, but when they were helping others, I saw a whole new student emerge. They would feel better about themselves and learn to be patient and kind to others. It was very transformational. There are endless opportunities to help in every community.
3. Gratitude from abundance, not scarcity: It is important to find things to be grateful for every day. It can change your brain chemistry. I am grateful for my home, food in my pantry or fridge, and my health. Be grateful for what you have already created in this life. Look at what is going right in your life. When you give your brain an assignment like look for what is good or what is going right, your brain will look for evidence of what is good. If you think about what you wish you had or what isn’t going well, your brain will look for more evidence about what you lack, keeping you unsatisfied.
4. Take a break or take in less from social media: Remember that peoples’ social media feeds are the highlight reel of their lives. When we look at peoples’ happy families, their trips, cars, homes and compare what we see to what we have, we can look at our lives as less than. We should not compare ourselves to others, we should only be comparing ourselves to ourselves. If we want to have more, each day we should be taking actions towards those goals and then comparing our progress with yesterday’s progress or last week’s progress, not how someone else is doing on social media. We only see their accomplishments, we are not seeing what it took to get there, AND we know that people can make something look better online than in real life. You are seeing a filtered version of their life.
5. Realize everyone is already 100% worthy and loveable. We are born that way. There is nothing we can do that would take away that 100% and there is nothing we can do to increase it. It just is. To me this was such a life changing thought. I don’t have to be constantly accomplishing something to “earn” my worth. I don’t need to be better than the next person. I can be, just as I am and that is perfect. I don’t have to be more than or less than anything.

I hope these 5 things give you comfort. I think the world is struggling and I want to be able to help people see the power they have in their own lives. We really can create satisfied lives if we just become aware of what we are thinking about every day and how our thoughts are getting in the way of that satisfaction.

Do you have any favorite books, podcasts, or resources that have inspired you to live with more joy in life?

The podcast that changed everything for me was: The Life Coach School by Brooke Castillo. This is the podcast where I learned that I was in control of what I created in this life. I followed through and did the work it took to become a certified Life Coach which has taken me to where I’m at today. This podcast was the catalyst for that change. I also LOVE Brene Brown’s podcasts, “Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead”. I read constantly and the books possibilities are endless, but the first ones that come to mind are “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks, “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer, and “The Gifts of Imperfection” by Brene Brown. Any of these readings can help people get started on their satisfied life journey.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would create a movement where parents and children learned about thoughts/emotions and how to regulate them from the beginning of their life. At first, we would have to educate the parents in conjunction with their children because we haven’t done a very good job so far. But hopefully as we effectively teach the next few generations, there would only be the need to continue to support families through schools and community outreach, as well as to help every person become aware of their thoughts and emotions. At some point, teachers, community members, business leaders, legislators, and anyone with influence would all be trained in this work, and they would have the tools and resources to help in benefit everyone in the field they pursued. Even though our times seem bleak right now, there is still and always will be hope. We just need to figure out how to get the right tools in everyone’s hands.

What is the best way for our readers to continue to follow your work online?

My podcast talks about all of this in much more detail and my website highlights my coaching business and how people can work with me if they would like more 1:1 help with satisfaction. Both can be found at

www.betterregulatethannever.com

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this. We wish you only continued success.

About The Interviewer: For 30 years, Drew Gerber has been inspiring those who want to change the world. Drew is the CEO of Wasabi Publicity, Inc., a full-service PR agency lauded by PR Week and Good Morning America. Wasabi Publicity, Inc. is a global marketing company that supports industry leaders, change agents, unconventional thinkers, companies and organizations that strive to make a difference. Whether it’s branding, traditional PR or social media marketing, every campaign is instilled with passion, creativity and brilliance to powerfully tell their clients’ story and amplify their intentions in the world. Schedule a free consultation at WasabiPublicity.com/Choosing-Publicity.