Your Brain’s Job is to Keep You Safe But Fortune Favors the Bold

Your Brain’s Oldest Instinct Could Be Your Biggest Enemy

Author

Mike Navarrete
March 23, 2025

Imagine this: You're about to click “buy” on a setup you’ve mapped for hours, but your heart races, palms sweaty (arms spaghetti), and a voice in your head whispers,

“What if I’m wrong?”

That voice isn’t your intuition. It’s your brain doing its job: protecting you from discomfort, uncertainty, and perceived danger.

In trading, survival instincts sabotage profitability.

Trading isn’t about safety. It’s about strategic boldness.

Our brain is a master of survival. It’s been keeping us alive for thousands of years, wired to avoid risk and discomfort at all costs (literally). While our ancestors dodged predators and fought for food, we’re battling something different..

We’re in between bulls and bears, but our modern battlefield is the market.

Trading is anything but safe.

It’s stepping into the unknown and trusting preparation, data and discipline.

Most traders never escape the brain’s trap because they don’t realize this simple truth:

“Your brain is not designed to create a successful life; it is designed to protect you and keep you safe.”

Dr. Joe Dispenza

The Awareness Shift

When fear brews up as you hover over the “buy” button, when you hesitate to hold a winner, or panic at the thought of a loss, that’s survival mode kicking in. The ancient brain doing what it does best: keeping you in the familiar, keeping you safe.

But awareness changes everything.

When you see fear for what it is…conditioning, not fact, you reclaim power.

“We’re addicted to familiar emotions because the body believes it’s safer to feel bad than to feel uncertain.”

Dr. Joe Dispenza

Your nervous system has memorized fear responses to uncertainty. The more you repeat them, the stronger they become.

But awareness weakens the grip.

Learn to observe this reaction without becoming it… step into a new paradigm.

Rewiring the Trader

I’ll share with you teachings from a mastermind I hosted that directly relate to us traders.

“The subconscious mind is like a programmed thermostat—it will always bring you back to the settings you’ve been conditioned with unless you consciously change them.”

Bob Proctor

Every hesitation, every small play, every fear-based decision, that’s your default setting in action. However, it’s JUST that: a setting.

It can be configured. It can be reprogrammed.

  • Hold through discomfort, don’t listen to your paradigm-based instincts.

  • Trust your system over the emotion of the moment.

  • Make decisions aligned with your system, you created it for this reason.

Each time you override the old thermostat, you raise the temperature, and the standard for your trading. Every time you make a choice aligned with the future version of yourself, you’re wiring new neural circuits.

The Call to Boldness

Fortune favors the bold, not because boldness is reckless… but because it’s calculated courage in the face of fear.

Today, your brain will try to protect you. Your old settings will try to dial you back to safety.

Your future self, the one living in freedom, in Tradetopia if you will, needs you to rewire your system now.

PS:

Where is your subconscious thermostat still set to "safe"?

Next time you trade, notice it and choose to manually override it.

PPS:

From Tradetopia,
Mike Navarrete 🧙🏽‍♂️