Everyone Has a Devil Living in Your Brain

The Peggie Li Letter · Issue #1

On paper, my life might look like I was constantly operating in a high-efficiency, hyper-rational mode：

I spent a decade working in content, strategy, and senior leadership roles at high-pressure companies like The Walt Disney Company, Fox Networks, DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures, and ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) from 2009 to 2018, before becoming an entrepreneur from 2018 to the present. I also built my own startup from scratch, raised a $5 million seed round, developed and managed both a Beijing-based engineering team and a U.S.-based growth team.

By conventional standards, someone like me should be: strong-willed, disciplined, logically sharp, and emotionally resilient.

But over the past few years, I’ve come to see something with increasing clarity:

Neuroscience gives this “automated scripts“ a clinical name: the Default Mode Network (DMN).

In Buddhism, it’s described as the continuous flow of “deluded thoughts.”

In Daoism, it’s the habitual inertia of “sliding down the path of the masses.”

And these days, I just call it what it feels like:

In this letter, I want to unpack this devil in full:

• What exactly is Default Mode Network (DMN) ?

• How does it quietly drain your energy and kill your creativity?

• Why have Buddhist and Daoist traditions 2000 years ago seen through its core mechanism?

• And how did I begin to see it, disarm it, and take back control of my life — through startups, postpartum anxiety, binge eating, and long-term stress?

1. The Default Mode Network: You Think You’re Resting — But Your Brain Is Secretly Running a Disaster Movie

Neuroscientific studies have uncovered a deeply counterintuitive fact:

When we’re “doing nothing” — spacing out, daydreaming, revisiting memories, or imagining the future — a specific network in the brain actually lights up with intense activity. That’s the Default Mode Network (DMN).

Even more surprising:

Your DMN consumes 60–80% of your brain’s energy during these so-called “resting states.”

In other words: while you think you’re resting, your brain is secretly running at high capacity in the background, steadily draining your mental battery.

Here’s a more intuitive metaphor:

It’s like going all day without touching your phone, only to find the battery at 50% when you finally check.

Nothing seemed to be happening — but background apps were working nonstop. That’s exactly how the DMN works.

The DMN primarily handles:

• Self-referential thoughts (“Who am I?”, “Am I good enough?”, “How do I compare?”)

• Mental replay of the past (“I said the wrong thing in that meeting — so embarrassing”)

• Simulation of future threats (“What if I lose my job?” “What if something happens to my child?”)

• Endless disaster trailers that haven’t actually happened, playing on loop

To be fair, this system had evolutionary value:

Our ancestors needed their brains to simulate threats while resting in caves —

“What if there’s a predator tomorrow?”

“What if the water source dries up?”

This kind of “mental rehearsal” once improved our survival odds.

But today, real physical threats are rare.

Here’s how it plays out:

• You’re physically safe, but your mind keeps flashing images of inadequacy

• The day’s work is done, but your brain replays all the moments you “weren’t perfect”

• Your child knocks over a glass of water, and your brain jumps to: “Am I a failure as a mother?”

Scientific research has shown a consistent conclusion:

So when you say “I can’t stop overthinking” or “I’m just someone who worries a lot” —

That’s not a personality flaw.

2. Imagined Threats Feel Just as Real — to Your Brain

Here’s a truth that’s both brutal and liberating:

Studies have shown that when people vividly imagine a tarantula crawling toward them — or anticipate a sound they associate with past electric shocks — the same fear-related brain regions light up. The body responds with tension, sweat, and a racing heart, even if no actual threat exists.

In other words, when the Default Mode Network keeps replaying mental horror reels, your body pays the real price for an event that never happened.

That’s why so many people — despite having relatively safe and stable lives — still live with chronic fear and anxiety.

Because the DMN treats imagination as reality.

From an energy perspective, it’s a massive leak: energy that could have gone toward creating, learning, loving, collaborating — all gets hijacked to simulate threats that don’t exist.

3. The DMN vs. Creativity: Why You’re “Stuck”

When the Default Mode Network is highly active, the brain goes into survival mode: all its bandwidth is reallocated to questions like “How do I avoid danger? How do I not make mistakes? How do I not fall behind?”

In this mode, your brain:

• Chooses the safest path — no risk, no experimentation

• Recycles old patterns — avoids trying new ideas

• Prioritizes “What will others think of me?” over “What do I really want to create?”

And that is the exact opposite of what creativity requires:

• Openness to the unknown

• Tolerance for failure

• Immersion in the present moment

• Trust in your own inner impulse

So when you say, “I want to start something creative” — but your DMN immediately drags you into “That’s not practical” or “What if no one cares?” or “Can I really make a living from this?” — it’s like hitting the gas with one foot and slamming the brake with the other.

You burn a ton of energy. And you still go nowhere.

4. My “Red Bean Cake Moment”

It wasn’t a deep subconscious message. It was just the Default Mode running a script.

Here’s a very personal story — one of my clearest encounters with the DMN.

After I raised a $5 million seed round for my startup, I entered one of the most high-pressure periods of my life. I chose to live apart from my husband and young child to stay in Beijing and manage our engineering team in person, while overseeing US operations remotely. That year was peak pandemic — travel was frozen, and I went an entire year without seeing my family. I was balancing startup stress, cross-continental leadership, and the emotional ache of being separated from my 4-year-old.

Every day on my way to the office, I passed a bakery. I had already “decided” I wasn’t going to eat sweets. But somehow — almost every day — I’d end up walking in and buying a red bean cake. I’d even secretly pat myself on the back for it: “Wow, my subconscious must be really powerful — it overrode my conscious decision and fulfilled my real craving!”

But looking back now, I know it wasn’t some profound message from the unconscious.

It was just my Default Mode Network running a primal comfort routine:

Overwhelmed → seek sugar and fat for fast relief → dopamine spike → back to battle.

I wasn’t choosing the red bean cake. I was being run by a program.

I thought it was “me” — but it was just an autopilot script.

That was the first time I began to dimly sense:

There’s an “auto-running me.” And that “me” doesn’t answer to my intentions.

It wasn’t until I started practicing structured awareness, meditation, energy tracking, and gratitude that I could finally see clearly:

That same “Red Bean Cake Moment” has appeared again and again in my life — in binge eating, emotional outbursts, overwork, and endless loops of guilt and self-blame. Behind every one of those moments was the same old script, quietly looping in the background.

Which brings us to the real question:

How do we wake up from the autopilot — and put our creativity back in the driver’s seat?

5. The Triple Breakthrough of Flow States

Here’s the uplifting counterpoint: scientists have discovered that when a seasoned jazz musician enters deep improvisation — what we often call flow — the brain undergoes a striking “triple shift.”

1). Time Begins to Melt

The first shift is the breakdown of time. Brainwave activity moves from the usual beta waves (alert and task-focused) to a dominance of theta waves — the same patterns seen in light meditation and dreaming. Subjective time slows dramatically; in fact, research shows that during flow, the perceived duration can deviate by more than 40–60% from actual time.

This echoes the Taoist saying: “To enter stillness is to step into eternity.” When your inner world becomes completely quiet, time itself dissolves — and in a moment, you touch the timeless.

2). Visual–Logical Hyperlinking

The second shift is what neuroscientists call visual-logical integration. The visual cortex and the brain’s executive control network start firing in sync, enabling the artist to see complex musical structures without needing to verbalize them. Images, patterns, and actions fuse into one seamless process.

When you shut down the DMN and engage in total focus, you literally start seeing things differently. It’s not mysticism — it’s a dormant superpower we all carry but rarely activate.

Think of Nikola Tesla describing how he could watch a machine run vividly in his mind. Or a designer who can rotate a fully imagined 3D object with eyes closed. Or Einstein, visualizing the curvature of time through imagination. These are not metaphors — they are the result of cross-domain neural pathways lighting up:

Visual Perception → Abstract Logic → Creative Output, in seamless fusion.

In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, the Buddha said:

This line describes a shift from reactive consciousness to integrated agency — exactly what happens when the visual cortex, motor systems, and executive logic network begin firing in synchrony.

When the brain stops being dragged by fear, noise, or habitual thoughts (DMN dominance), and instead enters a state where perception and logic fully integrate, you regain authorship of your own experience.

You stop being turned by the world

and begin turning the world through your mind.

That is the essence of Visual–Logical Hyperlinking:

not mysticism, but mastery.

3). The Ego Falls Silent

The third — and most profound — shift is the temporary deactivation of the “narrative self.” In flow, activity in the DMN sharply declines. The inner narrator — the one always evaluating, criticizing, analyzing — goes quiet.

This narrator is what we often call the “ego.” You hear it when you walk and it says, “Ugh, my legs are sore.” When you’re painting and it chirps, “That color looks wrong. That line’s too thick.” Even when you’re idle, it replays yesterday’s awkward meeting on a loop.

But in flow, this voice goes offline. There’s no space to wonder, “Am I doing this right?” or “What if I mess up?” You’re just in it — not playing music, but being the music.

Scientists call this state transient hypofrontality.

Buddhists call it non-self.

The Diamond Sutra captures it in a single line:

This teaching describes exactly what modern neuroscience calls transient hypofrontality — when the brain stops attaching to thoughts, memories, judgments, identities, or imagined futures.

When the DMN (the “story of me”) goes offline, awareness stops “fixating” on anything:

• not on who I am

• not on how I’m performing

• not on what might go wrong

• not on the mistakes I made yesterday

The mind doesn't disappear — it simply stops clinging.

And the moment consciousness stops clinging,

it begins to flow.

This is why creativity never comes from the ego.

It comes from the moment the ego finally gets out of the way.

6. The Tai Chi Rhythm: A Dance Between the DMN and Focus

Let’s be clear: the Default Mode Network is not the enemy.

Brain scans show that even during peak flow — such as jazz improvisation — the DMN does not stay completely shut down. Instead, it takes turns with the brain’s focus network (the executive control system), cycling roughly every 11.8 seconds in a yin–yang pattern.

• Inspiration comes from the focus network: free association, scene construction, and metaphor generation.

• Technique comes from the Default Mode Network: rhythmic control, fingering accuracy, and logical progression.

This means real creative power doesn’t come from being in pure “inspiration mode” or pure “logic mode.” It comes from their alternating rhythm — like a musician moving back and forth between surrender and control.

In Taoist terms:

Intuition and structure. Instinct and technique.

Only in this oscillation does higher-order intelligence emerge.

So the goal is not to kill the DMN. It is to learn how to work with it — not being dominated by it all day, but also not suppressing it completely. When focus is needed, we allow the DMN’s “autopilot” to step back. When free, associative thinking is needed, we let the DMN come forward again.

Most people’s problem is not that they have a DMN.

It’s that they are stuck in it.

Learning to shift between these two networks on purpose is the real foundation of mental mastery and sustainable creativity.

7. Eastern Philosophy Saw the DMN 2,000 Years Before Neuroscience

The more I study Buddhist sutras and Daoist classics developed over 2000 years ago, the more I feel a deep resonance with neuroscience. When I revisit modern research on the Default Mode Network (DMN), a realization keeps growing stronger:

They’re describing the same thing.

The Buddha once said:

The implied truth?

If your mind cannot focus, many things will remain out of reach.

Why? Because the mind is constantly being hijacked by wandering thoughts — what Buddhism calls “delusive thinking” — which sounds remarkably like the DMN generating endless background noise.

Daoism puts it this way:

In other words, when the vast majority of people are letting the DMN run their lives — caught in conformity, anxiety, self-doubt, and the endless chase for external approval — simply following that stream will yield the same results as everyone else. True transformation requires moving in the opposite direction:

• While others are anxious about the future, you return to the present.

• While others choose careers based on expectations, you choose based on flow.

• While others strive from “I’m not enough,” you create from inner abundance.

Reversing the current — that’s how we level up in this game of life.

As Warren Buffett once said: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

The Śūraṅgama Sūtra describes the uncontrolled mind in terms that feel eerily similar to what neuroscientists now call the DMN:

To me, this feels like a near-perfect definition of the Default Mode Network.

Without awareness, we are swept away by this uninterrupted stream of thought — “thought after thought”. And in that state, all our behaviors, decisions, and emotions are no longer driven by conscious will, but by the automated inertia of the DMN.

8. The Three Blades I Use to “Disarm the Default Mode Demon”

I don’t believe the DMN can—or should—be completely “killed.”

As I mentioned earlier, it has evolutionary value. The point is not to eliminate it, but to ask: Can you see it, name it, mute it when necessary—rather than letting it drag you around?

For me, the most important shift over the past few years is that I slowly forged three “spiritual blades.”

8.1 The Blade of Awareness:

From “being dragged around by fate” to “seeing exactly how I’m being dragged.”

In the beginning, all I did was meditate.

And at first, meditation looked like this: the moment I sat down, the DMN immediately went into overdrive. Thoughts rushed in like a flood—unreplied messages, things I said wrong yesterday, my child’s future, startup stress, tiny physical discomforts… The more I wanted quiet, the louder it became.

Eventually, I let go of the obsession with “getting rid of thoughts” and switched to one simple practice:

I no longer try to control the DMN. I simply sit in silence and watch it dancing on the stage.

• Watching “anxiety” rise like a fog

• Watching the “self-attack” script play again

• Watching the old pattern of “needing to prove myself” resurface

Every time I managed to step out of the chaos in my mind—even for just two seconds—it reinforced my mental muscle. And as practice deepened, I found I could do it not just on the meditation cushion, but in real life:

• Noticing whether I was “emotionally eating” when reaching for food

• Noticing, when speaking to my child, whether I was responding to him—or to the wounded version of myself from childhood

• Noticing whether my work effort was fueled by genuine passion—or by the Default Mode’s craving for safety and external validation

A step beyond meditation is this: not only practicing awareness, but summarizing, classifying, analyzing what you observe—and then making actual behavioral changes based on it.

To help myself practice awareness in daily life, I created an energy-tracking system. This system allows me to record my internal experience in real time, helping me identify the behavioral patterns that arise when my brain’s default network is in control, and to see clearly how those patterns affect my inner energy.

After each event or emotional spike throughout the day, I log my energy:

What charged me?

What drained me?

After which behaviors did I feel a noticeable drop?

After a period of doing this, something became unmistakably clear:

Whenever I was stressed, I almost instinctively turned to sweets—especially cake. But after eating the cake, my internal energy dropped sharply. I began to notice that the cake didn’t give my body any real pleasure; instead, it left me feeling heavy and greasy. And once I saw that clearly, the cake lost its power over me.

I went from eating cake almost every week—to maybe having it once a month at most.

Not because I suddenly became disciplined, but because:

I finally saw the Default Mode’s script, and I saw its real impact on my energy.

Because I personally experienced how awareness helped me break my automatic stress-eating pattern, I eventually turned this Energy Tracking system into a tool that everyone can use—because awareness should not be some “mystical sensation.” It should be something we can record, analyze, and use to make tiny improvements in our daily lives—improvements that eventually converge into a river strong enough to change our entire destiny.

8.2 The Blade of Flow:

Using What You Truly Love to Weaken the Power of the Default Mode

As mentioned earlier, DMN activity drops significantly when you’re in a flow state—the “narrative self” goes quiet for a while. For me, flow is not just a pleasurable state; it’s a very real form of self-protection. When I am genuinely in flow, my brain simply has no space left to fabricate all those endless fear-based imaginations.

Naval once said: our real currency is not time, and not money—it is attention. Wherever your attention goes, your life goes.

And flow, at its core, is simply this:

placing your full attention on something you genuinely care about.

One of the deepest confusions people struggle with throughout their lives is that they’ve never seriously asked:

“What activities allow me to enter flow most naturally?”

Instead, from childhood we’re trained to ask a different set of questions:

“What is the most practical? The safest? The most approved? The most profitable?”

Which is essentially letting the Default Mode choose your entire life path.

So the method to counter the brain’s default network is actually very simple: constantly observe which activities naturally put you into flow—and deliberately increase the time you spend doing them.

My approach has completely reversed from traditional thinking. I no longer begin with “What can make money?” I begin with “What puts me into flow effortlessly?” And then I ask the next logical question: “How do I transform this into sustainable value creation and an income stream?” This is not avoiding reality. It is choosing a more efficient path that aligns with your innate talents.

For example, suppose you discover that building LEGO puts you in a state of immersion, joy, and creativity. On the surface, LEGO doesn’t make money; in fact, it costs money to buy the bricks. But you can absolutely start a channel sharing your LEGO creations. Through consistent output, expression, and connection, there will come a day when it naturally evolves into a source of income.

When you support your flow through the content you create, you get to spend more of your life doing what you truly love. It becomes a positive cycle:

This is actually the path humans were meant to live.

The root problem of modern society is that most people choose their careers not based on flow, but based on family expectations, school norms, societal approval, or industry salaries. In other words, the external structure dictates the internal direction. This outside-in model almost inevitably leads to psychological depletion, emotional swings, self-doubt, and low energy, because you are spending your most precious resource—your attention—on things that do not give you energy.

Only when we begin building our lives from the inside out—with flow at the center, genuine interest as the path, value creation as the connective tissue, and business models as the final step—does creativity naturally appear, and action becomes effortless. Working from the inside out maximizes your potential. Your energy no longer leaks; it accumulates. Eventually, it forms a way of creating that feels light, joyful, stable, and abundant.

8.3 The Blade of Gratitude:

Using an “Opposite Frequency” to Counter the Default Mode’s Scarcity Script

There is another blade—simple, yet extraordinarily powerful—that I discovered almost by accident during many anxious early mornings: gratitude.

One time, I woke up at 5 a.m. from an intense wave of anxiety. You probably know that feeling well: your heart is racing, your mind is already rehearsing “every possible future that might go wrong,” your body doesn’t want to move at all, but emotionally you’re already in free fall.

That morning, instead of lying in bed wrestling with the DMN, I got up and did a gratitude meditation for less than ten minutes—very specifically sensing and thanking:

• The breath that was still moving in and out steadily

• The faint ache in a part of my body that was still working hard for me

• The people who have supported me or given me opportunities

After ten minutes, I felt something unmistakable: the anxiety receded like the tide. Not because all my real-life problems were solved, but because my brain had shifted from the Default Mode’s “scarcity frequency” to a frequency of “I am already abundant.”

The Default Mode’s core belief is:

You’re not enough. You need more. You must try harder. You need to be safer. You need more approval.

But the core belief of gratitude is:

I already have so much. I already live inside a structure that supports me. From here, I can create.

This is why gratitude isn’t about being positive—it’s you saying a clear “no” to the DMN’s scarcity loop. A gratitude practice is basically you telling the DMN’s scarcity mode to back off. But one practice can’t stabilize an abundant internal frequency. The DMN runs a nonstop scarcity program, and without repetition, it will effortlessly pull you back into the old script.

So later I made a very simple decision:

To turn “daily gratitude meditation” into a reusable structure—21 sessions, 5 minutes each—so that the body and brain can quickly memorize this opposite frequency through repetition.

I am shaping it into a free 21-day meditation experience.

If you want to receive it the moment it’s released, you can join the wishlist here.

From a DMN perspective, this is simply:

using a new automatic program to counteract an old automatic program.

9. If This “Demon” Lives in Your Brain Too, Start with One Small Thing Today

After everything I’ve written, if you only remember one thing, I hope it’s this:

Today, you can do one very small thing as the starting point for renegotiating with this “demon”:

• At some moment today, take 3–5 minutes to do nothing but notice what your mind is thinking. Don’t change anything—simply observe your thoughts as if they were an external phenomenon.

• Then, the next time you slip into an impulsive behavior, such as scrolling short videos endlessly, emotional eating, self-criticism, capture it in one sentence: What just happened? Did my energy go up or down?

If you’re willing to take one step further, you can use the Energy Tracking template I created to turn these little moments into behavioral pattern you can analyze over time. Or you can use my upcoming 21-day gratitude practice to help your brain gradually learn a different way of operating.

If you choose to, this won’t just be another newsletter from Peggie Li.

It could be a turning point in your relationship with your own brain—and very possibly,

a turning point in your destiny.

-Peggie Li