Why do you think you return to doing things you don't want to do? You're committed to start a new diet or go to bed early from now on, or not say that awful thing to someone you're close to. In the moment you were fully resolved but then, it happens again. So frustrating. Have you found out why change is so tough?
Our brain is constructed to not spend any more energy than it has to. It takes up 20% of our daily energy but is only 5% of our physiology. It is easier for your brain to do the familiar, so asking it to something new means it has to use more energy. And coupled with the fact that all these examples have beliefs behind them. Like I don't go to bed early because I have so much to do or I need to diet because I am so fat but I just keep getting fatter. We say those mean things to people we're close to because they've triggered a reaction in us and we defend ourselves by responding as an attack to deflect the pain. Looking behind the reason for changing what we don’t like doing is important.
Your brain is also a prediction machine. It wants to use what it knows to predict the future because prediction feels like safety and your brain is designed to keep you safe. Problem? We can’t predict everything. Surrendering to the mystery of any future can be a difficult thing to do if you don’t feel safe. If you trust your brain to do all your thinking it makes you think like a control freak that is afraid everyone is going to get the better of them. Your brain will lie to you to keep you safe and stop you from doing the unfamiliar or making changes. If your brain is in charge of you, your life will not be about fun adventure and challenge but fear and the drive to keep you safe.
One of the other things about our brain is that it is constructed to find out things that aren't solved yet and will keep bringing us back to those things. So what does this have to do with returning to things you don't want to do? For our brain to defend ourselves it takes you to the unsafe thing to help your mind find a way of making it safe.
With trying to keep you safe by preferring the familiar, predicting what won’t work and finding the things that aren’t solved yet it can look like this in your thought patterns “I want to lose weight because I’m getting fatter, but I have never been able to get to my ideal weight. I have no will power and am just have to get bigger. Why am I so hopeless?” Then a feeling of sadness, shame and overwhelm, connected to the thought re-enforces that. Next minute, these thoughts plus emotions lead you to reaching for something sugary for comfort - and then the loop starts again. Does it make sense?
The thought feeling trigger reaction needs a lot of unpacking. I wrote before about catching ourselves in a micro moment of doing the thing we don’t want to do, and this pause can help a lot of behaviour change if you work at it consistently. But here’s the thing. If it's attached to an emotion that's strong and painful , especially an early memory, then your brain will have a strong neural loop that needs a lot of focus. Here's what the work looks like in another example:
If, for example you had an emotionally unavailable parent, then you will look for partners who are the same without even realising it. There are two factors happening. Your brain likes what's familiar and emotionally unavailable is familiar. Your brain is also in a corrective loop or a loop that it's trying to correct by finding a better outcome, but without breaking down the correction which is often painful, it can't happen repeatedly. Same type of spouse or partner over and over again. We end up retraumatising ourselves because we're exposing ourselves again and again to the same pattern that hurts us without a better outcome. The key is to unpack the trigger safely in a way that identifies where it came from, the emotion you attached to it and the message we told ourselves. Once you've done that work, then replacing it with something better. That is the key to getting down to the underlying need that wasn't met to create new goals and more useful outcomes for you. It's sometimes a lot easier said than done which is why a mindset coach is helpful.
Creating a safe and consistent way to do this is key. It can be transformational.
Not written by Artificial Intelligence
