Have you ever decided excitedly to embark upon a health improvement project, like going on a diet, shown great progress hour after hour of your first day, and then, at the eleventh hour, you slip after a difficult conversation with your teenager?
If you have, you are not alone! Everyone slips at some point when trying to change their habits.
What causes this great gap between what we want and know we should be doing and what we actually do? What causes us to slip up?
Our habitual responses may conceal our real wants and needs and sabotage our life.
What we don’t know is a major risk factor for our health. However, awareness holds real power!
I want to give you five guideposts that shed some light on why we don’t do what we are supposed to do. I hope they will help you understand why we slip up and motivate you to use any “slip-ups” as catalysts to launch your own revolution and fundamentally shift your power.
You can gain the ultimate power of freedom of choice and use it to purposely disconnect from habitual responses which hold you back!
1. Your mind-brain relationship holds the key to your happiness.
Our nervous system, with our brain as the master conductor, is the main hub of external information processing. Our mind regulates energy and information flow, but essentially, “where our mind goes, energy flows.” What we routinely focus on will determine if we are more or less happy. Neurobiology teaches us that the attention of our mind induces connections between our brain’s 100 billion cells to create pathways. The more we use a certain pathway, the more it becomes “the norm.” For example, if you routinely focus on what you are grateful for, you induce nerve cells to connect (known as synapse) and reinforce an automatic response of gratitude. Gratitude and meditation practices also release neurotransmitters in the brain that activate our feel good reward center. This brings me to the next point—why we focus so much more on the negative aspects of life than on the positive.
2. Your brain is not that good at being happy naturally.
As a matter of survival during harsh conditions over a period of 600 million years, our brains evolved with the tendency to assume the worst, which results in a whole lot of unnecessary worry, anxiety, and fear. Studies actually show that chronic stress changes the brain in ways that reinforce its negative bias. For example, the constant release of cortisol as a result of long-term exposure to stress causes shrinkage to both the executive functioning part of our brain, our prefrontal cortex, as well as to our hippocampus, which is involved with creating new memories. This could be a great contributor to perpetuating our slip-ups. Luckily, we can provide a counter to this effect. By our mindful attention to looking at the positive things in our life, we can grow our left prefrontal cortex, which will increase our capacity to control negative emotions.
- When we let our brain’s pessimism run our life, we are temporarily impaired.
Because of the tremendous amount of resources required for the operation of our amazing body and mind, our brain will shut down essential functions and structures when our mind sends the message to our brain that a situation is threatening. It does not matter if the threat is perceived, like the fear of rejection or shame, or if it is imminent, like a cougar racing toward us. The bottom line is that when we operate from our stress response, we are temporarily cognitively, perceptually, and emotionally-impaired, which puts us on a sure path to slipping and not doing what we intended to do initially.
4. Most of our responses are automatic and happen without our permission.
Our nervous system’s main job is to keep us safe from threats in the environment. For energy conservation, the assessment of the potential danger or threat posed by any experience is automated at the level of the nervous system. So as much as we pride ourselves on our high IQ or our Ivy League education, the truth is that most of the time the way we respond to what is happening happens without our permission. Consider that your brain, although it makes up a mere 2% of your body mass, uses 20% of your body’s oxygen and calories. And still, out of eleven million bits of information per second that reach our brain for processing, our conscious mind can process less than fifty. Therefore, “procedural memory” is driving our actions and our behavior. Procedural memory, a subset of implicit memory, means our reactions are automated based on experiences we had in the past, even when we do not remember what those specific experiences are.
If you are curious as to how much data our brain can store, are you ready for this? The human brain’s memory capacity is up to 1,000 terabytes! Just to put this in perspective, the nineteen million volumes in the US Library of Congress represent only about ten terabytes of data.
5. The thoughts and attention of our mind determine how we experience our reality.
How we have labeled a situation produces chemical and electrical activity that either activates our reward center, resulting in pleasure, or elicits our stress response, resulting in pain. For example, any addiction, whether to a chemical substance, food, or action is a behavior that we choose unconsciously to calm down internal dysregulation by inducing the release of feel good hormones. Our brain will respond to vicious cycles of being exposed to too much stress by turning us to anything that has helped us feel good in the past, so it can balance the discomfort between rewards and environmental demands. So if, for example, in the past when you got anxious, you turned to a muffin for relief and did this unknowingly several times, you have trained your brain to release the feel good hormone dopamine by turning to “hyper-palatable” foods. That means that in the face of a stressor, your brain will release insulin that will make that muffin irresistible. But every time you choose to challenge this old negative pattern and resist that muffin, you are making a breakthrough. You are training your brain to sculpt new pathways that will lead you to a happier, healthier, and more beautiful reality.
We make so many choices on any given day. Many drive us to a positive outcome, and many sabotage our efforts and cause us to behave against our wishes and best judgment. It is part of our human nature to slip up and not do what we are supposed to do at times. But we do have the power to change that.
The biggest gift given to us by mind-blowing neuroscience research is that we can use simple, mundane, everyday experiences to re-sculpt our brain.
Regardless of how many times we have slipped up in the past, we have the power to create a happier and calmer brain and life.
Join me next week for the second part of this blog, “Why Don’t We Do What We Are Supposed to Do?” that will arm you with science-based solutions on what you can do about this common human challenge.