Let your brain know change is coming

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Think of your brain as your physical, on-board master computer system. Actually, it’s a massive network of neural connections that shuttles all kinds of conscious and unconscious information around.

But, it’s your computer, you control it and you program it.

Among your programming are certain behaviors that have become so predictable that they have become habits you give little thought to. Now, it’s New Year’s and you’ve got a list of changes ready, some of which are directed at old habits.

If you want to really want to change an old habit you need to inform you brain of your intentions in a meaningful way. If not, your brain isn’t going to pay much attention to you and your New Year’s resolutions will eventually fade away. Basically, your brain is comfortable with the way things are.

Even your attempts to inform your brain with new and deliberate conscious choices and/or repeated mantras of “I will … .” will do little to create the permanent change you desire, because your brain loves your habits.

Your habits are easy to implement, they run under the conscious radar and require little thought to fulfill their action. It means the rest of your brain can focus its energy wherever else it is needed. And, now you want to interrupt that flow with a change?

Let’s follow through and see what happens when your want to replace one of your habits with a New Year’s resolution.

Let’s say you made a New Year’s resolution to give up eating pizza. You write out your goal as – “I will give up eating pizza as of January 1st as part of my plan to lose weight.”

Now you’ve consciously decided this is your goal, you’ve written it out, and you have every intention of achieving this goal.

Pizza SliceThis is what happens next.  Your brain …

  • Identifies the written goal message give up pizza
  • Codes the goal into an electrical-chemical neural don’t eat pizza message
  • Sends don’t eat pizza message to the all things pizza center
  • Files into the all things pizza center the new don’t eat pizza message

Your All Things Pizza Center contains

  1. Sensory files that contain all sight, taste, feel and sounds of all pizza experiences (good and bad)
  2. Trigger files that translate any pizza associated sensory info into a potential motivator
  3. Response files that recognize a pizza trigger (i.e., someone says “let’s have pizza”) and the response habit to get pizza kicks in
  4. Satisfaction files that contain emotion links that get placated as pizza makes everything feel good in the world (temporarily)

Once, your New Year’s goal message reaches your internal pizza center, it has to compete against all previous “get pizza” messages.  This means your New Year’s resolutions starts out as one lowly don’t eat pizza message against all those eat pizza messages.

This creates conflict for your brain since it now has to figure out if you’re serious about this new pizza message.

Think of your brain having a conversation with itself.

 “Why on December 31st was pizza okay but not on January 1st? No one told me we were making any changes. Out-of-the-blue this new message comes down and I’m suppose to re-route all previous satisfy pizza demand neuronal connects immediately. Then I’m suppose to shut-down the get pizza, enjoy pizza and the pizza satisfaction center with no plan on how to handle pizza cravings and all the other fun social stuff that happened around a pizza experience.”

Think your brain is a little put-out and confused?

You would think your brain would get the message from your conscious decisions to reject pizza whenever the opportunity presents itself, or that it’s paying attention to all the repeated mantras “I will not eat pizza.” 

But, your brain is in conflict, and it seeks to return to its primary habit first (eat Pizza).  Conscious efforts and repeated and reinforced messages not to eat pizza will work for a while, but they eventually slip from your priority list. Once that happens you’re back to sneaking a slice and your brain is back in its comfort zone.

Your brain will only pay attention to you when you provide a meaningful message of change.  That meaningful message in order to be effective needs to contain a new computer brain program – in this case one based on not eating pizza.

How do you do that?

You as your own personal brain programmer you have to uncouple the neural wiring from the old habit pattern and create a new neural wiring path to your new program. (Sorry, just deleting the old program doesn’t work here.)

Next, I’ll explain just how you can do that.