The fight against your own brain

misifer
misifer Posts: 114 Member
in Motivation and Support
Sharing this "article" that was provided as part of a work Slimdown Challenge I'm participating in...
One of the first obstacles in keeping a behavior change is overcoming what your mind does not yet recognize as your “future self”. On a subconscious level your mind can easily put changes off until the future where it believes the “new you” can handle anything!

Why is this? First, your brain thinks your future self is a different person. Here’s a great example of how this works: You know you have to be up at 5 a.m. in order to exercise before work. But you stay up late watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times. On a conscious level you know you are setting yourself up to fail however on a subconscious level your mind thinks of the tomorrow version of you as a completely different person!

Believe it or not science shows that this feature is built into your brain through brain scans. Brain scans show that different parts of our brain light up when we’re thinking of ourselves versus when we’re thinking of other people. What’s interesting is that in some people, when they’re asked to think about their “future” selves, the region that lights up is the one reserved for other people. In other words, if someone asks you to think about what you’ll look like in 20 years your brain treats it as though you’re trying to picture a stranger. Second, according to one study, habits take 10 weeks before any sort of new behavior starts to feel automatic. That means that during these 2 months any kind of change in your routine can disrupt the process. If you have a week when you can’t exercise because of the flu, a pulled muscle or working late then the habit is broken. Typically, this is when most people go back to their old ways. Your brain likes efficiency and mindless habits are efficient so it wants to create mental shortcuts that help you get through the day using the least amount of brain power necessary.

Your brain uses progress as an excuse for self-indulgence. Think of a time when you were on a really great stretch for creating a new habit and then because you’ve been doing so well you “owe it” to yourself to take a day off. Sound familiar? There is actually a term for this: willpower depletion and its every bit as detrimental to your goals as it sounds.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if all it meant was that the occasional “You look great!” compliment resulted in one celebratory cheeseburger. Unfortunately, the basic principle is that if you slip up once, that one misstep causes you to say “oh, well I already slipped up. I might as well just keep going now!” So, if you make progress on your diet or exercise program you are very likely to give yourself an excuse to splurge just once. But as soon as you do, it’s like opening a floodgate of self-defeating behavior that could drag you all the way back to square one.

Your brain also prefers bad habits to real failure. So, while your conscious self is busy hating you for not fixing your bad habits, your subconscious self is secretly doing everything it can to sabotage any efforts to correct them, because self-indulgence, not self-improvement, is what your brain actually wants. Your subconscious would actually prefer and accept one type of failure out of fear of suffering a much greater one, almost like a plea bargain in court.

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