Creating Change: Why is it so Doggone Hard?

Photo by Dex Ezekiel on Unsplash

You really want to change. This time, it’s gonna happen. You make a plan, do everything right, and then… you find yourself doing the same old thing once again. What is it about change that is so doggone hard?

Brains do NOT like change. It is against our biology. Brains thrive on predictability. Overall, predictability = safety.

So naturally, when you attempt to change, you might find that you fall back into habitual patterns pretty quick. This is due to the sense of safety in what you already know. The brain likes to know what it knows, regardless of how it makes you feel.

We are wired to use our past experiences and information about our current state to predict the future. This helps increase the odds of a desired outcome and avoid future adversity. Or so you think.

The anticipation and hopeful predictions about the future can serve as an adaptive function in warding off some threats. But, when conducted excessively, it can become maladaptive. The effort to protect actually creates stress and anxiety rather than alleviates it.

Anxiety can be viewed as the brain’s attempt to be prepared in the face of an unpredictable threat. The more often you prepare for perceived threats through anxious thoughts or behaviors, the stronger your neural pathways become. In turn, the more used to anxious thought patterns you become.

Keep in mind, neurons that fire together wire together. This refers to how pathways in the brain develop and become reinforced through repetition.

If you are more anxious, your assessment may become biased around the probability of uncertain, negative events. This can result in higher distress when faced with a possibility of a negative outcome. You can become stuck in a never-ending loop of “what-ifs”.

Having a lower tolerance towards ambiguity or uncertainty can lead to avoidance, frustration, and nervousness. On the contrary, having an increased tolerance towards ambiguity leads to higher productivity, increased pleasure in exploring possibilities, and higher resilience towards challenges.

The journey towards tolerating the unknown

As mentioned earlier, neurons that fire together wire together. This concept also applies to how to start rewiring your brain from old habits to building your ability to create change through rewards.

Since anxiety is essentially a safety feature, it’s important to hold compassion and patience for the difficulties in trying to change. Again, the brain is designed to thwart every effort at change, no matter how much you know it will be good for you.

Change is hard because the new behaviors have not yet been developed or practiced. They also sometimes have an emotional (often negative) history attached to them.

For example, you may not like public speaking because in 5th grade you were laughed at and felt deeply embarrassed. You’re now 28 and struggle to speak up during work meetings but can’t understand why. You know you need to “get over” this to succeed at work, but you become crippled with anxiety every time.

This leads to step one…

The act of doing. To create change, you must do the same things you’ve been doing, but just a little differently. In other words, small little changes at a time to sort of trick the brain into thinking nothing is changing at all! And, you can’t wait for the anxiety to subside in order to “do”.

And step two…

Learning to calm your body even when your brain is screaming “Danger!” Mindfulness, deep breathing, and relaxation exercises can be paramount to helping you through those difficult moments.

Back to the work example…  You want to start to feel more confident around speaking during work meetings, but the events from your past keep informing your brain to anticipate threats. In turn, you experience anxiety, your heart rate rises, and you then avoid speaking up.

These stress responses can detract you from other ongoing goals because it narrows your focus to just the perceived threat.

The learned response of avoiding public speaking has kept you safe from embarrassment, therefore, has been rewarded and the avoidant behaviors become strengthened.

The reason “doing” is so essential, it’s that it starts to create new experiences that can help create disconfirming experiences that will build new rewards. Though, you need to do the thing in a small way while also tolerating the inevitable anxiety that will be there while you’re doing it.

You might be scared, but your body will only learn that there’s nothing to fear the more times you face that fear and have positive results.

So, you decide to raise your hand in the next work meeting, instead of biting your tongue throughout. You start by taking a few deep breaths, acknowledging your anxiety and challenging yourself simply to say just a few words. When you speak up, no one says a negative comment or snickers. Maybe you even get a few head nods. You’ve done it! Your body still feels anxious because it just did something unfamiliar and scary but nonetheless, you made it through without anything bad happening!!

When you begin to create a new experience or behavior change in alignment with your goals, you begin to value these new results or rewards. For a while you may still feel anxious about what could happen at the next meeting. That’s ok! You are starting your journey of unlearning old habitual patterns and building tolerance towards your fears. There’s no getting around the fact that it takes time.

The more new experiences you have where nothing embarrassing or shaming happens, the stronger the new neural network will become because it’s being rewarded. Of course, you also have to take in these new experiences without finding a way to dismiss them or project feared thoughts into the situation.

Revel in small wins… they matter!

Like anything, it takes practice and patience with yourself. These networks have been strengthened for an extended period of time, sometimes a lifetime. You can’t change a lifetime overnight.

Next time you begin to feel scared because of the uncertainty of a situation or anxious about making a change, remember you have neural networks that are working to keep things the same. These networks know what they know, and will do whatever they can to keep you safe.

But by bringing awareness, patience, small shifts in your thoughts and behaviors and finally building new intrinsic rewards, you take steps to break your old habitual response. Change is not only possible but even freeing the more used to it you get!

You might be relieved to discover that you can teach an old dog new tricks.