I have written before about our being creatures of habit. I keep being reminded of how important this is when I am are trying to change behaviors [my own]. My brain is very good at maintaining patterns of behavior/thinking/feeling. It seems to be able to do this effeciently with little energy output and seemingly almost automatically without my having to ask it to. This is one of many amazing things about our brains. It can store information that we tell it to [often apparently not fully aware that we are doing so]. Then it retrieves it when we need it to. Our brains monitor us constantly and can virtually instantly access a specific stored memory to fit the occasion. But what if we want to change this stored memory?
Our brains do not change these patterns on a whim or casually. If this were to happen, our brains might take our change in breathing as a command to change the stored pattern that supports our breathing and then we could be in big trouble. So, some of our behavior patterns are critical to our living. Actually, studies have shown that we drive a car without activating our frontal lobes, relying on stored memory. In fact, if we have a head injury we often have a great deal of trouble driving as our brain is automatically focused on trying to fix the impact of the injury and it is harder to access our stored memory patterns. So, it seems that we can perform complex activities [driving a car] using stored memory with our brain comparing what is happening to stored information and adjusting what we do without our having to process new information about what is happening, as we drive. That is very efficient and quite amazing.
However, what if we want to change a pattern? Well, presumably we do it frequently by giving our brains clear messages about what to change and why. This works if we are calm and not feeling any stress about the change. If we are feeling stressed and want to change a pattern but are still uncertain about it, our brains take this as a vote not to change the pattern.
So what to do. Well, it may be clearer now why some patterns are hard to change and why we act in certain ways even though it is not in our best interests. To change patterns, we must give our brains [ourselves] a clear message that we are serious about the change and why. It helps to tell our brains this outloud [really!]. It also seems necessary to have the change be a big one, not a little change, as our brains will treat little changes as no changes. So, to change patterns of behavior, we must committ to a big change in our behaviors and then see what happens.