If I’ve learned one thing in my time as a coach, it’s this. 

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Our brains, though they are miraculous and very well-intentioned, are also gigantic assholes. 

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If you’ve ever struggled with mental health, you’ve probably experienced this first-hand. But even if you haven’t, I’m sure you’ve noticed how hard it can be to install healthy habits in your routine. 

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Whether it’s following a diet, trying to read more, or making time to go outside, changes to your routine can often be met with a lot of obvious mental resistance— like anxiety, fear, and self-doubt, — and some not-so-obvious resistance, like procrastination, and distraction. 

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Well, there’s a reason for that— and a way to overcome it. 

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I’m going to share some powerful tips with you in this article. Many of which you may vehemently disbelieve, or have strong negative reactions towards. I will never ask you to just take me at my word, so I’ve linked out to some more scientific works that dive into those topics more at the end of the article. 

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But, for now—give me the benefit of your trust for just 1500 words or so. 

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Your brain optimizes for safety; not fulfillment. Therefore, you should mistrust it sometimes.  

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Your brain’s sole goal in life is to keep you alive. And when you think about how our prehistoric ancestors used to live, you can see that “alive” is synonymous with “safe.” The brains of our prehistoric ancestors didn’t care if said ancestors had a burning desire to create art or to see the world, they were too busy making sure their owners didn’t get eaten by large predators! 

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Though we are long past those days, we carry a lot of the same hardware in our skulls. 

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You may have heard a term called “homeostasis” in Biology 101—it’s a state in which everything in our body is within a comfortable, safe, predictable balance, as determined by our brains. We very much want the brain to apply this principle to our bodies. It’s nice that we don’t have to worry about keeping our internal temperature at the right level or balancing the C02 and O2 in our bloodstreams, right? 

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But the more insidious part of this deal—and one we don’t really talk about enough—is that the brain also applies this concept of homeostasis to your thoughts and feelings and thereby the behaviors those thoughts and feelings motivate you to take each day. 

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If you’ve started doing some self-development work, or hired a coach already, you may have noticed this already. If left entirely to your own devices, you tend to think the exact same thoughts and take many of the same actions every single day. In doing so, you maintain a mental sort of homeostasis that your brain considers safe because it is predictable and nearly certain. 

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Here’s an example: do you often touch burning candles in your daily routine? 

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Probably not, because at a young age, you learned this was undesirable. How did that happen? Little, curious you, touched the flame, and your brain sent you a negative sensation (physical pain) that made you not want to touch the candle again. Therefore, we might say you have been conditioned as an adult to not touch hot things because you do not want the pain that the experience will bring you! 

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Certain aspects of our conditioning, like not touching open flames, we obviously do not want to shift or lose. But think about the many, many pieces of your conditioning that do not serve your longer term goals or vision of yourself. The tendency to skip the gym, to always order dessert, to have a cigarette at the bar, to go on TikTok instead of creating art, to tell yourself you’re a worthless piece of shit, and to seek emotionally unavailable romantic partners, are also all potentially conditionable behaviors that get reinforced over time. 

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If you allow your brain to take the wheel each day, you will just enact your old conditioning  (even if it is actively harmful ) because that is homeostatic. You will effectively be the exact same person you were yesterday.

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If you have any interest in becoming something more or something different, then you’ll need to get really good at disobeying the thoughts, emotions, and compulsions that surface within you. And that is intentionally going to feel really shitty at first. 

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In order to develop new conditioning and grow, you must be ok with an unhappy brain

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As a coach, I am glad when my clients are triggered when working towards their goals. 

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I am glad when they experience anxiety, discomfort, fear, self-doubt, and all the rest. Not because I am a masochist, but because the presence of these uncomfortable emotions is the best evidence that somebody is pushing their brain beyond its homeostatic comfort zone with new behavior.

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This is a major point that society and the mental health industrial complex are very good at butchering. We are taught that feeling negative emotions or discomfort is “bad” and that it is something that needs to be “treated” so that we can “feel better.” Taking that approach to your uncomfortable feelings is an amazing way to make sure that you remain stuck in your comfort zone and never become the person you dream of becoming. 

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Letting your feelings call the shots effectively hands your brain a remote-control for your life. 

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“Oh, you’re going to try this new sport at school?! Nope, I’m going to send you a blast of anxiety and self-doubt and because those feelings suck so much, like a good little Pavlovian dog, you’ll back down and stop trying new things and we’ll stay nice and safe!” 

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Once you really understand the implications of this, you have the power to reshape anything about your life that you want—so long as you are willing to sit through prolonged periods of discomfort to build new conditioning. 

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Now, there is contextual nuance here. If you feel intense amounts of emotional angst each day and you are very sure it’s not because you are trying something new or different (even subtle mental actions, like not analyzing your feelings as much, can count here!) then this could be a signal that you’re not building new, helpful conditioning—you might actually be doing the reverse.

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I also want to be real with you and remind you that sometimes, our lives and the world around us can very forcibly put us into uncomfortable situations. If your angst is directed at the political climate in the US, the many wars happening abroad, something happening in your family, or the state of the world in general, guess what? The universe might literally be forcing you to grow and let go of some negative conditioning you’re hanging onto. No matter how you slice it, the presence of emotional discomfort is often the best evidence that you’re in unfamiliar territory. Whether that territory is actually helpful for you to be in or not is a matter of important nuance. 

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You can absolutely do this work on your own, but this is where working with a coach (or a very good, with-the-times therapist) becomes really important. We can help you connect the dots between what you’re experiencing and what that might mean for you at the level of your normal habits and conditioning. 

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And yes, this process still applies to everyone: but finding the sweet spot is important! 

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Even if you have a mental health diagnosis. Even if you have severe trauma. Even if your life is currently in shambles all around you: you are still a human being with a brain, and there is not a single brain out there that does not try to optimize for homeostasis. 

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If you have trouble accepting that, or want to make a case for how you’re a special case and are different, I lovingly invite you to put that perspective down for a bit and just give this method a try and see what happens. 

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Now as a caveat: I do not recommend you try to shift every single piece of negative conditioning that you have all at once. Nor do I recommend that you go full elimination mode on a piece of your conditioning cold-turkey. 

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If, for example, the negative pattern you want to break is frequent alcohol consumption, do not try to quit the sauce cold-turkey. A change that dramatic might do more than cause discomfort in your system—it might fully overwhelm it with life-disrupting emotions like panic or intense anxiety.  

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Instead, pick one piece of conditioning you want to undo and find the smallest change that produces discomfort. In our alcohol example, perhaps that could be reducing the amount of drinks you have each week from 10 to 8. Do that for a few weeks until it no longer feels uncomfortable to have only 8 drinks. Then make it 6. Rinse and repeat until you become comfortable with whatever you want the number to be—maybe just 2, maybe none at all. Once it no longer feels uncomfortable to stick with that amount, congrats, you just rewrote some of your conditioning and created a new behavioral norm for yourself.  

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This is tough work, and I will be honest—it is work that spans a lifetime. Think about older people who often complain about being “stuck in their ways.” What they are quite literally saying is that they are stuck in their brain’s conditioning. And as you may have surmised by now, the longer a piece of conditioning has existed in you, the longer it will take to “rewrite” it. 

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Again, think about our open-flame example. You could decondition yourself to the point that touching open flames no longer feels scary anymore (I mean, how do fire eaters do it?), but  you’ve got a lot of damn years behind that habit, so it’s not going to just evaporate within a few months. If what you’re trying to shift is something you have done for a very, very long time, then be prepared to play the long-game and set realistic expectations for your growth. 

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And of course—coaches like me literally exist to help you find and unwind these patterns. If you think I can help you undo some of your negative conditioning, please do not hesitate to reach out. 

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And as promised, if these topics interest you (or you don’t believe in them at all) here are some resources packed with information for you to check out. 

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Mark Freeman’s You are not a Rock. Many of the points I made in this article come directly from Freeman’s work! 

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Robert Saplosky’s Determined, a Science of Life Without Free Will. This is a neuroscientific book that dives a lot deeper into the idea of mental and behavioral conditioning.  

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Photo credit: Alex Shuper, Unsplash.com

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