Making new resolutions can be exciting, but sticking to them is often challenging and met with failure. This difficulty arises because our brains are wired to follow familiar, automatic habits that have been reinforced over time. Changing these ingrained patterns requires significant effort, consistency, and time.
New behaviours must compete with old, well-established ones, making the process of transformation slow and often frustrating. Without a clear strategy and understanding of how habits work, it's easy to fall back into old routines, making resolutions harder to sustain.
If you have a driving license or know how to drive a bicycle, you can immediately get a sense of how automated the behaviour is. Cast your mind back to when you first sat in a car for your first driving lesson everything being so new and overwhelming because there's so many variables at play all at once.
Today you can jump in the car, start the engine and drive and have no thought around what you are actually doing. In fact sometimes we drive so automatically that you would become mindless to the experience. We go from A to B and once we arrive, we ask ourselves: how did I get here? So habits operate from an unconscious part of our brain.
They've been rehearsed so much that ultimately they become embedded in our unconscious mind and operate in an automated way. Why replacing those behaviours is so hard boils down to the fact that:
1. They are habitual and unconscious;
2. When they become ingrained, it is the easiest path to resistance to anything that we want to do and the brain has a desire to operate from an easiest path as possible.
Existing behaviours have been rehearsed for years from the past, and they are very strongly embedded. When we implement changes, we are starting from zero with the new desired behaviour, and it will take quite a long time, quite a lot of repetition, quite a lot of practice for the new behaviour to build strongly enough to eventually equal or surpass the old behaviour and effectively replace it.
Often people make the mistake to try and stop the old behaviour as their strategy to change, but actually it's easier to create a new behaviour and stick with it enough so that it eventually surpasses the old ones than to try and reduce the existing and grain-rooted behaviour.
The second reason why it's so difficult is because these behaviours, however addictive and/or damaging they may be, are often designed to soothe and protect. And so whether we realise it or not, these cravings were implanted in our way of being at a time where usually as children we didn't have the resources to come up with a strategy that as adults we can create.
It was in our limited understanding of the world and its complexity, that as children, our little brains came up with the strategies that we thought were useful and therefore created a habit to stay protected from trauma, to soothe ourselves from pain and abuse of any kind.
And the sad part is that these strategies then become habitual and embedded and we carry them forward, transforming them slightly in adulthood until it becomes a new habit that we are now contented with.
Our retreats and programmes help you break unhealthy coping habits by tapping into subconscious beliefs. Understand where they came from to overcome their hold onto you.
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