Why aren't you achieving your goals?
It's not you, it's your brain!
We are often taught that the shortest distance between where you are now and your goal, is a straight line.
True enough, but lets imagine that your goal is climbing a mountain. The shortest distance would be straight up, but that might be very steep, scary, even dangerous, and very hard work. Does that sound like some of your goals?
There is another way. Take the winding, meandering, zigzagging path up the mountain. It takes away the steep, scary and dangerous parts. Maybe it will take a little longer than the direct path, but its safer, and you are more likely to get there, by taking small, easy steps. Now which feels better?
To understand why the first straight line method often doesn't work, we need to know how our brain is structured, and how it works, which is really quite simple, when you know how. (And this is a simplistic explanation!)
We actually have 3 brains in 1, that have evolved over time. 3 brains nested in your skull, wrapped around each other.
The first brain is the Reptilian brain, it sits like your fist on top of your spinal column. It is responsible for the Fight, Flight, Freeze, Food and the other F - reproduction. Imagine a crocodile, it defends its territory, fights, feeds, freezes (like a deer in the headlights), and they mate, lay eggs, and then leave them to go back to the other F's.
Wrapped around that is the Limbic brain, or mid brain, or mammalian brain. This is responsible for pattern recognition, and feelings like love and loyalty. This time picture a dog, it does all the things a croc does, and shows love and loyalty, to it's owners, pups, other dogs and humans. The mammalian brain is more densely wired, and contains the Amygdala, more on that later.
Finally, wrapped around the Limbic brain is the Neo Cortex, the human brain that we are familiar with, the seat of logic and reason, language and art. (The main character in The Matrix was called Neo, hmmmm)
Your relatively new, human, Neo Cortex brain, doesn't have a lot to do with the other two brains. Your lizard brain
Acts, your mammalian brain
Feels, and your neo cortex
Reasons.
Why do you eat junk food when you say you are on a diet? Because your older brains are wired to eat and put on weight, because they were designed when food was scarce. Your old brains are not easily controlled by your fancy new brain that just read a diet book.
Imagine a cheating partner, while lying in tousled sheets afterward and staring at the ceiling, they can simultaneously enjoy satisfied lust, feel sad because of their disloyalty, and come up with a justification for their conduct.
Does this explain some of your self-contradictory nature?
Now lets see how this works for your goals...
When we have all 3 brains working in harmony, we typically make better decisions, BUT whenever we are stressed, we trigger down to our reptile brain, and the FIGHT, FLIGHT or FREEZE mechanism kicks in.
Imagine your left hand, clenched into a fist, is your reptile brain. Now wrap your right hand around your left fist, that's your neo cortex. Whenever you get stressed, afraid or angry, your right hand springs open, you literally
flip your lid, and your neo cortex, your human reasoning brain, goes off line.
That's why when you get into an argument, 3 hours later you think of the perfect comeback. Or when you are trying to remember the name of a a movie, its on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't reach it, then when you get home, sit on the edge of your bed, you jump up and say "Hunt For Red October!". Your neo cortex comes back on line when your fear, stress or anger goes away.
Now, your Amygdala, residing in the mid brain, is always paying attention to the external world.
Whenever we are doing stuff that is habit, routine, or a system, it is very happy.
Whenever we change that, by doing something different, that is out of the ordinary, like striving for a new goal, the Amygdala sets off an
alarm, you feel fear, or stress or anger (mid brain stuff) and we trigger down to the hind brain and the FIGHT, FLIGHT or FREEZE mechanism kicks in, and the neo cortex is no longer available to us. Your lid has been flipped.
So we start off in a new direction, (remember goals are signposts), we make big changes, and we fire off an inner resistance, a self saboteur. It doesn't want us to take action, We experience stress and fear, we fight against it, we run away to self sabotaging behaviors, junk food, booze, TV, or worse, or we just freeze and do nothing.
It's not you, it's your reptilian brain!
The secret to stop this happening, is to slip under the Amygdala's RADAR, by taking the tiniest actions we can, so the alarm doesn't go off. If the alarm doesn't go off, we have access to our neo cortex, we make better decisions, we get closer to our goals, and have more chance of achieving them.
We are not eliminating the resistance, but making it so small, that it is easy to step over, rather than setting the bar so high, and making it very difficult to get over without triggering the alarm.
Example. You set a goal to run a marathon. You decided to start training by running 10Km, which if you are not running regularly, is a very long way. If you even manage to get out of the door, or by the time you have run a km or two, your Amygdala is screaming that this is not our routine, "Danger, Danger Will Robinson!", and your FFF is going to kick in and sabotage your efforts.
The way around it is to start small. Start with a walk around the block. When that's fairly routine, then maybe run 20 paces, walk 20 paces, around the block. Again, slowly slowy, increase the difficulty, so that you don't trigger the alarm.
If you are not taking action, your action is too big. Make it smaller, until you can do it. The key is not to trigger your alarm!
Meditation is a proven way of getting calm, so all your brains are on line, and increasing your tolerance to stress, which means you can remain calm for longer in stressful situations, and have your neo cortex available to you. When you meditate, your brain is literally rewired and harmonized.
To your success,
Trevor Long
