Your Brain is Lazy
Growth is HARD
Your brain is lazy.
Last week I wrote an article about the invisible force coming against you as an obstacle to success. This invisible force is the threat your success becomes to the people around you. As a result, your family and friends try to subtly derail your progress by pulling you back into habits and mindsets that you are trying desperately to leave behind. You can find the podcast version podcast version here and the article version here.
It can sound really malicious, but the vast majority of the time, it is NOT. Rather, your progress can be a stark reminder that the people in your life are not making progress. And that feels threatening to THEM. Their inner tension manifests in small ways that seek to bring you back to the way you were before because it will make THEM feel better.
This idea that your success becomes an unconscious threat to the people around you who love and support you is one explanation of this phenomenon.
Importantly, the other crucial element to understand is one that not only plays out in others as they watch your success, but within YOU as you seek to improve yourself or your business.
It is the headline of this article – your brain is lazy.
While it sounds like hyperbole (and I suppose it might be), it’s also true.
How Does This Happen?
Our bodies as a whole are designed to meet the demands of the lives we lead. Both our bodies and our brains want to be as efficient as possible because it uses fewer resources to get the job done.
Here is a good example. If you do any kind of exercise, an important concept is adaptation. When you decide to start lifting weights💪 (and if you are a woman over the age of 40, you do need to be weightlifting regularly!), completing three sets of ten repetitions of bicep curls will be hard. You will struggle😩 to get those final two or three lifts up!
If you stick with your program, you will notice that in a month, completing those same sets of reps with that weight amount will be “easier.”
Incidentally, it’s not that it got easier, it’s that you got STRONGER. The reason you can lift with less struggle is because your muscles responded to the demand you were placing on them by growing. This is called hypertrophy – muscle growth in respond to demand.
Why? Your body wants to support your life!
So, if you signal to your body that you want it to lift heavier weight, it will immediately begin to accommodate those demands and grow your muscles to meet that demand.
If you know anything about fitness you know what comes next – you need to increase either your weight, your number of reps, or number of sets in order to keep progressing. If you stay at the same level of demand, your body will only become more efficient at meeting that intensity of demand. This is called progressive overload.
That initial new demand you are making on your body is hard and you struggle. But over time with consistently sending the message to your muscles that “this is what we are going to do,” your body responds to make the demand easier.🔥
The same exact process happens in our brains. When we decide to do something different – develop a new habit, start a new system in your business, any new thing – learning to do it will be challenging.
The difference between our brains and our body is that the initial stages of habit change typically come with excitement. We pursue something new because we want change somewhere. We want our business to grow, we want to eat healthier foods, we want to lose weight, we want to try new networking to grow our business.
Preliminary phases are energizing!
…..Until about three weeks later. All of the sudden these new habits feel HARD to continue. Why? Because you still have to concentrate on executing them. It’s not as simple as lifting a few weights.
Change means learning new things. Learning and adapting are stressors for the brain. It’s generally healthy stress, but it is stress, nonetheless.
Your brain has to form new neural connections that didn’t exist before to meet the demand you are making of it. Those new neural connections then have to be fortified and strengthened before they become automatic.
This means you need to repeatedly do the new thing over and over, for typically several months before the new behavior becomes automatic.
At the same time, those old neural pathways, the habits you did for years and years like eating sugary foods, being sedentary, and giving in to overwhelm in your business will fight to take over. Why? Because it’s so much EASIER for your brain to do what it has always done. Your brain is highly efficient at your habits because your brain responded to the demands in the past.
It wants to keep things the same because it seeks to be efficient. This is a good thing sometimes. Can you imagine if each time you had to tie your shoes you had to find a YouTube video to show you how to do it? Our brain’s ability to do things automatically and efficiently helps us daily, and we could not live without this feature.
The issue arises when you want different outcomes than the ones you get now. The REQUIRES that you do different things, learn new strategies and IMPLEMENT them.
All of those steps mean making demands on your brain to create neural connections that either do not currently exist or are weak.
As your brain burns calories to meet these demands (and by the way, your brain DOES burn a ton of calories!), it will want to pull back to what it is already highly efficient at performing.
You experience this as fatigue, a sense of it being too hard to sustain, and overwhelm at maintaining the changes.
It is at this exact point that many people quit, and revert back to old, efficient habits.
Additionally, this explains why friends and family work to keep us in the same patterns we had for decades. It’s too hard for THEM to learn new patterns of interacting with you and your new habits. Your personal change requires that they learn new things about you. And that demands more from THEM.
It is easier for them to pull you back into old habits because they want efficiency. They don’t necessarily want to change along with you. It means more work for them.
Is this tough to accept? Yes. It is painful for me to tell you because it feels discouraging. And the last thing I want is for you to feel discouraged! After all, this is Fuel for Growth, so let’s figure out how to make this optimistic!
Here we go:
Find support. You cannot do this alone. Making any kind of significant change will challenge you deeply. It is imperative that you surround yourself with a new environment of people who are, ideally, exactly where you are, or just a bit ahead of you. These people will “get” what you are going through in a way that others cannot.
Anticipate the fatigue. I just explained to you what is going to happen as you implement change. You now KNOW your brain is going to work against you in a way so that it can return to efficiency in that area. So now is the time to consider what you will do when that moment hits. Who will you call? What will you do to counteract the strong pull to stop? Are there reliable podcasts you can listen to, or videos you can watch that will support you in your desired change? Have those in an easy-to-find playlist so you can inject motivation when you need it.
Focus on commitment. For too many of us, we get caught in making a change without really thinking about what is entailed. Instead, be realistic about what you are asking of yourself. Know that at times you will feel like you are swimming against the current. This is NOT a signal to give up. It is a sign that you are CHANGING in the direction you WANT to change.
Remind yourself of that every time you have a chance!
Progress is lonely many times. It requires a willingness to endure discomfort as well as the excitement of seeing change.
While we now know that your brain’s tendency toward laziness can derail you in multiple ways, it is time to do something about that.
Reach out for support. Find new people to hang around. Get mentors and people you trust for advice and encouragement.
Your brain will respond to that, as well!
If I can be of any help, let me know. It’s what I do.
And if I could humbly request that you share this with someone who might need this encouragement and explanation?
If you like it, can you “like” it? 😁
And if this is really something important to you, I invite you to subscribe.
To YOUR success,
Dr. Anita