Latest / Fit for Hiking / Ep. 131 Your Brain Wants You to Fail - How to Rewire Your Brain to Make New Habits Stick
Transcript
- Your brain wants you to fail - how to rewire your brain to make new habits stick Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a long time fitness professional and Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. In combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your one stop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female wellness, trail talk and adventure. Hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the fit for hiking podcast. What's up my friends? Welcome to another episode of the fit for Hiking podcast. This is your host, Brady, and today we are going to be talking about something that is very, very relevant as we are heading into all of the New Year's resolutions. You know, we're in January right now. We're like kind of in the thick of it. So if you have had something on your mind, a goal or a habit that you've wanted been wanting to implement, you're probably working on that actively right now, or at least thinking about it. Maybe you're still kind of in that pre contemplative, contemplative stage where you're like, hmm, I know I need to I know I need to, but I just haven't yet. And so we're going to talk about why your brain is literally designed to keep you doing the exact same thing that you're used to. So ultimately, it wants you to fail at changing behavior, at building new habits. Our brain is not necessarily our friend when it comes to trying to rewire and do things differently and get a new result. So let's talk about why that is, why it's not your fault that it feels so, so difficult to to correct poor behaviors or like, break bad habits and actually change them out for new ones. And how to actually rewire your brain to make new, better habits stick. Okay, so let's get into it. Let's talk about all the reasons why this is so hard. And I want to be very clear that, like, if you are someone who has failed over and over again at implementing something new about trying to start a new habit, you are not alone. This is not a unique thing because we all struggle with this, and it's because your brain wants you to stay comfortable. It's not because of your lack of willpower, just not having enough motivation. It's literally biology. So let's talk about the science behind this. Our brain is, first of all wired for energy conservation. So this is just how we have evolved. And how we were made is we're wired for survival. So it's going to avoid unnecessary effort and seek efficiency. This is why if there's a shortcut for something and there's a way to make a task easier, faster, less energy involved, we will take it as humans, right? Like that's why we have made our lives as simple and comfortable and efficient as humanly possible. Because anything new, challenging or uncomfortable is interpreted, interpreted as potential energy cost. So the result of this is that your brain is going to prefer familiar things, even if they're not optimal. Okay, I want to repeat that your brain defends the familiar, even if it's not the best thing for you, even if it's not optimal in any way, shape or form. This is why people will stay in what you could say a familiar hell versus pursuing an unfamiliar heaven. Like, even if you know that what's on the other side is so much better than what you're currently doing because it's unfamiliar, it's uncomfortable, and we are going to avoid it. Our brain is going to try to get you not to go that direction, because it requires less energy just to simply stay where you are, okay? Our limbic system also favors safety over growth. So this is like your emotional brain, the limbic system. And it is. Definitely going to take precedence over your rational brain. Its primary job is to keep you alive. Not necessarily help you thrive so it associates familiar familiarity with safety, and anything else is like a potential threat. Anything that's causing change or uncertainty okay. So when you try to start a new workout routine, eat differently than you've always eaten, push intensity or actually stay consistent in the things that you want to do but haven't been doing. Start a new morning routine. Try to cut out alcohol. All of these things might trigger resistance from your brain. Okay, this is a protection. This isn't sabotage, but it can definitely feel like sabotage because you're like, I want to do these things. Why is this so difficult to actually follow through? This is why this is actually the science behind it. Let's talk about the concept of homeostasis. So homeostasis means status quo. It's kind of like your baselines your default. So your body likes to return to homeostasis. They try to maintain it at all costs. So this just keeps things internally stable right. So examples of this would be your body weight. We kind of always gravitate towards a certain range. That's kind of our baseline body weight, daily routines, our stress levels, our general calorie intakes, our sleep patterns, our morning routines, things like that. And then when you go to change a behavior that causes shifts, your hunger hormones can shift, your stress responses can shift. Neural pathways are disrupted. So your brain interprets this as an imbalance and it tries to pull you back to baseline. This is why you guys change is hard. It's not just in your head. It's not just a you thing. This isn't everybody thing because their brain is actually trying to keep you at baseline no matter what, even if it's at the expense of your growth or of your goals that you have in mind, or of being at your best possible health or your best possible mental health. Dopamine also reinforces comfort loops. Okay, so dopamine isn't just about pleasure, it's also about prediction and reward. So familiar behaviors are going to deliver predictable dopamine hits. So think about like, alcohol. Right. Even if you know that you're not happy with how you feel after a big night of drinking, you also know that you're gonna have a dopamine hit when you're drinking. And it's a familiar pattern. And you know that that thing will be delivered like that, result of feeling carefree and light and bubbly after having some drinks. So your your brain's going to favor that, even though there's a negative consequence to it at the same time. Right. So scrolling, snacking, skipping workouts, ditching your morning routine, having the extra drink all of those things have a known reward and low effort like scrolling. Think about how low effort that is. That's why it's so addicting. That's why people are literally addicted to their phones. And like, I struggle with this too, because it's so much easier to just zone out and scroll my phone. There's a quick dopamine hit. I know the reward and it's so low effort versus like trying to go do this thing that's like looming over me that I know I need to do, but I don't want to do it because it costs me more energy and effort and mental fatigue. Your brain is going to ask, why work harder for a result that I'm not even guaranteed yet? And that right there is why so many people have the exact same fitness and health goals for decades without ever actually following through into taking action. They might say that they want this reward or this outcome or this desired result, but they don't actually do it, because why work hard for something that's not even guaranteed? It's easier to just stay where you're at because your brain's used to that. The prefrontal cortex also gets tired easily. So when we're talking about discipline, decision making, planning, this is something that we have to factor in. It's energy expensive to do those things. You can get easily fatigued. You can get overridden under stress or low sleep or calorie restriction. All those things kind of make it hard to stay on track. So when your prefrontal cortex gets tired, the brain is going to default back to its automatic behaviors that it already knows. This is where comfort wins over intention. And this is what makes it so, so difficult. Like to stick with things like when you are in a calorie deficit for a long time, but you're also not getting enough sleep. You're stressed, you've got all these other things going on. It's so easy under all of those conditions to just slip right back to comfort eating, stress eating these things that you know are going to provide quick dopamine hits. And this is why motivation drops fastest when you're under fueled, you're overstressed, you're not sleeping while you're under recovered all of these things. So let's talk about what to do with all of this information. Right. Willpower is not going to cut it. So how do we actually counteract this? First, we need to lower the perceived quote unquote threat. Okay, big goals feel dangerous to your brain. It feels overwhelming. So instead of like saying, oh my gosh, I need to lose £100, or I need to literally change every single habit that I have around my health and fitness or my mental health or all these different things. Instead of making it so massive that it feels unattainable and overwhelming. Shrink the habit and focus on making just small, tiny adjustments at a time. Okay, so consistency is going to actually be so much easier when the habits feel safe and they don't feel daunting and overwhelming. Overwhelm almost always leads to quitting quickly because you just can't sustain it. We talk about this on the show all the time. And yet as humans, for some reason, we gravitate towards these extreme things because we want these extreme results. We want them fast. We want them now. But then we're setting ourselves up to just stay in this loop of failure because it's too much and our brain is like, no, I can't do this. You also need to reduce thinking and decision making as much as possible. Discipline is going to fail when decisions are piling up in that mental fatigue starts. And this is why I am such an advocate for coaching and not just for, you know, the program that I run for, Mountain Metabolic Coaching. I'm talking about, like for myself, like I have business coaches, I have people that I defer to because I don't want to have to overthink about everything all the time. I don't have the mental space in my life for that. And also I don't know everything. So it becomes so much more overwhelming when you don't have a next clear step or when things hit the fan and you're just like, oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm failing. Having someone to point you back to what you're supposed to be focusing on and remove some of that mental clutter. So having a coach, having someone to walk you through this and take some of this mental gymnastics out for you, having the same workout time, having a reliable workout plan that you don't even have to come up with because somebody else is providing it for you? You know exactly what to do and you know you'll see the results. Having the similar times that you're going. Having kind of a plan around your schedule for the week. Having the same go to meals, staple meals. We are such an advocate for this in mountain metabolic coaching because half of the time people are just failing with nutrition out of overwhelm because they're trying to do a million different things and do all these extreme things and meal prep meals that have like 20 different steps to them, and it's just too overwhelming. Okay, so having some simplicity there, having pre-planned routines that you don't have to think so hard about. When these things start to become second nature, it's infinitely easier. So less thinking equals more follow through. Number three add immediate reward. So your brain needs short term payoffs like quick wins. Because if all we're looking at is this thing that's like a year down the line, hopefully it becomes hard to stay motivated, right? So instead of always thinking about like I need this outcome, right. Now think about just quick dopamine hits along the way. So maybe while you work out, you listen to an audiobook that you're obsessed with and you've been looking forward to, or your favorite podcasts, or you pair a morning walk with your favorite cup of coffee and you bring it with you and you call a friend, okay? It may be if you hit a new PR in the gym or you hit consistency goals like I'm going to work out three times a week for the next month and you do it, then you get yourself like a really cute workout set. Okay. Have little reward for yourself because it teaches your brain that the effort is worth it. Number four is regulating stress first. High stress is going to push your brain into survival mode, and we don't want to be there too. So to counteract this, we need to make sure that we're actually eating enough, especially protein and carbs. As women, we cannot just under fuel all the time. And this is a whole different podcast episode that I want to talk about, but we are very much, unfortunately, in an era of like skinny culture again, where there are literally skinny coaches trying to tell women to just, like, eat hardly anything, reduce muscle mass, all of these crazy things. I think I will do a podcast episode on this because I'm very passionate about it, and it's honestly crazy that we are back there again. But please ladies, you need to be eating enough. And I'm not talking to the, you know, to everybody here because some of us, we don't struggle with that. Like we are eating more than enough and we're just fine there. But other women listening to this, you might actually be chronically under eating it, whether knowingly or unknowingly. And this is definitely going to create a stress response in your body. Prioritizing sleep I get it. I have two little kids, neither of which are good sleepers. I do not get very good sleep very often, so I know it's not always super easy to implement this stuff, but as often as you can prioritize good sleep, trying to at least be in bed for 7 to 8 hours even if you're not asleep for all of it. Just the effort there. Having some evening bedtime routines that you can default to that help you get into sleepy mode and start to turn your brain off. Having your phone or having a TV on in bed. Not really supporting quality sleep. So definitely having some systems around this. Avoiding excessive cardio, especially when you're trying to lose fat. If you're in a calorie deficit and you're trying to also adhere to this crazy cardio regimen, those two things are completely at odds because your body is going to require more fuel. The more that you are doing things like cardio and that goes against a calorie deficit. So you're just going to be fighting yourself the whole time and definitely is going to create a stress response. Um, add calming inputs into your day. So things like walks, silent walks if you can. This is a really hard one for me, but walking without just looking at your phone the whole time, or listening to something or even calling anybody, there's nothing wrong with doing those things sometimes, but sometimes you just need nothingness. You just need silence. So your nervous system needs a break. So just listening to nature sounds, um, that breathing like. Do you. Doing deep breathing exercises. Spending time outside sunlight hikes, things like that are going to be so good for your nervous system. Regulated nervous system is going to build better habits. We're always going to thrive under a regulated nervous system versus if we're just totally fried, exhausted, stressed out, it's going to be way harder to see the results from your efforts when you are chronically high stress. Number five use identity, not just relying on motivation. Your brain follows who you believe you are. So when you start to shift how you talk about yourself or talk to yourself or make decisions that really does change, things like this stuff has to become part of your identity or this will not stick. It just won't. So if you're constantly having this short term mentality that is not making this part of your identity. So shifting from, I know I need to work out, I'm trying to work out. I need to start a plan to. I am someone who does this, I prioritize this, I strength train every single week. Like, for me, I've gotten to the point where this is not something I even have to think about. I just know that I'm going to make it work. I'm not going to just go a week or two without going to the gym, no matter what's going on. Like I'm going to do it. And when you can get to that point, it takes away the mental gymnastics because you're like, this is just something that I do like brushing my teeth, like sleeping every night, like having my meals. Like doing these things that are just second nature to who we are as people. And this doesn't happen overnight. I'm not saying it's easy. There's definitely habits in my life that I need to get there with, and I am absolutely not there at all. So it's it's different things for everyone that that will be a struggle. But especially as you're trying to get this off the ground, you need some support for supporting this, being part of your identity. That is where, again, having a really solid coach and coaching community is going to be crucial because when life gets hard or busy or you have slip ups, it's so easy to revert back to like, oh my gosh, I just can't do this. I fail every time. And then you let that become your identity versus having someone speak into you, encouragement and helping you troubleshoot these things when they come up and really enforcing that, like, you can do this, right? So proving it to yourself with the small actions, having that support system to make this part of your identity, to ultimately create automatic behavior changes. Number six tracking evidence, not outcomes. So your brain updates beliefs based on proof. So tracking things like benchmarks streaks adherence instead of only relying on these outcomes that you want. So for instance if you're trying to lose weight so many people only focus on the scale. They're only looking at the numbers instead of looking at how often was I actually consistent with my workouts? How often was I actually hitting my protein goal? How often? Was I actually going for the walks that I said I was going to go on? Right. And one thing I would really love about the app that we use for our clients is that it actually tracks your adherence, so there's no way around it. Like, the numbers do not lie. So if I'm on a call with someone and they're like, oh, I just am not seeing the results I want, I can pull it up and I can say, okay, well, let's look at this here. Looks like you've only been 40% consistent with your workouts in the last month. It looks like you've been 30% consistent with hitting your calorie goal or your protein goal steps, or at 50% consistency. And then you can kind of say, okay, what does that tell us? Right. Like the consistency is not there. So looking at actual adherence benchmarks versus only looking at the outcomes. So you can see okay, where is it behaviorally that I'm not, you know lining up with what I want to achieve. And then you can also see when you are crushing it like that is really exciting. And then you're not only looking at the outcome, you're looking at the process along the way and making this just a part of what you're doing on a daily basis. Evidence is always going to build confidence faster than motivation, so that's something to think about. Okay. So let's talk about something called the neutral zone. So this is the phase in behavior change where motivation starts to drop because it's no longer exciting anymore. Results maybe aren't super obvious here. Progress feels boring. You're you're kind of getting into routines and routine is kind of boring. That's why things are always more exciting at the kickoff of like a challenge or a fitness program or something, when you're like all into like, oh my gosh, this is new and fun, right? And then that starts to kind of drop off as time goes on and you're just doing the things over and over again, right? Most people end up quitting here. But this is exactly where neuro rewiring happens. So that's where it's most important to not give up. So this is like days 30 through 60 of something okay. That's where you might start to get bored. And you want to just like revert back because you're like, nah, this isn't very exciting anymore. I'm not seeing the results as best as I want. This is where you have to push through more than any other time. Okay, so discomfort doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong. It means that your brain is starting to adapt. Very very important. So if you take nothing else away from this episode, please just remember that your brain isn't broken. It's not just that you're lacking willpower. You're not failing. You're simply rewarding. You're simply wired for comfort. And once you understand that, you can design habits that work with your biology instead of against it. So start from a calm place, build consistency, and then increase the challenge over the time. That's how it actually sticks. And that's why these things like 75 hard and these cleanses and like Whole30 and all these things that are super extreme, they don't end up usually sticking because they're not really working with your brain. And the way that we know actually helps us build better habits and work on behavior change. And so if we're thinking long term, we need to do this. The right way. So if all of this is really resonating with you and you know that you need the support, you know that you've done it the wrong way over and over and over again. You're stuck in this loop. I really encourage you to check out coaching. Like there's never going to be a better time than right now. And while you're feeling that nudge, like if you are listening to this show week after week and you're just not really doing anything with the information or doing anything about it consistently, and you know that you're feeling that nudge to take action, I really encourage you to go for it today. Like, this is the time. Go with your gut on this and and see what it's all about and start to actually make changes. Because the reality is like the difference between the people who, six months from now, have completely transformed their body and their life, and the people who are exactly where they are today and haven't made any changes, is the ability to just take action and start and invest in the right things and actually make it a true priority. And unfortunately, I talk to women all of the time that say, oh yeah, I want to do this, I want to do that. This is my goal. But it's not a big enough priority for them to actually do anything about it or to actually invest in themselves. And then a year later, two years later, they're still where they were when we chatted. And now they're realizing that they just should have taken action sooner. So don't let that be you a year from now. Right. Let's do things the right way and start to see some changes. Um, so if that is appealing to you, if you want to find out more, if you're ready to take action and transform this year, then you can tap the application link in the show notes. Takes you through a few quick questions so I can better understand what's going on. And I will reach out and we can talk. You can also DM us at the Fit Underscore for Hiking Instagram page, and I can chat with you there so you can just DM us the word ready and we will go from there. Thank you so much for tuning in you guys. I hope that this has been a helpful and insightful message for you today. I find it so fascinating to like, learn about the brain and why it is that it's such a struggle sometimes for us to do the things that we want to do. So hopefully this gives you some helpful insights of of how to work against the urge to always just stay comfortable. Okay, let's make this the year where we actively get uncomfortable. Step into discomfort a little bit. All right I will chat with you all in the next episode.