The War In Our Minds: Why It’s So Difficult to Change.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
If you look at any media at this time of year, there is one thing that takes prominence of place — New Year’s resolutions and why we don’t keep them. The typical morning TV show guest will tell us that it’s because people make vague resolutions rather than setting specific goals with an action plan. That’s true to an extent, but even if everyone actually made a realistic and specific plan, do you think even half of them would follow it? We both know the answer to that. The problem with their advice is that it’s always tactical, always a simple “how to” guide that says “if you want this, then do that”. They’ll even tell you not to set resolutions.
The quote that I began this post with wasn’t an accident. People make resolutions because they recognise something is wrong and they need to make a change, and in some cases they really are committed to that change, but within a couple of months they fail. It’s not because they’re weak and it’s not necessarily because they didn’t make an action plan. Resolutions and plans fail for one important, overarching reason: people don’t understand their own psychology.
Think of your mind as a computer program made up of millions of lines of code. That code is full of scripts and commands that were there the moment you were born: breathe, eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, scratch when itchy. You’ve never had to consciously think about how to do any of this because it’s part of your genetics, it’s like code that’s prewritten in by the factory and can never be altered or erased.
Then we have our higher level stuff, and this part of your programming wasn’t there from the start, it’s code that has been contributed by your parents, other authority figures, teachers, siblings and everyone that you grew up around. From the moment you left the womb, your senses have been taking in stimuli, processing the data and writing scripts in your brain on how to deal with a million different situations. The problem? Just as a computer doesn’t know when there are problems in its programming, neither do people.
For instance, it’s no coincidence that if you grew up in a household where everyone was obese that you have problems trying to lose weight. From the moment you were brought home from the hospital you had your family’s attitudes and patterns of behavior in relation to food imprinted into your subconscious. Every time you’ve made the decision to lose weight, here is some of what you’re probably working against:
*You eat more than you need to — your parents made you eat your whole plate of dinner each night, even though you didn’t want to. Your psychological programming now concludes that you need to eat until you feel stuffed when you sit down for a meal. When you don’t, you feel hungry.
*You’re used to eating calorie dense food — for dinner you often ate pizza, fries and had soda. This causes an extra physiologic adaptation because of the changes in brain chemistry this food causes. Your programming now defines this food as “normal”, so food that doesn’t make you feel good like this, such as lettuce, is extremely hard to tolerate.
*You think that diets don’t work — you’ve seen your parents try to diet and lose weight, and fail each time. Your psychological programming has thus concluded that diets don’t work, meaning you fail before you even begin because subconsciously you don’t expect to succeed.
Those are just 3 examples of invisible scripts that may be running in your psychological programming if you’re obese. So you see, it isn’t just a matter of making a resolution, putting it into an action plan and doing it, because you’re fighting a war on two fronts without even realising it. On the main front, you’re fighting who you are right now and trying to change your physical shape (which is the easy part), but attacking from the rear are all the scripts in your programming that are sabotaging the main effort.
If you want to lose the weight and keep it off, you can’t just treat the present state. You’ve got to back into your past and find all of those scripts that have caused you to make it to where you are now and forcibly overwrite them, otherwise those long running scripts will eventually take control again, causing you to fail. You can’t expect even the best weight loss plan to win out over decades of entrenched psychological scripts that are running in your subconscious, you have to treat that part of the problem first. If you need any further proof, look at the hundreds of former The Biggest Loser contestants who put all the weight back on. They lost all the weight, but because they didn’t fix those underlying scripts, they put it all back on.
This is of course not just limited to losing weight. We all have long running scripts for every conceivable situation affecting our actions. Did you suck at maths in high school? That could very well have been the result of a script started by your parents the first time you didn’t do so well on a test when they said “that’s ok Billy, you just aren’t good at maths”. Your young and impressionable brain made note of this and parked it in your subconscious. Any subsequent difficulty you have in the following years is explained away by this, further entrenching the script in your psychological programming. So rather than it being a case of “I need to try harder to be good at maths” it’s instead “I’m not good at maths”. By the time you’re in 12th grade, you’re in the middle or bottom maths class and always struggling because “you just aren’t good at maths”. It goes even further than this though — every time you struggle with something in life, rather than realising you just need practice, your brain instead concludes that you just aren’t good at it.
Needless to say this is a huge deal, and even the smallest life events when we’re young can have huge consequences when we become adults. These scripts perpetuate themselves and become part of our mental narrative, often making it very difficult to shake them off. They are in place for how you act and think in every conceivable situation:
Health
Money
Relationships
Learning
Conflict
Work
Shopping
Self esteem
Worldview
Politics
If you really do want to change something, you need to go back into your past (sometimes a very long way) and determine the life events that might have either caused the invisible scripts in your subconscious to be written or have contributed to it. Be aware your current circle of friends and family could still be contributing to such scripts. I’ve already written a post on how your upbringing and immediate circle affects what you think of as normal, and you should definitely give it a read to gain further understanding. If you want the ultimate level of power, if you really want to succeed and constantly keep raising the bar, you need to do something that almost no one else does: examine your scripts for everything.
Think about it. Your partner says something that upsets you. Rather than telling them you’re upset and why, you instead become sullen. You want to tell them, but it’s like there’s an invisible force field holding you back every time. Most people will just accept this and become sullen every single time. But what if instead of doing that, you asked yourself why this happens to you in this situation? Look back in your past and examine it. Is it because talking about your feelings when you were growing up was a no no? Is it because a former partner or partners ridiculed you when this happened in the past? Is it because you were hit when you cried as a child? There could be myriad reasons why this happens, but you’re not going to know unless you ask the question.
Our attitudes to life in general are shaped by these psychological scripts as well. You might come from an extremely hard working family who highly value education and high income work. You therefore go into a career in finance, law or engineering without even questioning why you’re doing it. You make it to 40 and feel desperately unhappy despite being very successful with a lot of money, and you can’t work out why that is. It’s because all of the scripts in your psychology told you that being an adult equalled power, money and prestige. You literally don’t have a script for how to be happy without any of that stuff, which is why you feel completely lost when you realise that all of the power, money and prestige isn’t going to bring you happiness.
For some of the simple problems, it’s a matter of recognising the script that’s running in the background in a moment of weakness when you’re going to backslide, and mentally talking it through. Telling yourself that this is just your old script and you’re not going to give in. In this way you’re forcibly rewriting your psychological programming. For many deep seated problems where you might have multiple reasons or an origin shrouded in the past, you’ll probably need to seek some outside help, be it a psychologist, counsellor or a trusted friend/advisor. You can’t expect to change a script that’s been running in your subconscious for 30 years on your own.
Be aware also of how you speak about yourself. Anytime you say the word “I”, you need to be especially careful of how you complete that sentence, because in this case you yourself are writing the script. When you self deprecate, when you put yourself down, you’re reinforcing bad scripts. Saying “I’m just a limo driver” or “hey, I’m not the smartest guy, but…” or anything along those lines is a really bad thing to do. Likewise when you say “I can’t”, you’re putting mental blocks into your subconscious. You’re programming your own psychology to work against you, which is why so many people lack confidence. They program it into themselves.
School is a great example of where a large group puts invisible scripts in place on all the members of the group. The kids that stand out are generally bullied or ridiculed, so everyone else’s brains register these events and by the time we reach adulthood, it’s programmed into us that standing out is something to be scared of. I did a talk recently at a high school for some year 10 students about their career, and one of the biggest points I stressed was to be a top performer. In the Q&A that followed, one of them asked me “so are you a top performer?” Without a second’s hesitation, I answered “yes, being a top performer is a baseline for people that work in my company”. They all looked stunned, but it wasn’t the stunned silence of “wow, this guy is really full of himself”, it was the stunned silence of “wow, can you actually say that? You mean you don’t have to say that you’re average when you aren’t?”
So you can see, these hidden psychological scripts come from every source imaginable, because your brain is always processing new stimuli. When you start to pick away at them, you realise that there is a reason that you do and think everything that you do. Think of the scripts holding you back from what you want as the invisible laser net guarding the vault in a heist movie. You can’t get through that net unless you can actually see it, so you spray compressed air to reveal all those laser beams. This post has hopefully been that compressed air on the invisible scripts holding you back from what you want in life, and you can now recognise them when they are running.
So if you want to make real changes to any part of your life in this new year, reverse the whole equation:
- Define the problem
2. Uncover the psychological scripts that are causing the problem
3. Create an action plan to remove the scripts and overwrite them with what you want
4. Resolve to see it through
What are the invisible scripts that you feel are holding you back?