The Science Behind Changing Your Self From Within

Self-Awareness, Neuroscience and Brainwave Coherence

10 min readNov 23, 2018

On Changing Your Personality And Moving Into A New Future

Part 3: How Our Brain Works

Introduction

In part 1 and part 2 of this series “On Changing Your Personality And Moving Into A New Future”, we covered how our environment influences our thoughts and emotions and why it is so hard to change yourself as well as what is really necessary to do so.

Even though we had a look at some studies, many of the concepts might still seem a bit far-fetched to you.

That’s why we are going to have a deeper look at the science of our brain to really understand what is happening when we set out to change our personality and our personal reality.

How to Realize Change

To understand how to change who we are, we need to understand more about our personality.

What determines our personality?

Our personality is made up of the way we think, feel and behave.

So it is influenced by all the experiences we made in the past, by certain traits we have since birth and the neurological connections we established in our brain throughout our lifetime.

What represents all of that is our mind.

Two Minds

The mind is the brain in action and has traditionally always be compared to an iceberg.

The tiny portion of it that is above the surface is the conscious mind, while the vast majority lies below the surface.

This is the subconscious mind. It consists of unconscious processes, attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and emotional reaction patterns.

So the biggest part of who we are, of our personality, is actually sub- or unconscious.

This means that our body is acting out while our conscious mind is inactive. The body has taken over and become the master.

You can see this when you are driving a car, or when you get out of bed in the morning.

Our behavior has become automatic and we don’t have to think about it consciously. It has become a habit.

This can be a very good thing. It would be such a waste of mental energy if you had to consciously do all the steps again if you want to side park your car.

Also, you can make use of this and design your routines and habits in such a way that they are contributing to your goals. Then you make taking action and progressing towards your goals automatic, without being dependent on willpower, motivation or discipline.

However, this is not the default state.

Very often we follow a set of unconscious programs that were implemented by others in our childhood or that we at least never planned to run.

This is when we are being run by emotions of lack, of jealousy, judgment, anger, envy, fear and in general unconscious thought patterns and impulses that don’t serve out best interest.

We keep running this programs, thinking that’s who we are until a crisis hits us and we wake up out of the dream.

These can be disease, a breakup, a loss of someone, job problems or the overwhelming feeling of being unhappy with the current situation.

This is when we start to see the program we have been run by. Our thoughts, emotions and in general our whole state of being and personality.

But do we have to wait until crisis hits?

Can we not recognize earlier if we are happy with our life situation and with the person we are being right now?

Actually, we can.

If we homo sapiens compare ourselves with other animals, one thing that really separates us is the development of our brains.

Around 40% of our brain is the frontal lobe, the newest addition to our brain from an evolutionary perspective.

Compared to other animals, this high percentage is unique in the animal kingdom, where this part usually makes up a way smaller percentage of the brain.

This is what makes us special because the frontal lobe is what gives us the ability to observe ourselves and evaluate ourselves critically.

This is called metacognition and allows us to do several things that define us as conscious and rational beings

We can:

become aware of what we are thinking and analyze our thoughts
look at ourselves and our behavior from a third person perspective and evaluate ourselves critically
we can then focus on possibilities instead of problems

In other words, we have the crucial skill of self-awareness.

This allows us to realize when we should make a change in our life situation.

But more than that. It allows us to identify all the impulses, emotions and thoughts, in short, the program, our life was run by.

Through self-observation, we can realize that only because we have a thought does not mean it is true. And it definitely does not mean that we are these thoughts and accompanying emotions.

We start to realize that we don’t have to believe everything we think.

The first step towards that is to observe the program. To observe the thoughts, the emotions and impulses once they come up.

Once we observe something, we are in a subject-object relationship and we start to disidentify. We realize who we really are.

The silent watcher, the observer, the awareness in the background.

Pure consciousness.

This realization is extremely powerful.

How Can We Use That To Change Our Self?

This realization allows us to objectify our self by observing it.

Like in a video game, we are the person sitting in front of a TV and controlling a character on a screen.
We gain some distance to that character. We observer whatever happens to the character and usually take it very lightheartedly.

Once we practice this skill of disidentifying and self-observation we can start to correct ourselves.

It’s like professional athletes recording their training in order to correct flaws in their form, movement, and training.

With that skill, we have developed more awareness and can anticipate the impulses and thoughts that will come up with their intention to sabotage you and hinder you from change.

But once you have observed these behaviors and are aware of them, you can decide consciously and with a firm determination not to do these behaviors anymore.

Once you are really fed up with your old, negative self, then this decision has an energy that is stronger than the old emotional addictions and bad habits that keep you bound to the past.

In other words, when you realize who you no longer want to be, how you no longer want to behave, and fully commit to change, then you retire the old self.

The Scientific Background

I hear you saying:

“That sounds all nice, but is that even possible? What does science say about this?”

Through recent experiments and discoveries in neuroscience, we have come much closer towards being able to explain the art of inner transformation from a scientific perspective.

Several experiments with rats have given us insights into the workings of the brain and why changing ourselves is often so hard.

If an organism is exposed to the hormones of stress, especially cortisol, over the long-term, they will denature and destroy fibers in the part of the brain called hippocampus.

The part is among others responsible for making decisions in uncertain situations.

So in these experiments with rats, it was shown that when the hippocampus is damaged through cortisol, the rats would not go into a maze to find food.

They would stay in the known and take fewer risks.

The same might be true for us. When we are faced with long-term stress, we are prone to stay in the known and try to deal with the immediate challenges in the outer world.

We don’t want the unknown, we’re taking fewer risks because we’re afraid of it.

The unknown, however, is the door through which personal change and a better future and life situation would come through.

So what can we do?

The positive note is that the hippocampus can regenerate and you can start to crave adventure and the unknown again.

This is called dendritic restoration and occurs when stress is removed and cortisol levels are lowered.

Why is that so important?

If you don’t make time for this, you are trapped in the vicious cycle of stress and your old loop of thinking and feeling.

You will tell yourself that it’s not that bad, that you will change tomorrow, being reactive to your external environment and addicted to your old emotions and behaviors.

You have to make time for this.

You have to install a new software in your brain. A software that is so powerful that it changes the hardware, the brain itself.

Changing The Hardwiring Of Your Brain

The science of neuroplasticity has shown that you can influence the structure of your brain by the thoughts you choose to have.

A thought is a set of neurons that fire in a common specific sequence.

According to neuropsychologist Donald Hebb’s law:

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

So similar thoughts that are held on a regular basis, form networks of neurons which can be seen in the brain.

But the same is also true the other way around.

“Neurons that no longer fire together, no longer wire together.”

In other words:

“If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

Keep in mind that also the subconscious reaction and thought patterns, emotions and behaviors are all stored in your brain.

So by reminding yourself regularly who you do not want to be and how that should be reflected in your behaviors, you are actually dissolving old neural networks in the brain and unlearning old behavior patterns.

By paying attention to how you don’t want to be, you make your unconscious thoughts conscious so they will never flip by your awareness again.

You make such a firm commitment and decision that you will never be that way.

Then your body responds to your mind, regardless of the emotional addictions.

And in the same way, by reminding yourself who you do want to be and by rehearsing your behavior for the future you are establishing new neural connections that are helpful.

So plan your behavior by mentally rehearsing what you know is the right action.

This could be:

Staying in the present moment
Forgiving
Listening
Showing kindness and understanding
Whatever behavior you want to adopt

Once you do that as vividly as described in the previous parts, you signal your brain that the experience is real.

And as the science of epigenetics has shown, you are then signaling your genes to adapt. You start to upregulate genes that were not yet active and literally become a new person.

If you do it repeatedly, then you neuro-chemically hardwire your body and your subconscious mind.

You have new neural networks and a new set of upregulated genes. Your actions are equal to your thoughts, your mind and body work together.

The Science Behind Brainwaves

In order to reach your subconscious mind and alter the subconscious programs and patterns that have been running us forever, we need to pass the analytical mind.

This is the border between the conscious and the subconscious mind.

For some this analytical mind is stronger, they analyze more and are very logical. Others take things with less questioning.

If it is easy for you to pass the analytical mind then you are a highly suggestible person.

What has to change for everybody in order to reach the subconscious are the patterns of our brainwaves.

From the “You Are The Placebo” audiobook companion guide by Dr. Joe Dispenza

As seen in Figure 6.9 on the right, we have different brainwaves with different frequencies.

The more we go into the subconscious mind, the smaller the frequency of the brainwave. The brainwaves are slower.

The gradual progression to get into the subconscious mind is from the different levels of beta, towards alpha, while passing the analytical mind and then getting into theta or even delta brainwaves, see Figure 6.8.

This progression happens to each of us during our day.

Before we go to bed our brainwaves become slower and reach the subconscious stages, to get ready for sleep and dreaming.

When we wake up our brainwaves start to pick up until they reach their usual high beta states.

That is why we place such an emphasis on the importance of morning and evening routines. This is where the saying comes from:

“Never go to bed without a request to your subconscious mind.”
— Thomas Edison

During these stages in the morning and evening, we are highly suggestible. It is easier for us to get into our subconscious mind, into a trance-like state and influence our subconscious programming.

That’s why it is recommended to do meditation combined with visualization during exactly these stages of the day.

Brainwave Coherence

We can not only change the frequency of our brainwaves to influence our subconscious mind, but we can also make them more coherent.

Coherence means that brainwaves are more concentrated and synchronous.

From an energetic point of view coherence is healing and incoherence is disease.

By bringing our brainwaves in harmony we experience states of inner tranquility, peace and bliss.

As in the example of metronome synchronization, coherent patterns can transform incoherent patterns into more coherent patterns.

As in the diagrams below, that means that if we regularly establish coherent brainwaves through meditation, this has to potential to dissolve incoherence and disease over the long-term.