Why Is Change So Hard? How Your Brain Makes It Difficult For You To Change And What To Do About It
We all know that change is hard. In the case of healthy lifestyle changes like exercise and healthy eating, it’s really hard.
It’s tempting to blame your willpower, motivation, or outside circumstances. You might think: “I’m too lazy”, or “I just don’t have time”. Maybe you simply haven’t found the right workout program or diet yet.
None of these things are the real problem.
The real problem is in your brain. Well, not just yours. It’s in all of our brains.
Our brains are wired in a very specific way that makes it hard for us to make healthy choices.
It turns out that along with all the other obstacles in our lives – stress, responsibilities, a society and environment that encourage unhealthy habits – now we have to fight against our own brains to make the choices that will help us improve our health and well-being.
There is good news, though. If you understand why change is so hard, you can use that knowledge to put strategies in place that will make it easier for you to be successful.
How Our Brains Shape Our Choices
When it comes to our behaviors, there are two systems in our brain that interact to guide what we do.
Your Rational Brain vs. Your Emotional Brain
Your rational brain system makes your conscious decisions. It’s responsible for long-term planning and thinking about the consequences of your actions.
This is the part of your brain that says: “I want to be healthier in the future. I want to be stronger. I want to get off my blood pressure medication and be able to run and play with my grandchildren. If I want to achieve those things, I should start exercising and making healthy eating choices.”
Your emotional brain system, on the other hand, is concerned with immediate rewards. It doesn’t care at all about the long-term consequences. Your emotional brain is all about what you want to do to feel good in the moment.
Unfortunately, those two parts of your brain are often in conflict.
To make the healthy choice, you have to give up what makes you feel good in the moment for the promise of a benefit in the future.
You have to say no to those donuts in the break room and eat a healthy snack instead. You have to get out of your warm comfortable bed and do your morning workout.
It’s only if you make those choices consistently, day after day, that you will achieve your goals.
It’s so hard to do that (give up something that feels good right now in favor of something that will benefit you later) because your brain is wired in a way that makes your emotional system stronger than your rational system.
The emotional part of your brain is closer and better connected to the parts of your brain that actually carry out the behavior.
When you subconsciously weigh a future benefit against an immediate one, your brain gives more weight to that immediate benefit. Your emotional system wins.
This explains why, even if you know you shouldn’t eat that third donut, you eat it anyway. Your emotional system wants that delicious taste right now and it overrides your rational brain system. You know you should get out of bed for your morning workout, but your emotional system wants to stay there. So you hit the snooze.
This also explains why people will knowingly do things that lead to pain or discomfort, like eating foods they know will cause heartburn later.
The Human Rider And The Elephant
Here's a visual way to understand this. This analogy comes from a great book called "The Happiness Hypothesis" by Jonathon Haidt. The analogy is of a human rider sitting on top of an elephant.
Your rational system is the human rider, and your emotional system is the elephant.
The human rider plans the route. It decides which path you should take to get to where you want to go. The elephant, though, is the one who actually does the walking.
Imagine if the human rider wants to go in one direction but the elephant wants to go in another. Guess who really gets to decide where they go...
If your human rider tries as hard as they possibly can, they might be able to push the elephant in a certain direction for a little while.
That’s what willpower is.
This is what most people do, they try to force themselves to stick to a diet or an exercise plan by sheer force of will.
Think about how much effort it takes to push that elephant in a direction that it doesn’t really want to go. You can only do that for so long before you get exhausted and you give up. That’s exactly what doesn’t work for behavior change.
How To Change Your Behaviors And Achieve Your Goals
What does work is getting to the point where what you know you should do to achieve your goals and what you want to do are the same thing.
You can achieve a state in which you want to do your workout and you want to eat nutritious foods. So when your human rider says: “we need to go this way if we want to move towards our goal”, the elephant says, “great, I also want to go that way”, and off you go in the right direction.
If you can get to that point, leading a healthy lifestyle becomes easy. You don’t have to fight or force yourself to adopt healthy habits.
Strategies For Getting Both Parts Of Your Brain To Work Together
To create the conditions that make it easy for you to lead a healthy lifestyle, you'll need to do some work on your mindset and goal-setting. This takes some extra effort and may mean doing things differently than you've done before.
Some of these strategies serve to give your human rider a very detailed map, so they can clearly and confidently direct the elephant. That involves carefully outlining your goals, shrinking the behaviors to make them simple and easy to implement, and creating action plans so there’s no ambiguity about what you need to do and how and when you need to do it.
Some of these strategies decrease the resistance to certain changes, making the path that leads to your goals the easier one for your elephant to walk, and making the path away from your goals more difficult. These are things like changing your environment and reducing decision fatigue.
Others are about finding a deeper meaning in your goals and connecting your core values and self-identity to the behaviors you’re trying to change. That gives your elephant a reason to move in the right direction. It also creates immediate, emotion-based rewards that keep the elephant moving forward.
I’ve written articles about each of the following strategies. Try them out and adopt what works for you.
For more information, check out “Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. In that book, they expand on the human rider and elephant metaphor.
If you need help creating sustainable healthy lifestyle changes, contact me! All of my one-on-one personal training programs include coaching to help you create healthy habits and a mindset that makes change easier.