How come it is so hard to change?!
Okay so you are a normal man or woman, and you maybe have a thought pattern, behaviour, a feeling, a certain emotional response, or one of the many other possible things that you would like to change to about yourself.
You’ve had one or many negative experiences with it in the past, you are acutely aware that it does not work for you, you remember how you felt because of it, and with all your conscious energy, you have come to the decision you would like this ‘thing’ to change.
Despite all your positive intentions, despite your action plans, despite you reading up about it to further understand it, and despite trying your best, it seems to come back time and again.
So how come it is so hard to change it?
If we were to pause for a moment, and consider what our mind is ‘composed’ of, that may help us in our endeavour.
We have the conscious mind, which is our objective or thinking mind, which helps identify incoming information, helps us to compare things, analyse things, and to make decisions. The conscious mind is where we utilise our creativity, and it can only hold one idea at any one time.
Then we have the unconscious or subconscious mind, sub meaning ‘below’ conscious, which may include information out of our awareness about our identity, our beliefs, values and attitudes.
The unconscious mind is an incredible resource; it can store vast information, and encode it in such a way that it can be recalled in seconds. It controls the many unconscious processes that go on outside of our awareness, such as regulating our breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, healing, and cell regeneration, to name but a few… WOW!
If we were to summarise its main objective, or its main task that it never strays too far from, the role of the unconscious mind is to make sure we survive. To make sure we keep on living.
In order to promote the best chance of survival, our mind wants to keep things the same. The unconscious mind LOVES the status quo.
If we do exactly the same as what we did yesterday, again today, and again tomorrow, we will continue to live.
What better way to ensure survival than by doing the same things as yesterday, as after all, in order for you to have gotten to this point today, you must have survived yesterday – JOB DONE!
The only problem is… what happens if ‘yesterday’ wasn’t very pleasant? What happens if yesterday something negative, emotional, or traumatic happened?
What happens then?
Well unfortunately, this is not of much concern to the unconscious mind, as after all, you did survive, you did keep living, and so those same programs run again, “let’s do the same again” says the unconscious mind. Before you know it, those negative responses you know oh so well, are up and running again, with you left to rue all the effort you put into understanding the whole thing.
And if we try to make the change – our system will engage ‘safety protocols’, and will kick in with a big dose of fear (False Evidence Appearing Real), and maybe some chaos too, just enough to encourage us to retreat back to where we were, where we will continue to get, what we have always got.
This then sheds a little more light on how achieving change on your own is difficult, because from an unconscious point of view, survival is the goal, and as there is already hardwired experience of how to do it, the unconscious will roll out that successful programme day after day. That’s not to say change on your own is impossible, it’s just bloody hard work!
In other words, consciously trying to change can be futile when the unconscious is geared up to repeat yesterday and maintain the status quo.
How could this be of help? How could this programming work for us?
As an analogy, think of your first day at school. There you are, in a somewhat scary place, no idea what is supposed to happen, in a state of hyper alertness, scanning the environment to look for information. You begin watching and looking around, observing what other people do, how they manage things in this place, and begin copying them. The people in authority tell you information, and you take it as gospel and go along with it, you get through the day…..phew...
In a place where you don’t know what you’re doing, you observe, copy, make meanings, and learn from all those that you see and hear, to help you survive the day. (Does this sound like something that resembles how each of us comes into this world?!)
After a few days, that entire information gathering expedition has been absorbed. Without thinking you know you need to go and register first, then go to class, do the same type of things, in the same order, and it becomes second nature. There is comfort in the sameness of it all; there is SAFETY in the sameness of it all.
Your system has learned what it needs to do to get you through the day, and it works, it works very, very well!
The same thing happens in life. Where in the first 7 years, we spend a lot of time looking, observing, copying, and most importantly…..LEARNING. Our minds are just like sponges!
So how can we achieve the conscious change we want when the unconscious has other ideas?
What would life be like if we were unconsciously set up to continue growing, learning and evolving in a way that worked FOR us? If our unconscious and conscious minds were playing the same tune so to speak?
As Matt Hudson would say, there are a million ways out of a puzzle. But if you’d like to take the lightest, easiest, and gentlest way, ask a Body Mind Worker how they can help!
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