Why It’s SO Hard To Change & Why We Resist it.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO CHANGE?
“To think is to create. If you allow the outer world to control how you think and feel, the external environment is patterning circuits in your brain to make you think “equal to” everything familiar to you. The result is that you create more of the same; you hardware your brain to reflect the problems, personal conditions, and circumstances in your life. So to change, you must be greater than all things physical in your life. Think greater than you feel. Be greater than your environment” Dr. Joe Dispenza

On average, we think sixty to seventy thousand thoughts a day and, 90% of those thoughts are recycled from the day before, and if you are miserable, you have the propensity to just think and way you did the day before, and the moment before and then nothing new has been allowed to come to fruition. It cannot come to be because you haven’t thought equivalent to anything NEW. If you just do what you do without even thinking about it, then it’s called a HABIT, the subconscious mind is responsible for your habits. A habit is when you have a regular tendency to do something and you find it especially hard to give up. It is created by the frequent repetition that is basically involuntary for you to accomplish with little thought at all, it is sometimes referred to as auto-pilot.

If your habit is complaining, nagging, judging, and criticizing yourself and others, then you are probably not the happiest person around and the way you perceive the world is equivalent to your state of mind called “unhappiness.” You perceive the world from your state of being called unhappiness and view everything equivalent to that state of mind and you see unhappiness in everything and you say I AM UNHAPPY. What you have done is just been thinking and feeling and thinking and feeling everything to the exclusion of everything else, and after an amount of time, you begin to BE unhappy. Your automatic pilot is set to a level of unhappiness. Then when someone asks you why you can’t stop being unhappy and you say, “I can’t” then you are stuck in a pattern of unhappiness and the cycle continues. Behavior is addictive just like anything else, and we become addicted to our conditioned thought patterns making it even more difficult to change and form new habits because our old ones are so ingrained in our neural pathways in our brains.

HEBBIAN LEARNING.
There is a concept called the Hebbian theory and basically, it states that “nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” So the more times you do something, the stronger the connection in the brain will be and you continue to strengthen that connection by thinking and doing. If you play tennis and practice playing tennis you should get better, same goes for any sport, same goes for any other skill. The more times you do it, it will become automatic or shift to auto-pilot. When it is on auto-pilot your body becomes the mind and it gets a lot harder to change even if it’s for the better.

So if you have conditioned yourself to be unhappy, miserable, sad, discontent, frustrated, impatient, you get what I mean? You have just fired and wired it and practiced and wired that neural pathway in your brain so many times that YOU have conditioned yourself to be unhappy, sad, miserable, discontent etc. You’ve literally become addicted to those emotions and those thought processes that you find it difficult to change. I think when we accept that we are little addicts it makes us that much more motivated to create positive change, because what is the cost to you if you continue to fee unhappy, miserable and discontent? It will cost you your health, your peace of mind, it may cost you friendships and certainly opportunities in your life if you continue down that path and could even become destructive.

OBSESSING ABOUT THE WORST CASE SCENARIO.
For a long time, psychologists have known that the more we think about, ruminate and obsess about one negative thought over and over and over again, our thought process and thus our attitude and view of life will be more negative and the neural connections are strengthened and then it becomes very difficult to stop the loop. The more you practice being negative, the more the pathways relationship is fortified.

This is exactly why thoughts that cause panic, anxiety, obsessions are so difficult to combat and to stop becomes the connections become very strong and your emotional and physiological reactions can keep you stuck and limited to this negative feedback loop. It takes will and a level of conscious awareness to stop it and that requires effort and mental fortitude to want to overcome yourself and your limited emotions. This is the HARD part.

Although you may know what you are doing is NOT working, but if you do it long enough it becomes your “familiar” state of being. Anything that is familiar and you start trying to change, your subconscious kicks in and it can talk you out of change and the sub-vocalizations in the brain will try and talk you out of change and they go something like this, “you aren’t good enough, who do you think you are to change? Your mother told you you wouldn’t be able to do it, you’re too fat, ugly, short, you aren’t smart enough, you can start tomorrow and my favorite, this doesn’t feel right.” So know you are going to come up against yourself and you might fail a few times but keep going, that;s the secret keep going despite the discomfort and keep that mental fortitude, you just have to want it enough.

What if you obsessed about the BEST case scenario? How differently would your life look? Much different I bet because you would be obsessing about LOVE, passion, health, wellness, letting go, travel, being unlimited, abundance, etc.

CHANGE IS DEPENDENT ON YOU.
The reason it’s so hard to move forward after a break up is because it’s a habit, the reason it’s so hard to unlearn a negative behavioral pattern like anger is because it’s become an ingrained habit. I learned in a Dr. Dispenza workshop is that by the time you are 35, you are one BIG imprint of behaviors, perceptions, attitudes and beliefs and you have wired in those patterns deeply that by the time you are 35, its subconscious (below the consciousness) and you do it without thinking about it. So then you can see that at 35, it’s more difficult to change or it can be more difficult to change. That’s where you get “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

Change really depends on YOU and your willingness to implement it. Everything is possible, but, nothing is impossible but your resistance to change increase mainly because you have strengthened those connections in your brain over time and that whole thing about it taking 30 days to create or break a habit, well I heard and I know from teaching my clients, if you have had a habit of getting angry and frustrated at work or when things don’t go your way, if you practice NOT being that way and act more patient and kind, after 30 days, you may not have eliminated it, but your resistance to the change diminishes and it gets much easier.

So when my clients tell me it takes 30 days to make or break a habit and then they go right back to what they were doing because they couldn’t override their conditioning, I tell them, keep going, it may take a while longer, shit it may take months or even years to break the conditioned habits. But when you do you will always say just ONE thing: “that was SO worth it!”

Change requires effort and energy, sometimes a lot of energy, sometimes we are inherently lazy beings so get up off the couch, stop whining and go DO something! I know first hand, I still struggle to make changes, they can be hard but I always know how worth it,it is to change myself, it give me so much joy to overcome my old self.

PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION.
When you have eliminated your anger, your frustration or your criticism, when you strengthen that neural network to STOP exhibiting that behavior, something very organic and natural occurs, you begin to feel happier, freer and more open, and when you are more open, you are more creative and more loving and when you are more loving, you are more forgiving and more passionate, when you are more passionate, you are more productive, you get the gist right? So change is really about eliminating behaviors that don’t work to get you where you want to be in life but it is also about unlearning those FAMILIAR limited emotions as well.

A good depiction of change is when you are holding a tissue in your hand and you crumple it up, it has changed from its previous state and you if you haven’t ripped it, it will stay intact right? But if you rip it up or if you burn it, you can then say the tissue has been transformed and it can no longer return to its original state. That is true personal transformation, it cannot be undone. When you have truly transformed your frustration into liberation, your sadness into happiness and your judgment into acceptance, then and only then will you know true joy and true freedom and live life on your terms.

I believe in YOU.

You are more capable than you think.

You just have to WANT it.

Susie G