Why is change so hard?

How many times have you decided that you are going to change but you fall back into old habits?

Why is it that even when you know for so many reasons changing is good for you, it is just so damn hard?

Let’s take an example of wanting to lose weight. You’re sick of your jeans being too tight and feeling bloated. You are determined that you are going to do something about it.

You might be able to make changes for a short while but eventually the old habits creep back and you’re over-eating and feeling bad about yourself and you’re back to square one.

I think we all know the feeling.

There is a very good reason why change is hard.

We humans are designed in such a way that when something becomes a “habit”, certain neurons in our brain are firing together so that we don’t have to think about it. This is great.

It makes things easy to do as our unconscious mind takes over.

This can be very convenient when we’re doing certain things like brushing or teeth, riding a bicycle, walking or doing the myriad of things we need to do every day which we can do on automatic pilot.

However the fact that there is an established neural connection in place makes it very difficult to get rid of a bad habit.

This neural pathway has become established and will always be the default route for us.

The point to bear in mind is :

Nature abhors a vacuum

What this means is that if you want to change a bad habit, you need to replace it with a new healthier habit.

You need to start the creation of a new neural network.

Eventually the old neural pathway will atrophy and die and the new one will become the default route.

There are lots of tips and rules around habit change which I will explore in later blogs but the point I wanted to make now is that if you are using will-power alone to get rid of an old habit you are fighting a losing battle.