When it comes to your brain, the expression, " What you focus on grows", is literally true.
Your brain uses neural pathways to run messages to your body, and each thought elicits its own unique response. The more often you think a specific thought, the more established that neural pathway becomes.
It’s like a footpath in a grassy field: the more times you walk on it, the more clearly it shows in the grass. And when someone new wants to cross the field, they are likely to walk on that path too. The same is true of thoughts – new thoughts are more likely to follow entrenched pathways.
Let’s say you regularly think about yourself in negative terms, and then someone gives you a compliment. The positive thought about yourself is unfamiliar and surprising. The new thought enters the field of your brain. Where should it go? It observes a well-trodden path of ‘I’m not good enough’ and zips down that neural pathway. Within split seconds that nice compliment goes from, “Oh, that’s a nice thing to hear about myself” (new thought) to “They don’t know the real me. I’m actually no good” (old thought, old familiar pathway) and back you go to your familiar state of feeling bad about yourself.
It’s a tough job to train your brain to use new neural pathways. It’s like creating a new path across the field instead of using the familiar one: “But my shoes will get muddy. The grass is wet. Are there snakes? Where will this take me? Is it safe?” and on and on.
This is the response of a very ancient part of our brain, the reptilian brain, which focuses on survival. This part of our brain is not rational or logical. It views familiar things as ‘safe’: because we’ve already experienced them and stayed alive, it assumes they’ve helped us survive.
To this part of our brain Unknown = Danger, so any attempt to change our homeostasis is identified as a threat. The reptilian brain has many clever scare tactics to get you back in the ‘safe zone’ if you veer from the known, even though ‘known’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘best for you’. For this reason it’ll resist your attempts to think new thoughts.
Here's the irony: You may feel uncomfortable, angry or resistant when you try to think positive things instead of your usual negative things because the ancient part of your brain is trying to protect you from new unknown things.
When we make discoveries, improve our situations and advance as a species, we use the relatively more recently developed parts of the brain that are designed for exploring unfamiliar areas.
We need all the parts of our brain to survive, and each has its strengths. The primal, fear-driven brain assesses survival risks. It has no capacity to think and rationalise and therefore it’s unhelpful in making life decisions, yet we let it weigh in on our decisions all the time. Sometimes this is obvious because we live in anxiety but sometimes it’s very subtle.
Look at Hera’s example:
One day someone points out Hera’s enthusiasm for reading and doing research and Hera notices herself feeling awkward and apologising for it. It makes her aware that part of her is still complying to the social rules of the high school she went to, where it was ‘uncool’ to want to learn. In that setting, it was social suicide to embrace her eager-to-learn self, so she’d hidden her ‘nerdiness’. She’d been accepted by the ‘cool’ kids, but secretly envied the avid learning of those who were labelled ‘nerds’. Her reptilian brain had learned that it was dangerous to let others know she delighted in quantum physics textbooks.
Even many years later, she couldn’t allow herself to express her interest in learning without mild anxiety, which showed up in her apologising for it. Isn’t high school a joy? Hera now has to consciously use the more modern parts of her brain to override the ancient brain and rewire the neural pathways in order to feel safe to express her keen-bean self.
What we come down to is this:
Over and over again, we face choices. At each moment of choice we meet the ancient, fear-based part of our brain as well as the more modern, expansion-seeking part of our brain. In each moment we get to choose which path we walk to cross the field.
What we focus on grows – the neural pathways we regularly practise become more firmly entrenched, which affects the direction of our future thoughts. We literally live out the results of our choices. Everything in our life – what we think, how we feel, our relationships, our work, our satisfaction levels – result from the myriad small choices we make.
If you regularly make choices from a place of loving yourself and meeting your needs, your future cannot help but be what feels good to you.
If you loved yourself, what would you choose to think now?
