BSB Ep 72
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Size Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and today I want to ask you, who would win in a head-to-head battle, a habit or a goal? So I recently read an article by a team of neuroscientists that they were doing research on this very same thing. Which does your brain prioritize habits or goals?
And the answer is. maybe shocking to you. Can you take a guess which? Go ahead. I'll give you a second. If you said habit, then you are correct, my friend. The brain will prioritize a habit over a goal. So what does that mean for you? In this research study the scientists. ask you to imagine someone who just got off work and was driving home.
The habit would be to drive straight home. A goal would be to stop off on the way [00:01:00] home to the grocery store to pick up a couple of items. You've probably been in a similar scenario. Where you could get something from the grocery store, you probably need it. But then you start thinking about how tired you are, how it was a long day at work, how you can't wait to get home and do X, Y, Z, or just to shake the day off so you end up not going to the grocery store.
Or you rationalize it and go, I don't really need that thing. I can make this dinner instead. I don't need to go get the ingredients right now. I'll just wait until I'm in a better mood or have more energy, et cetera. And that is an example of your brain overriding your goal of going to the grocery store and defaulting to the habit of just going straight home.
Now, why is this important? It's important because if you are trying to create a new habit, let's say eat healthy, then that [00:02:00] new habit is in reality a goal, and what your brain will do is it will prioritize your current habit, which is maybe eating junk food over the goal of eating healthy. And this is why we find it so difficult to create new habits is because the brain doesn't view them that way.
The brain's like, yeah, it'd be something nice to do, but not something we have to do. Now, we all know that's not true. There are some things that we really have to do, but some people don't do them until they're in extraordinarily painful situations. So as a doctor in my private practice. All the time. I saw patients who didn't make a life change until after they'd had a major health issue, like a heart attack or a cancer.
They don't start looking at what would be nice to [00:03:00] do, like a goal and what they knew they should do, eat healthy exercise until they were forced to make that change. That's the position the brain puts us in. And it does that because of a few reasons. The brain loves the habits. It loves comfort, and it's hardwired to take you away from pain and toward pleasure.
So these goals, these new habits, would require you to do something different, and that would mean doing something that's out of your normal habitual routine, and that's viewed as unsafe or threatening. But the good news is you can override that system and here are a few ways to do it. So step one, you could even do this on a piece of paper, is to write out what the goal is, and we'll use that previous example, eat healthy.
The next column would be, what habit do I need to [00:04:00] begin to make this goal a reality? That might be, eat more fruits and vegetables, eat the rainbow foods in the diet, whatever that might be for you. And then the third column might be, what habit do I need to overcome or stop to make this goal a reality?
In that column you might put, stop eating junk food. Stop eating fast food. If you continue this list along, you're gonna find that to eat healthier is gonna require more than one new habit. It's gonna require you to change the way you shop, change maybe your lunchtime routine, et cetera. So you wanna list out all the new habits that you would need to acquire to make this goal a reality, and you're gonna have a list of habits that you would need to stop or overcome.
Also to make that goal a reality. So that's step one. And getting it all on paper [00:05:00] pleases that part of your brain. The neocortex that is involved in planning, organization, and higher decision making, and this is the piece of the brain doesn't get a lot of love. So remember, we're trying to overcome that automatic pilot and the brain's preference for habit to get into that space of planning for something new, AKA, the goal.
That part of the brain, the neocortex, really loves to see the plan on paper, right? It's gonna help increase your odds of success if you write the plan down. Because trust me, you're gonna need that plan later. So step two is let's think about why the goal is important. Now, if you're in business or corporate at all, then you know that the why behind things keeps you going when your motivation slows down.
We as humans also have this cycle of [00:06:00] motivation. We're excited in the beginning because we're like, yes, I totally wanna do this. This is why everybody hits the gym in January. After those New Year's resolutions. In the beginning, step one, you're very excited. But then when you start trying to develop new habits, overcome older ones, you hit this middle phase where it's hard.
And your brain does not like things to be hard. If we all had our preference, wouldn't we want it all to be easy? Your brain's the same way. Remember, it's hardwired to take you away from pain and towards pleasure. So if it sees you and the effort that you're putting in going to the gym to create this goal as being difficult, then it's gonna default back to your pattern.
So this stage is one of the most treacherous stages that you get yourself in, because this is where we tend to lose [00:07:00] the thread, and this is where we need to be reminded of the master plan you created in step one. And we need to remind ourself of the most important why. For example, if you've had a heart attack and you are wanting to change your lifestyle because of that heart attack. Why do you wanna do that? You wanna live longer. You wanna see your kids graduate from college. You want to travel like you've always dreamed. This is your why, and you're gonna need to bring that back in. When going to the gym feels hard or eating that carrot stick feels hard. So that's step two.
Really understand the why behind your goal and make it a good one. And step three, we wanna reinforce benefits of the win, not focus on what we lose. And your brain loves to do this too, because it's gonna try to bring that in as rationale [00:08:00] of your cheat days, you know, you can just have this food. It won't kill you just to eat a Big Mac today.
You can hit the gym extra hard tomorrow because it wants to sabotage your new goal or your new habits because it will default back to your old habits where it could safely control you. It controls the environment because it thinks it's safer for you to run on something that's expected instead of a new program.
That's anything could happen if you go to the gym. Anything could happen if you eat a carrot stick. So you need to remind yourself of the wins and the benefits frequently. Especially in the middle phase when things are harder. So if you're having to get up at 5:00 AM to go to the gym, remind yourself of the wins. It's gonna feel so good to get this workout.
[00:09:00] I can feel myself getting stronger every day. I feel slimmer and healthier. I have more energy instead of. I can't stand to get up at 5:00 AM I wish I could just eat one salad, lose five pounds, or I wish I could just lift weights one time and be buff as I wanted. If you think about everything you're having to give up the extra hour of sleep, the travel time, the traffic.
If you focus on the negatives. This is justification for your brain to hijack you again and take over and push you back into that default space. It's hard, my friends, this is why we fight change, and all of these battles are happening subconsciously and unconsciously, it's why change is this start, stop, start, stop.
One step forward, two steps back. But when you understand the shenanigans that your brain is pulling on [00:10:00] you, it makes it easier to step in and go, Nope, I see what you're doing there, brain. I'm gonna redirect you back to the primary goal. What do I want? Why do I want it? How am I gonna get there? And this is how you keep yourself motivated when you are trying to make life changes big or small.
I cannot tell you the number of times I've worked on dietary plans with patients back when I was a doctor and let's say someone had an allergy test and they found out they were allergic to wheat, corn, and gluten. So what's my advice going to be? Remove wheat, corn, gluten, or dairy from the diet, right?
Every single patient to a person immediately starts going, what is their left to eat? Seriously? What is their left to eat? And think about this, if you removed wheat, dairy, corn, let's just say that. Your mind [00:11:00] immediately goes to what you're about to lose, and it focuses there because it views losing those things as painful. Loss is painful to that survival brain.
But now think about it with your logical brain. If you took dairy, corn, wheat, or gluten out of the diet, what does that leave you? Every fruit and vegetable known to man like it leaves you. Everything. But what it does cut off is processed foods and junk foods. And if that's the majority of your diet, number one, that's kind of a big problem.
But number two, it's no wonder that your brain is going, what's their left for me to eat? So these are sort of the things that you're fighting all the time. Your brain wants to focus on what you're losing, not what you're gaining. And it focuses on loss because the survival brain is in charge. So we have to bring that neocortex, bring that logical brain in charge, and remind that worrying piece of your [00:12:00] brain that says, I'm about to starve to death because you're taking dairy, corn, and gluten outta my diet.
And remind it. Nope, there's every fruit, every vegetable, every meat. It just can't be processed. Or you might have to read labels as a new habit. When you are aware of these little challenges, these little obstacles and how your brain naturally operates, you can learn how to go around it. It's just like a traffic cone in the highway.
You can let it stop you or you can learn to go around it. This is working smarter, not harder. This is working with the flow of your brain instead of against it. You know, sometimes we do have to go against it if it's a negative flow, but when you understand the difference, it makes your life so much easier and it makes achieving your goals so much easier when you really understand the thought process of why the sabotages are coming up, where they might [00:13:00] come up, and what you need to do to get around them. And this is what I teach my clients in the bespoke brain system. So if you wanna learn how to do this for yourself, and sometimes I feel like a vanilla ice moment, if you got a problem, you'll I'll solve it.
And what it is is I'm teaching you how to solve your problems based on a new way to think and a new way to look at the problems. We're hacking your brain. We're doing a little neurohacking here by showing you this is the way things work in a neuroscience and psychological way, and this is how we can use that system, hijack it for ourselves to turn it into a gold machine.
To really use what's there for the purposes that we want and not just for habits or default or automatic pilot. I do free phone consultations if you're interested in learning about how this system can help you solve your problem, then head [00:14:00] over to aprildarley.com and schedule your consultation with me today.
Until next week, my friends happy habit forming goodbye.
