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Rewire Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Behaviour Change

We’re living in a tough time. Yes, some things are more accessible and more comfortable than ever. But there are also more stressors than before. Not just the psychological, I have a deadline and need to get to the gym and cook, stress…but the purely physiological kind. The type that we’re forgetting to notice. The constant notifications, bright colours, flashing lights, and fast-moving pace of the technology that is glued to our hands and in front of our eyes. Stressors, as a function of our modern environment, are sadly unavoidable. But our reaction to these stressors, and therefore our stress, is programmable…hackable, if you will.

Stress and Stressors

When we experience stress, our brain instinctively seeks to compare our current situation with past experiences. This constant effort to match the present with the past is a natural mechanism. It’s designed to create shortcuts and automatic responses, making decision-making more energy-efficient. Understanding this adaptive nature of our brain is not just useful, it’s enlightening. It empowers us to reprogram our reactions to stress, putting us in control of our well-being.

This evolutionary protective mechanism is perhaps one of the reasons we have become the dominant species on the planet. Besides, in the hunter-gatherer days, it would have been better to perceive an end-of-life threat and run or hide than to be wrong and leave ourselves in mortal danger. As a result, our stress response pulls our attention to our environment, body, and time. And all of this is really, really, hard to change. It is hardwired. But remember, it is an addiction. An addiction to being under stress that you have the power to overcome.

There’s a deeper neurobiological foundation for stress addiction – it involves key brain regions and complex interactions among neurochemical systems1. The amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and extended amygdala all play pivotal roles in processing and responding to stress2. Interestingly, cortisol itself may lead to a perpetuation of addiction3.

Chronic stress impairs executive functions in the prefrontal cortex and alters the basal ganglia, leading to compulsive stress-seeking behaviours. Neurochemical systems, including dopamine, cortisol, glutamate, and GABA, are also involved, with chronic stress disrupting their balance and affecting reward sensitivity. Mechanisms of stress addiction include alterations in reward circuitry, neuroplastic changes, negative reinforcement, and impaired executive function, which collectively perpetuate the cycle of stress addiction4.

The Technology Problem

Our stress response mechanisms are further exacerbated by the technology we use every day. Our devices are designed to hijack our pleasure centres, with gamification specifically targeting the mesolimbic reward pathways – the pathways that reinforce rewarding behaviours5. The only issue is that our brains can become accustomed to this stimulation and even desensitise to it. As a result, over time, we’ll need more and more of that stimulus to produce the same response in the brain. This leads to a cycle of seeking more and more stimulation, perpetuating the addiction.

Sadly, most people don’t even know they’re addicted to their devices. Test it for yourself. Try leaving all your technology locked in a room for a day (choose a Sunday or non-working day), and see how long you last. When you start to feel anxious, irritable, or the twitches of phantom vibration syndrome, you’ll begin to understand that this is your withdrawal. Withdrawal goes hand in hand with addiction. But this particular drug you’re addicted to is your technology.

Meditation and low-stimulus activities, like reading a physical book, are other examples of where you will notice this withdrawal-induced agitation. They are such low stimuli compared to what you’re used to; you’ll see how short your attention span is and how much you want to jump from thought to thought, from task to task…this is all a function of our modern-day environment if left unchecked.

None of this is to say technology is inherently bad; it profoundly benefits humanity. But it is important to temper our reliance on it and reshape our relationship with it. Modern technology should be seen as a library of tools that we consciously choose to use, not tools that control us. The answer to fix this addiction? Put simply: environmental change, behaviour change, developing awareness and changing your mind.

The Science

To understand how we can focus on behaviour change, we must explore a some common techniques. Thankfully, behaviour change methods have been the focus of a growing body of research. Many books, articles and social media gurus have discussed some tools we can use. However, a few key pieces of research stand out as the most comprehensive, so let’s explore what they have to say.

A large-scale meta-analysis of behaviour techniques, published in Nature Reviews Psychology (the creme-de-la-creme of journals), provides excellent insight into what predicts human behaviour and how to implement behaviour change most effectively. It concluded that many commonly assumed strategies were largely ineffective, these include: providing accurate information or attempting to change beliefs, implementing administrative and legal sanctions, and focussing on trustworthiness6.

The most effective techniques were providing social support, leveraging behavioural skills and habits, and removing practical obstacles to desired behaviours. The researchers emphasise that strategies targeting individual capacities and social/structural factors are more successful than those focused solely on information provision or belief modification.

What does this mean practically? Simply providing access to the best strategies and support, providing financial and time freedom, and individual-focussed solutions are likely to be more successful. However, the paper also concludes that behaviours, populations, and contexts are likely to be unique. Therefore, no review or meta-analysis can predict the result of a strategy across all contexts.

A recent study published in the Annals of Behavioural Medicine examined behaviour change techniques towards physical activity programs for older adults7. This paper is particularly interesting because most Western diseases are secondary to a sedentary lifestyle. It highlighted that action planning, graded tasks, behavioural practice, and rehearsal were the most commonly successful techniques; and that these had a predominantly positive impact on physical activity behaviour outcomes.

Finally, a recent comprehensive review further emphasises the importance of a process-based approach to organise and integrate human behaviour change. This approach suggests that successful behaviour change requires both self-initiated and other-initiated strategies. It outlines that changing behaviour depends not just on individual capacity to regulate impulses but also on the ecosystems in which people operate, including structural affordances, social norms and cultural practices8.

This further highlights that behaviour change involves not only focusing on your internal locus of control but also ensuring you shape your environment in a way that is conducive to the change you are seeking.

The Solution

Neuroscience and the biology of change dictate a fundamental principle: if you change, your life changes. And, by extension, nothing changes in our lives until we change. How do we manifest the change in ourselves that is congruent with the change we want in our lives? You practice flexing your muscles of presence and awareness.

It may be exercise, ice baths, meditation, holotropic breathwork, wim hof breathing, or something else; whichever practice works for you, it must be deliberate. It must include gratitude and intention, reflection and introspection, visualisation, and future planning.

I advocate for a daily combination of exercise, ice baths, and meditation. Meditation should include intention setting, gratitude, and visualisation. These practices will greatly enhance your mindful awareness and your ability to retrain your subconscious.

Key Principles of Change

Whichever practices you choose, there are two principles to keep front and centre:

(1) Meaning and Outcome: Understanding the ‘what’ and ‘why’ makes the ‘how’ easier by assigning meaning and achieving better outcomes. BUT THIS IS INEFFECTIVE UNLESS YOU ACHIEVE POINT 2.

(2) Repetition and Attention: This is the key to developing the neurocircuitry that enables and reflects your change. Suppose you understand the ‘what’, the ‘why’, and the ‘how’; you create the conditions to receive instruction internally and externally. You must then apply the new conditions, personalising them to align with your intention.

Through this process, you can align your behaviour with your attention, and your thoughts will then guide your actions. Initially, this process must be conscious, through awareness, but over time, it will become subconscious. Then you must guide your mind and body to work together to create the experience of change. And this will require speaking the language of the brain and the language of the body.

Experience is the language of the brain, and emotion is the language of the body. So, you must match your emotion to your experience. As this becomes habitual, and subconscious, your experience will then teach the body what the mind has already come to understand. This process can be seen as embodying the truth.

The aim is to remove the disconnect between the mind and the body and allow them to work together for change. This requires intention, understanding and repetition. Through this process, your subconscious mind will re-program and you will change.

Over time, and with practice, your body will begin to understand your intention better than your conscious mind—this is how it becomes innate knowledge and becomes who you are. This is the point at which you have not just changed your behaviours but also your being.

TLDR;

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate

Carl Jung
  • Meaning and Outcome: Understanding the ‘what’ and ‘why’ makes the ‘how’ easier by assigning meaning and achieving better outcomes.
  • Repetition and Attention: Key for developing the neuro-circuitry of the new you.
  • Instruction and Personalisation: Create conditions to receive, apply, and personalise instruction and intention.
  • Behaviour and Intention Alignment: Align behaviours with intentions, and actions with thoughts.
  • Mind-Body Connection: Integrate mind and body to facilitate the experience of change.
  • Experience and Emotion: Experience, especially with emotion, teaches the body chemically what the mind has understood.
  • Embodiment of Truth: This process leads to biological and neurochemical changes, becoming the desired you.
  • Conditioning Mind and Body: Condition the mind and body to work together for change.
  • Repetition: Set intention. Develop awareness. Change behaviours. Repeat these actions.
  • Subconscious Integration: When the body can perform the intention better than the conscious mind, it becomes innate knowledge and a subconscious program, forming part of one’s identity.

References

  1. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-27830-009 ↩︎
  2. https://www.rupahealth.com/post/the-neurobiology-of-stress-cortisol-and-beyond ↩︎
  3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2257874/ ↩︎
  4. https://www.nature.com/articles/1301574 ↩︎
  5. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272519057_Video_game_training_and_the_reward_system ↩︎
  6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00305-0 ↩︎
  7. https://academic.oup.com/abm/article/58/3/216/7596023?login=false ↩︎
  8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7946166 ↩︎

[NB. All images created using MidJourney]

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