The Unknown Success Secret Is Forming New Behaviors and Breaking Old Patterns
To form new habits, you must lay the foundation for new neurological highways to be built. Learn more about building that foundation.
By Ben Angel •
The following excerpt is from Ben Angel's book Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound
To form new habits, we must lay the foundation for new neurological highways to be built, ensuring they're well-established and well-maintained. These new highways help you close the gap between who you are and who you need to become to reach your goals.
The more you frequent these new paths, the easier they are to travel, until they unconsciously lead you to success. Once they're embedded in your memory and experiences, your need for willpower to force change diminishes and change becomes easy. Attempting to use willpower to force yourself to change can result in negative neural pathways being built, to the point where your brain views your goals as a threat because it requires too much energy to process the unknown factors surrounding it. This could trigger your fight/flight response because the goal is located outside your comfort zone and you end up "snapping back" into your old self. Because it's triggered while the mind is in fight/flight mode, this behavior becomes unconscious and can sabotage your success beneath the surface.
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To change our behavior and ensure we reach our goals, we must make a conscious choice. This choice should occur while we're in the logical/rational mindset. After we've traversed this road repeatedly, it then becomes a "positive unconscious behavior" that naturally leads to success.
When we first attempt to travel down a new highway, it can feel incredibly uncomfortable. The unknown requires copious amounts of mental energy to process. Although going back to the old pattern could negatively impact your ability to reach your goal, it's still easier for your brain than learning something new. Furthermore, our tendency to repeat negative behaviors amplifies when we hit decision fatigue and our brain puts us into self-preservation mode.
Our objective is to demolish these old highways and build new ones using a strategic and long-lasting approach that works without turning on fight/flight. So let's look at how traumatic life experiences can shape our behavior decades after the events have been forgotten. While these events may not seem traumatic to others, perception is personal, and your response to a situation deserves respect. Fear isn't always rational -- unless you're staring down the face of a Category 5 hurricane.
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1. When you experience a traumatic event, your fight/flight response is triggered.
This creates new neurological pathways that apply meaning to this event: fear, sadness, anxiety, grief, or anger. Your emotions are amplified in this primal state as your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, increasing the likelihood of it being committed to your long-term memory, both consciously and subconsciously. This reaction is meant to keep you safe and on high alert to future life/death situations despite the real/perceived danger having passed.
2. If similar events occur in the future that remind you of this experience (through sight, sound, smell, taste or touch), your brain defaults to those old neurological pathways and responds based on your previous experiences.
The past event is its reference point for future ones. Because this highway has been traveled repeatedly before, it's easy for your brain to default to it. In essence, you may be reacting to the old event out of habit, not the current one out of fear.
This physiological programming shapes the way we behave in every aspect of our lives, even if we attempt to convince ourselves it doesn't. It's like playing the same old album on repeat. It becomes comfortable. It reinforces who we believe ourselves to be, despite being in conflict with who we need to become to reach our goals. Hence, an internal battle for one's self continues until we select a new soundtrack for our life. When we short-circuit these neurological pathways and form new ones, we can quickly dismantle our fears and phobias. Change becomes easy, freeing us from our self-imposed limitations and allowing us to transform into the person we know we can become.
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It's often only in hindsight that we're aware of how our behavior has been impacted by this change. When you're in a mental state of fight/flight, you see everything through an emotional, fear-filled lens. Your emotions become amplified, and sometimes uncontrollable. In this state, others may tell you to "calm down and breathe deeply." This can be completely ineffectual because your logical mind is not in control. You may sometimes be able to talk yourself out of it, or a pleasant distraction may interrupt the pattern.
But other times, your pattern may need to run until the adrenaline is released. The more often we allow stress to activate our fight/flight response, the harder it can be to rationalize fears we may have about stepping out of our comfort zones. If your goal engages your fight/flight response because it makes you feel too uncomfortable, your brain may come to view it as a real life-or-death situation. If this happens, you'll forever be caught in a tug of war between who you are and who you want to become.
There's a constant battle between your primal brain's need to keep you safe and your spiritual side's need for you to shine. There's no more painful way to live than fighting against your own primal instincts. Repeatedly experiencing fight/flight can manifest all types of unusual behavior that can sabotage your success, including:
- Avoidance behavior: Putting off what you need to get done, including overworking, so you don't have to deal with a particular situation. Spending countless hours scrolling through social media or watching TV.
- Changes in mood: Becoming angry or moody without realizing why and lashing out at others in an uncharacteristic way.
- Increased anxiety: This includes everything from racing heartbeat, fidgeting, and pacing to withdrawing from others and an inability to focus, all to keep yourself distracted from what's truly at play.
- Identity shift: You switch into a different mode and begin to think you're the kind of person who just doesn't reach their goals or ever get what they want.
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