M4 : Lesson 6: Why change is hard
Transcript
Module 4 less than 6. Why change is hard? Cellular addiction to the old biochemistry? Unconscious resistance to change. We are wired to stay the same.
Our ego identity feels safest in familiar patterns. And our limbic system prefers similar patterns. And as humans, we typically need a lot of motivation to change. It is expected that you might resist or avoid doing your brain retraining. You will find a 1,000,000 distractions and reasons why you cannot do this.
And for some of you, I expect your brain to feel that these practices might not be safe or might cause your body symptoms to get worse, or you might have some ebbs and flows in how it responds to the shift in biochemistry. And for some eye expect that you may have increased anxiety or sympathetic dominant responses as you attempt to visualize good things when you’ve been used to being stuck in survival. And the deal is this, you have got to trust in the big picture and understand the science behind doing these practices. This will help motivate you to get through the moments of resistance when it feels counterintuitive to do this process. When you know that you are truly better, often safer, by choosing to elevate your emotional state and sending calming messages to your body, even when you don’t feel well, you will over time rewire your brain to self regulate even if there are bumps along the way.
And I’m speaking of this to normalize resistance to change and the resistance to doing your brain retraining, so you’re less likely to buy into your reasons that you don’t feel like doing it. Remember, our core ego identity is to resist change, and it feels threatened by it. And it might seem crazy that there’s often an unconscious comfort with the familiar, even if it’s sickness and pain and loneliness and limiting at least your brain knows what life is gonna be like today. Well, when we start to shift our personal reality to have new energy, the capacity to get out and about, create new relationships, or get back to work, this can feel really scary to parts of us. We can sometimes experience subconscious resistance and protection patterns that might feel like self sabotage.
This subconscious resistance can be really overt, like feeling tremendous anxiety about doing your brain retraining and regulation practices or like calming down is dangerous because you might mistakenly think you’re okay, and then you’ll get even sicker. Or another common one is that part of you might think you don’t deserve to be well until you improve yourself or fix your mistakes of your past. That was a big one for me. And another one is to fear that you don’t get any help or support anymore if you heal or that people will think you were making it all up if all of a sudden you improve with brain retraining. Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?
Well, the more subtle subconscious resistance can look like distraction or engaging in dopamine producing activities like social media scrolling or being too busy to commit to your practice or just simply not feeling like it. It’s important to become aware of your resistance In fact, it’s helpful in part a of ABC to become aware of all the ways you don’t wanna do your brain retraining. This helps you to see why you’re choosing to do brain retraining instead. Next, I want to speak to cellular addiction to the old biochemistry. In addition to the emotional allegiance of what is familiar, we have cellular chemical allegiance to what is familiar.
What I’m saying is we have addictions in our biochemistry. We can develop a dependency on how levels of stress hormones if our cells have been bathing in stress chemistry over time. When we attempt to shift this internal chemistry, it can be experienced quite literally like a withdrawal, like weaning off a drug. The process of change can be rocky at times, and it’s and to have self compassion and patience for yourself and your body as it adapts to new habits and biochemical changes running through your body. This is where I find participation in the community is so helpful to see that you are not alone and that the bumpy ride you might be experiencing is totally normal.
Up next is lesson 7. How to deal with triggers.