There are 3 evolutionary areas of the human brain that have evolved to protect you. They have a significant impact on your perception of your life, on what you actually see, on what you feel, on your reactions and therefore how you deal with the situations that arise in your life on a day to day basis. They have the ability to physically exhaust you, especially in your attempts to introduce new information and establish new automatic behaviours. So once again knowledge is the potential power here, it is important to understand what these areas are, how they work and what they are doing for you. In your attempts to create new conditioning they will work for you and they will work against you, you must become aware of when to override these areas to establish the long term positive conditioning that you are looking for.

1. The Prefrontal Cortex

This is known as the brains 'holding area' its where new incoming information is stored and filtered, this area of the brain only has a limited amount of storage room and therefore any information that is not consciously focused on will be discarded, any information at all, positive or negative. Now this area of the brain is extremely energy intensive, it requires a lot of physical energy to operate, that means any new information and resulting habits or conditioning that you wish to integrate will need to be consciously held in this area for an extended period of time, and this requires energy, this will make you tired, this will drain you physically, mentally and emotionally. So here lies your first challenge, to hold the information required to become who it is that you want to become in this area with enough focus, with enough emotion, with enough intensity and for a long enough period of time so that it drops from the prefrontal cortex into the automatic response area of the brain, the basal ganglia. So far throughout your life this has been happening without your knowledge, so to bring this process to conscious attention will not be easy, it will require practice, it will require focus and it will require energy.

2. The Basal Ganglia

This area of the brain is invoked by routine or familiar activity, this is the area of the brain that allows you for example to drive a car and change gears without thinking about it. This area functions exceedingly well without conscious thought in any routine activity, which means any activity or pattern conducted repetitively to the point of becoming a habit will get pushed down into this area, the habit centre part of the brain. Again this will work for you or against you depending of what form of conditioning you have allowed to reside in this area. Whether good or bad it will now come into play automatically. The basal ganglia requires much less energy to function than does the working memory, partly because it seamlessly connects simple behaviours that have already been shaped and created through your past experiences and behaviour, it basically shifts among patterns of deeply held past thoughts and conditioning that has already been established. So by becoming the observer in your own life and how you react to certain situations that arise in your life will give you a great indication of what conditioning and patterns are currently held in this area of the brain as you must become aware of what is currently playing out in order to change any negative conditioning that resides there.

3. The Amygdala

This is an area of the brain that everyone will be familiar with, it’s the source of what is known as the ‘amygdala hijack’ or 'the fight or flight' response, this is the area of the brain that allows you to push to the back of your mind any uncomfortable fear or anger based emotions unless it directly threatens the survival of the creature. Now when this area kicks in, it is completely dominating it can push people to become highly emotional, impulsive and animal instincts take over. This is an evolutionary defence mechanism created to ‘keep the creature alive’. Therefore its job is to dominate and forcefully redirect the creature away from what it considers mortal danger. For example if you are afraid of heights ask yourself what would you be feeling while standing with your toes over the edge of a 30 story building, with a strong wind blowing at your back? Would you have physical control of your body at this point? Different people have different reactions to multiple situations, some are afraid of heights, some are afraid of spiders, some are afraid of clowns. However the end result is the same, to physically control the creature through overwhelming emotion and redirect it away from danger. ‘Keep the creature alive’.

Now what happens throughout our lives is that we often attach, through our flawed perception of our past experiences in our youth, an overwhelming fear or anger response to situations in our adult life. This will work against us and hold us back from growth and achievement. For example, again, overreacting to bullying as a child will definitely work against you if you are still playing out that conditioning in your adult working life. So what is needed here is self awareness, become the observer in your own life and begin to just watch how you react to certain situations that arise in your life. Begin to ask yourself, are you overreacting to some or any situations arising in your life? Is your reaction to whatever it is that has arisen practical and constructive or does it in any way initiate some form of self sabotage? Is this area of the brain automatically kicking in to protect you when it is no longer required? Honest self awareness will be the key here, and yes it’s a challenging one.

So why is change so hard?
Firstly trying to change any established long term condition or hardwired habit requires quite a lot of effort in the form of attention density, that is, the amount of depth, strength and time duration of attention that you are willing to commit to the creation of any new habit and resulting conditioning. However what this effort initially produces is a reaction that most people perceive as being physically and psychologically uncomfortable.

A good example of this is going to the gym, in that the strain and uncomfortable feeling created by the short term pain generally associated with muscle soreness and fatigue will actually result in the creation of strength, muscle growth and the cardio vascular efficiency associated with long term health and therefore long term pleasure. Speak to any fitness professional or ‘gym junky’ and they will tell you that once you have become accustomed to the short term pain, the resulting long term health, strength and clarity alters the bodies perception of that initial pain and literally turns pain into pleasure. They will tell you that they don’t even remember that initial pain anymore. This is nothing more than a conditioned response, a response that will actually alter with your perception. Once you attach more focus and more pleasure to the result that the short term pain will create, that short term pain will actually shift into pleasure. This is why people who repetitively work out refer to the training session as stress relieving and pleasurable. This is because the body and the mind have actually become so reconditioned by the long term pleasure created by that initial short term pain experience, that the brain now releases the positive, ‘feel good’ chemicals such as endorphins, dopamine and serotonin. Now obviously it did not start out that way but ‘sticking it out’ has altered the minds perception of that initial pain into pleasure by focusing more attention on the positive long term results than on the initial short term discomfort.

Now why is this so important to understand?
Because the only two predominant areas of emotion that shift people into action are;

So the use of the pain / pleasure principle as a tool can be a very powerful incentive to initiate behavioural change. Simply and repeatedly attach more pleasure to any new conditioning, even though in the early stages it may be exhausting, painful and feel like a lie. Continually tell yourself that it is a pleasurable experience, so basically lie to yourself and that is exactly what it will become, pleasure. Now after you have experienced this just once you will realise that this is basically how the mind creates your conditioning and therefore your resulting reality, whatever you focus on for more than 30 days with definiteness of purpose and enough focused emotion will create your new conditioning, so make sure its a new and constructive habit of your choosing rather than a random negative fear or anger response.

The question you now face is, how long and how hard are you willing to ‘stick it out’ until the original discomfort and effort of changing a negative psychological pattern or condition is overridden by the long term positive effects of changing that negative pattern into something new and constructive. The fact is the brain has no choice but to alter its structure, rewire and create the new pattern that you are focusing on. It simply does not matter what you have experienced throughout your life, what trials you have gone through, what abuse you have suffered or whatever it is that has created the current negative responses that are playing out throughout your life. The human brain is pliable, the human condition is growing and changing all the time in response to where you are putting your attention, if your are not happy with the current life you are living then take control of that change and direct it into whatever it is that you do want, begin to recondition yourself for success. The so called successful people are simply highly success-conditioned, that is the only difference.

However the reality is, and the first challenge you will face is,  like the majority of people you will feel an overwhelming desire to give up way to soon, to quit just before the new conditioning establishes itself as an automatic response. All that initial effort and focus becomes wasted because you simply haven’t ‘stuck it out’, to fall back into old habits is a natural thing, and it will happen, however do not except it.

Note: You will definitely fail in your attempts to change and grow, but as Mohammad Ali once said

“It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count its whether you can get back up”

You must continue to ‘get back up’ until the new patterns you are attempting to put into play become an automatic response. IT WILL HAPPEN. However there is simply no such thing as an overnight success, ask anyone that has become successful. The ‘overnight success’ is another media created myth. I know this is definitely not what you want to hear however the sooner you see through these media created myths the sooner you can move forward, as these unrealistic ideals are part of the conditioning that is holding you back.

Once a new condition has become automatic nothing more is required to keep it in play, it requires no effort, no energy and no attention as long as you do no override it with a counteractive negative condition. For example initially it takes a large amount of effort to train the physical body into top shape, that is, lean muscle mass, flexibility and low body fat. Once this condition has been achieved however, it actually takes minimal effort to keep that biological machine in top physical condition. It is exactly the same when training the mind. So it simply comes down to how much you want it, and how much time and effort you are prepared to put in. After personally competing at a national level in multiple sports, spending years in the martial arts arena as well as the gym I can honestly say, that in my personal experience, it takes far more energy to train the mind than it does to train the physical body, however I have also found that they are closely linked. Once you have dominated one it then becomes much easier to control the other. Unfortunately I’ve found that it also works in reverse, when you allow one to degrade it increases the effort required to control and direct the other.

The second reason why change is so hard relates to an evolutionary basic brain function. Neuroscientists have discovered that the human brain has an extraordinary capacity to detect ‘errors’. These are the perceived differences between expectation and reality. That is, the difference between what it is that you expect to see and what it is that you actually see. A basic example of this would be, if you are a highly organised and efficient person with a very structured, neat and organised home environment and you came home one day to find something out of place, something that you had not moved but is now not where it should be, this would trigger an error signal, this would trigger and emotional reaction and it would immediately draw your attention and your focus. This reaction is nothing more than the difference between what you expect to see, because you’ve seen it on a daily basis and what you actually see, something not where it should be, something out of place. Now these error signals exist in the paradigm of the mind and thought as well as throughout your daily physical experiences. Catching something out of the ‘corner of your eye’ for example is usually, not always, but usually an error signal, it’s the difference between what you are expecting to see and if something completely different occurs, it catches your eye, and it catches your attention.

This amazing product of evolution will actually create an emotional reaction and it will draw your visual attention, no matter how small the difference are, it will immediately draw your focus. What this means is, in your attempts to integrate new behaviours and conditioning, the brain will continually send out strong messages or error signals that something is simply not right, something is out of place something is not consistent with your past. These signals grab the individual attention and have the ability to actually overpower rational thought. This will happen every time you try to initiate a new form of conditioning, a new habit or a new pattern, simply due to the fact that it has a very specific job, and that is to keep you in the ‘comfort zone’, to keep you in the form of conditioning that has kept you safe and alive up until this point. Its job is to ‘keep the creature alive’ even if it’s a life that has not fulfilled you, even if it’s a life that has made you desperately unhappy, your personal satisfaction is not its concern, your survival is.

The accumulation of years of study and research has shown that there is no golden rule here. Opposed to what you’ve been told through these self help books and ‘5 day life altering’ seminars, there is no get rich quick scheme (legal ones anyway), there is no singular answer that will automatically fix you or anyone else for that matter. The research has been clear that our mind / brain relationship is so incredibly unique and individual to each person that it is completely useless to spend our time searching for the ‘one’ shortcut, the one seminar, the one book, the one key that will fix everyone, it simply does not exist. We have all been conditioned independently, and so uniquely that we must discover and take control of your own past conditioning, our current responses and personally create and take responsibility for our new lives.

Research has shown that the best way to go about creating lasting growth, the best way to go about facilitating change, the best way to create and impact the creation of new neural pathways is through cultivating moments of insight. Now we have all had them, they are those intense moments in our life that have occurred just after you have accumulated the last piece of any puzzle, that last bit of information that connects almost instantly and often overwhelmingly years of ideas or thoughts. Some people call them revelations, some a spiritual awakening, whatever you want to call them it is simply a common occurrence. We’ve all had them and will continue to have them. The beautiful thing about insight and revelations are that they seem to be associated with the a release of the brains ‘feel good’ chemistry, adrenaline, dopamine and endorphins which is the reason you always feel energised, clear, focused and centred.

One study has actually found sudden bursts of high frequency 40Hz oscillations (gamma rays) in the brain appearing just prior to moments of insights. Now what this finding suggests is that at the moment of an insight an intense and complex set on new neural pathway connections are being created. These connections have the potential ability to enhance our mental resources and overcome the brains resistance to change. To make this new connection into a habit however, given the brains limited working memory, we simply need to make a deliberate effort to hardwire that insight by paying repeated and deliberate attention to it. Focus and attention density are the only two things that will create a long term relationship with any newly created neural pathway, mental map or conditioning.

So in your efforts to grow and change an insight or revelation will be your first step. Now from my experience an insight does not need years of study and information accumulation to occur, given that we now know the human brain has no concept of time it is actually quite easy to trick the brain into complying. One scientific study after another has already proven that the ‘expectation for decreased pain will actually produce a reduction of perceived pain of up to 28.4%, now that rivals an analgesic does of morphine’ and has also been repeatedly demonstrated for years by the placebo effect.

We actually have the ability to trick the human brain into creating moments of revelation or insight through such things as self directed thought and certain forms of meditation.

Journey Therapy for example is a specific form of guided meditation that has the ability to do just that. Discovered by Brandon Bays it is now world wide and is currently having a massive impact on behavioural change in places such as South Africa, England, Australia and America. There are also countless reports of emotional and physical healing through this form of guided meditation, however please remember once the initial revelation or new set of connections has been created only repeated focus and attention density will allow those new connections to become stabilised and developed. You simply cannot escape the hard work that will be required. The fact that our expectations can play such a huge role in our actual perception has significant implications for growth and behavioural change. Self-knowledge will be your warrior here, and Brandon Bays’ Journey Therapy could be another weapon you could add to your arsenal.

For more information on Journey Therapy please refer to Brandon’s book The Journey: A Practical Guide to Healing Your Life and Setting Yourself Free

Unconscious conditioning is happening all the time, through what it is that you are seeing, reading, hearing and feeling, so begin to choose what it is that you see, what it is that you feel, what it is that you read and make sure that all the information that you are allowing to influence you has a constructive and empowering component to it, and that the information that you are allowing to influence you is leading you in the direction of your goals, in the direction of becoming the person that you choose, the person that will fulfil your unique potential. And in turn create the life that will make you happy. For example why read beauty magazines when they only encourage you to compare yourself to figments of imagination and will only make you feel ugly? This is not realistic, it’s not sensible. The human brain is collecting around 400,000 bits of information per second but we are only integrating 2000 so that means the mind is responding to incoming conditioning all the time without your conscious awareness; however that also means that multiple opportunities for taking charge of your reconditioning are always present.

What the Bleep Do We Know!? is a DVD based on what we currently know about quantum physics, reconditioning and the human experience and it will give you a fantastic visual representation on what is being discussed here. Each time you watch this movie you will gain more and more insight, something new will jump out, a deeper understanding will be revealed. The Secret is also another DVD produced to raise awareness of the power and potential of human thought, and is more of a simplistic version of the messages contained in What the Bleep, however it is still definitely worth the time required to watch, and does contain multiple moments of enlightening awareness.

So what does all this mean?
Its all comes down to identity, how do you see yourself? Who is it that you believe yourself to be?
To change your life you must create a new identity, that is, the person you wish to become.

BE... DO... HAVE...

To become the person you wish to BE. You must do the things that that person would DO. Then you will have the things that that person would HAVE

Individual thoughts and acts of the mind can become an intrinsic part of an individual’s identity. Who you are, how you perceive the world, and how your individual brain works.

The neuroscientist’s term for this is self-directed neuroplasticity.

Identity is created as a result of your thoughts. Your thoughts create your conditioning. By controlling & redirecting your conditioning. You automatically create your new identity. It will happen anyway so choose intelligently.

Easily said, easily written, certainly challenging to do, but incredibly empowering to achieve. And achievable it certainly is.

Again reading and re-reading and then reflecting on the information presented here will serve you far greater than skimming over it.
Make use of the links provided and begin to make the effort to come to your own conclusions.

The one constant that science has discovered so far concerning our lives and our individual conditioning is that we are all incredibly unique, we all learn, think and act differently, which is why having someone else hand you an answer is primarily useless, as you will not integrate it.

Insight, revelation, awareness have proven to be the tools that move us forward.

In the next section we will cover what in the past has been called maturity, and what is now labelled Emotional Intelligence .
These are the 4 sections and 20 subsections of your personality that have evolved to determine the quality of your current life.
The beauty of emotional intelligence is that all these sections are learnable, all are pliable and all are refinable.

Related articles:

The Science behind Behavioural Change - Part 1

Living the Mature Life