Trust Your Brain and Your Brain Will Trust You

The Little Engine thought he could, and he made it up the mountain. By force of sheer will, he overcame the challenges before him, and succeeded where before he had failed. 

TLE’s now retired, sitting on a sofa, watching TV. Next to him is a bowl of potato chips. He knows he shouldn’t eat them. A few are okay, but not the whole bowl. But there goes his hand, dipping and lifting the crispy treat to his mouth. “I can stop,” he says to himself. “I think I can!” And then he shoves the fistful in, and sighs as he flips channels on the TV.

We’ve all got bad habits. And we’ve all got routines and motions we go through, without even thinking about it. How do we break out of these ruts, and become the people we know we want to be? The key is confidence. It really is all about believing in and trusting yourself.

Those new-agers were right, but science can back-up some of the claims, by pointing to key areas in the brain. Consider self-control, which is occurs in the frontal part of your brain. This is an area with high energy demands, and you can literally run out of fuel necessary to control yourself (scientists call this “ego depletion”). Now consider the deeper, emotional part of your brain, the ones that want what they want NOW. You’re fighting temptation all day to the point you’re literally tired of fighting, and since the reward for staying motivated is less insistent than the reward for giving in now, you give in.

You run out of that very will that kept TLE chugging up the mountain.

Trusting yourself can replace that emotional want with a different emotion all together. This is reminiscent of the way the brain chooses to give control to the heuristics that you use for routines, and a more conscious executive decision making process. Your brain will choose the method that has the most confidence—it’s easier to drive a car to work, letting your brain handle the lefts and rights while you mental prepare the big speech for your boss. On the other hand, you wouldn’t expect to automatically drive through a city you’ve never been in before, or you’ll end up hopelessly lost.

So, if you’re confident in your decision, then making that decision will be its own reward. Instead of your frontal brain fighting against the pull of your emotions, you harness those emotions to actually push yourself up that hill.

The Little Engine that could should picture himself as a happier engine, sitting in a place where there are no chips. By choosing to concentrate on a positive outcome to his decisions, he can trust himself to execute those proper decisions. Then he can pick up the bowl, take it into the kitchen, and go back to this TV, with the bowl now out of sight.

References:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addicted-brains/201311/the-key-quitting-self-trust-part-1
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/11/12/should-habits-or-goals-direct-your-life-it-depends-2/
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2013/april-13/why-wait-the-science-behind-procrastination.html