Wired to Resist: The Brain-Science of Why Change Fails

I am delighted to announce the publication of my book, Wired to Resist: The Brain Science of Why Changes Fails and a New Model for Driving Success.

Every year failed change costs billions of dollars around the world. We are biologically wired to resist change: it’s the key to our survival and the obstacle that often gets in the way of us fulfilling our potential. Wired to Resist provides a new understanding of our biology and why change so often fails, despite our best plans.

In this book, I synthesize the latest scientific studies to create a new understanding of why people resist change, why change fatigue is so prevalent, and how skilled leaders and managers can guide successful change. Learn how you can use the groundbreaking Change Journey Model to overcome our natural resistance and bring out the best in people and organizations.

There are four brain structures that play a role in how we experience and move through change. Below, I have shared one chapter of my book on one of them, the habenula. Click here to learn more about the book.

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Chapter 11 Habenula: Our Failure-Avoidance Center

Only recently has imaging technology allowed scientists to truly see and study the habenula, which is located deep in the center of our brain, near the thalamus. The habenula is responsible for decision-making and actions. It does this by creating chemical guardrails that moderate our behavior.

Our brain naturally releases dopamine and serotonin, the “feel good” chemicals, when we do something right. This is part of the brain’s reward system. You probably feel it when you accomplish a task or receive praise for a job well done. However, when we make a poor choice that does not lead to a reward, the habenula restricts the flow of those chemicals, cutting off the drip so to speak, making us feel bad.

The habenula’s role is quite important to the survival of our species. In our hunter-gatherer days, it would help us repeat good choices like going back to the trail that led to a food source (reward), and making us uncomfortable about the trail that didn’t have food. It’s almost like a chemical game of “warmer/colder” or the reins on a horse, guiding us toward and away from good choices.

In our modern world, it still helps us repeat successful behaviors like returning to a restaurant where we had a good meal or approaching a work project in a similar way to a previous one that turned out well.

Scientists have also discovered that the habenula is hyperactive in people with severe depression, which over-restricts serotonin and dopamine so that they feel bad all the time. In addition, the habenula plays a crucial role in regulating sleep patterns, including rapid eye movement (REM) and circadian rhythms.

But the habenula does more than help us repeat behaviors that will bring rewards. It also helps us avoid punishment. According to Dr. Okihide Hikosaka, at the National Institutes of Health Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, “Failing to obtain a reward is disappointing and disheartening, but to be punished may be worse.” Studies have shown that the habenula is also very active when we approach a task where we have received a punishment. In fact, it suppresses not only our motivation but also our physical body movements. In other words, we don’t want to do the behavior, but it’s more difficult to make our body do the behavior as well. Talk about a double whammy! You can’t get excited to do it but even if you managed to psych yourself up, your body won’t get on board. If you ever find yourself thinking, I just can’t seem to make myself do it, you’re probably caught in this cycle.

This whole process can be exacerbated by stress. When a person is under sustained, uncontrollable stress, the body responds by inducing various immune responses such as increasing inflammatory chemicals. The body is essentially treating the stress as a physical threat and responding like it would to bacteria or a virus, like the flu, including suppressing motivation and motor movements. In other words, you feel tired all the time and have little energy or desire to get things done.

When we’re physically sick, this response helps us to get better. It essentially forces us to rest, saving our energy so our immune system can overcome the source of the illness and return us to health. But in situations of sustained stress, it creates depression and lethargy that can go on and on.

When stress and the habenula’s natural function to avoid failure come together, you can unintentionally create “learned helplessness,” a concept first identified by psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, who went on to found the Positive Psychology movement. He had been conducting experiments with dogs that were being classically conditioned by receiving a mild shock, a form of punishment, when they heard a bell. Once that conditioning was in place, he put the dogs in a room where they had freedom to move away from the source of the shock. But guess what happened? They lay down and gave up.

Seligman’s research, and many subsequent studies, have shown that if we have enough negative experiences we become conditioned to expect failure and we just give up and stop trying—and here is the most important part—even when things have changed! In other words, we reach a point where we just can’t motivate ourselves emotionally or physically to try anymore.

Many psychologists believe that learned helplessness is at play in all kinds of situations: people who cannot leave an abusive situation, students who no longer try to succeed in a subject like math, people with health problems who continue to make the same unhealthy choices. In the work setting, learned helplessness can affect people and teams. If conditions have been bad enough for long enough, change won’t necessarily overcome the learned helplessness. I have seen numerous situations where a solution has been implemented, like a poor leader is replaced or more resources are provided, and the people involved don’t shift to a healthier state. Clearly, this can be very confusing to leaders.

The habenula’s function around failure can also be seen in a very common workplace process: the performance review. Dr. Markus Ullsperger and Dr. Yves von Cramon at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences used MRI machines to view brain activity as people received feedback about their performance. When people were given negative feedback, a form of punishment, their habenulas were highly activated, creating another feel-bad experience.

No wonder employees and managers alike have come to dread the annual review process. The very process that is supposed to help people improve their performance becomes fraught with negative feelings. Performance reviews are known to kick off the amygdala’s fear response as well. Oh, the irony.

Failure and Change

Understandably, the habenula is going to activate during change initiatives because change creates so many opportunities to fail. Think about all the potential “failures” for employees:

• Missing a milestone or deadline of the change plan
• Misreading new social dynamics in a way that affects a relationship
• Being tired and making mistakes in everyday tasks
• Having an emotional reaction that bothers others
• Not developing the new habits/behaviors fast enough
• Losing a job due to redundancy or poor performance

For the leaders and managers, the list includes those above as well as these additional opportunities for failure:

• Designing an ineffective change
• Miscalculating the change’s costs or benefits
• Designing an ineffective change plan
• Undercommunicating or miscommunicating the change plan
• Miscalculating followers’ change bandwidth
• Launching too many changes simultaneously or in succession
• Not allowing sufficient time for people to move through the change plan and the change curve
• Not preparing for the emotions of the change curve
• Not designing the right behaviors to support the change
• Not providing training that develops the right habits
• Not offering compelling rewards to motivate new behaviors and habits

Change brings opportunities to fail, and when we do, our brains and our bodies become more and more resistant to embracing future changes. I think it’s likely that many of those initial negative emotions on the change curve are remnants of past failure.

Failure as an adult can also trigger some of our most painful memories of childhood failure and shame. As Dr. Brené Brown, an internationally recognized scholar on the effects of shame describes in her book Daring Greatly, “childhood experiences of shame change who we are, how we think about ourselves, and our sense of self-worth.” Most often, children are shamed by parents and teachers when they make mistakes at home and at school.

Sadly, shaming doesn’t stop when we grow up. I have seen managers attempt to “motivate” their teams by publicly shaming employees. And coworkers may use shaming as a defensive technique when their amygdala is activated. Dr. Brown’s research goes on to show the profound and negative impacts of shaming in the workplace and how it harms creativity, innovation, collaboration, and productivity. If failure is combined with shame, the negative feelings will completely suppress both the motivation and willingness to try again.

I believe our previous lack of understanding about the habenula has contributed to the high failure rate of change initiatives.

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