Repetition is a Double-Edged Sword

(click for podcast) (7:35 min.)

The kind of improvements and developments we seek in our bodies have many parallels in how we achieve them in our brains. They both require many of the same kind of efforts and the same kind of process. Of course as they’re inextricably integrated, what we do in one area will affect the other.

Likewise, what we don’t do in one will affect the other. I chose repetition as a topic because it’s basically low-hanging fruit. This single area accounts for our success or failure more often than not, and most of the time it’s subconscious or unconscious. That right there is a huge reason to start paying attention to it. You certainly don’t want to be driving while asleep at the wheel.

Without getting too neuroscience-y, we do want to highlight the mechanism behind this so we can get a grip on it. Our brains use a huge amount of our body’s energy stores, and as virtually everything in nature tends to conserve energy, our brains follow this rule as well.

You’ve probably heard the expression “neurons that fire together wire together.” Rather than recreating neural pathways from scratch every time we do something, if it’s something that we repeat, the brain saves energy by pre-wiring that pathway. It’s a bit more complex than that, but to simplify, it’s a lot like trailblazing. If you hike a specific route over and over, you’ll trample down the underbrush until it becomes a path. Now you have that path to follow more easily, as you no longer have to trample down the underbrush. This path is now what we’d call the Path of Least Resistance. Foot traffic can do the same thing to a carpet in an office or living space. To exaggerate this a little, if you rolled a ball, it would follow that Path of Least Resistance (once again, conserving energy.)

A Dopey Helper: To help this process along, one particular neurotransmitter is very involved. When we set out to do something and we do it, our brain rewards us with a nice little hit of Dopamine. We feel better – for a moment. This moment doesn’t last as it exhausts neurons, and will require another action (or repetition) to engage other neurons, who will then get exhausted as well, and the cycle begins. This exhaustion is behind the drive to repeat whatever just got us the Dopamine. This is the same mechanism that drives addictive behavior. Dopamine doesn’t care what you did; just that you did it. Personally I’ve always found it ironic that the first syllable is “dope.”

So you can see the double-edged sword here. If we repeat habits that don’t serve us, they become more and more wired in, and to save resources our brains may relegate them to our sub-consciousness; to not take up thinking resources. A huge number of scripts and narratives live there, and untying those is a lot of what I work on with clients. If we repeat habits that do serve us, the same process takes place, and we don’t need to spend a lot of conscious energy on them. We just get progress and Dopamine.

Nature Abhors a Void: This is where the real workout takes place. You may have heard this phrase, attributed to Aristotle, and for the most part nature does abhor a void. This means that just stopping a habit that doesn’t serve you is going to be very difficult. It may not be serving you, but it is serving a purpose. It’s the mechanism that gets you that Dopamine hit, even if it’s literally doing damage to you (eg. smoking.)

This means that we need to figure out what the best possible replacement habit would be in advance. I’ve found that designing a habit that slightly replicates or shares some facet of the old habit makes it easier to do the shift. This is using that same conservation of energy concept again. Sorry to use a sports metaphor, but if you’ve ever watched football, you’ve seen that it’s much easier to push someone sideways out of bounds than to hit them head on, trying to stop them.

Somatic Awareness: One of the most powerful tools I’ve found in helping clients do this shift from habits that don’t serve to ones that do, is first recognizing that you’re about to do the negative habit. That can be tricky in itself, but many times we’ll get a physical cue before we head down the old path. This is a great red flag to get our attention. Then we can implement the new replacement habit in the moment. And this is where repetition comes back into play. By not following the old habit, and following the new one over and over again, we wear new grooves in the carpet. The new habit gives us our Dopamine now. We get a double benefit.

Repetition is the key. Doing one push-up or doing push-ups just one day isn’t going to get you the results you want. By repeating this workload, your body sends resources to enable you to succeed. You get stronger.

Our brain will do the same thing. It will send resources to the new habit, you’ll get stronger there, and the old one will atrophy. This concept of rewiring habits isn’t limited to physical actions. We can rewire how we habitually think about things or feel about things, re-examining them with new perspectives. We can replace habitual beliefs and narratives that hold us back with new ones that serve us and others.