Stuck in a Rut: How Brain Pathways Shape Our Lives—and How to Redirect Them

I read a LOT of fantasy novels. I mean like 15-20 a year or more. These books are generally set in a medieval-style setting. In such a setting, a common mode of transportation would be a horse-drawn wagon, or maybe a carriage. Naturally, the roads these wagons traverse are dirt. In the more frequently traveled roads, the wagons dig ruts on the surface. This is especially true after a season with much rain.

Driving a wagon on a road with deep ruts means picking a rut and driving in it. Once in such a rut, you are pretty much stuck. You’re going where that rut goes. Sure, if you need to take a turn that the ruts don’t take, you can, but this change in direction will take effort as your horse works to put the weight of the wagon and all its contents and passengers up out of the rut.

Traveling through the ruts is easy. Changing direction to go to a place the ruts are going, takes work.

Ruts in Our Brain

The pathways in our brains are like roads that our thoughts travel along. For things that we think about often, our brain creates ruts, neuropathways, to get us to those thoughts more quickly. This is why something that you had never heard of as a nursing student becomes something you can bring up without even thinking about it later in your career. This is why going over ACLS algorithms repeatedly, or working through scenarios and mock codes helps us not have to think about what to do next when the time comes.

Ruts can be good

When our son was about 18 months old, he and I went to have lunch with his mother. She was breaking up pieces of a hamburger for him to eat. Things were going great, till they weren’t.

MY SON WAS CHOKING!!

My wife screamed my name, picked up our son, and handed him to me. Without even thinking, I flipped him over and did the sort of back blows they teach in life-saving classes. I had never done this on a child before, but I had practiced it so many times that my brain had created ruts that quickly took me to what I needed to do. After a few blows our son coughed up the meat. We quickly asked for our check and left. Lunch was over, but our son was ok. He now has a wife and a son of his own.

In another instance, we were having Christmas dinner at my in-laws’ house when my mother-in-law started choking. Again my wife screamed my name. I jumped up and, again, did what I had been trained to do. After a couple of abdominal thrusts, she coughed up the food she was choking on. I had never done this either, but the ruts that my training had built in my brain took me to the place I needed to go to save my mother-in-law’s life… not sure if that was a good or bad thing. (Totally kidding, my mother-in-law is great and I’m very glad that she’s still here.)

Ruts can be bad

In the above instances, the ruts in my brain were good. However, that is not always the case.

Some years ago I experienced what I was convinced at the time was a nervous breakdown. I talk about this in the Mental Health chapter of my book, The Restored Nurse. Or you can read it HERE. Through that experience, my brain developed some new ruts. When I woke up the next morning, I was afraid of things that I had never been afraid of before. I was afraid to fly. No biggy, lots of people are. But, I had flown on multiple occasions before this and loved it. I was afraid to ride in elevators. Again, this is something that lots of people are afraid of, but I had never been. I was afraid to start IVs. I had been a nurse for close to 15 years and had started hundreds of IVs. Not only had I started hundreds, I was good at it, but the things I had experienced that night made me afraid to do something that had become so familiar to me.

This experience created ruts in my brain that ran straight from flying, elevators, and IVs to FEAR! I mean I couldn’t even take the elevator down one level that next morning, even though I had ridden on that same elevator hundreds of times before this. Unlike the life-saving ruts I spoke of above, these ruts definitely were not helping me or anyone else.

The ruts in your brain

In addition to the ruts I’ve mentioned already, many of us have ruts in our brains that steer our lives in directions we don’t want to go. Perhaps you have a rut that leads you to overeat when you’re stressed, sad, or even happy. Maybe you have a rut that leads you to spend money you don’t have or at least money that you shouldn’t be spending. I don’t care what the internet says, “shopping therapy” can be a really bad thing.

These ruts in my fantasy novels, steer the wagons where the ruts want to go, with no care for where the wagon or its driver want to go. Sometimes the ruts in our brains are the same way. The good news for the characters in my books is that they are not stuck in the ruts. They can pull out of them and go in a direction other than where the ruts are going. We can do the same thing. We don’t have to be slaves to the ruts in our brains. But, just like in the books I read, getting out of these ruts requires two things: intentionality and work.

Where are the ruts in your brain taking you that you don’t to go?

You can join the conversation on my TikTok or leave a comment below. If you’d prefer to keep your ruts private, shoot me an email. I’d love to talk about it.