How Your Brain Can Sabotage You

January 25, 2010

Interview with Kelly Traver M.D., author of the book The Program: The Brain-Smart Approach to the Healthiest You: The Life-Changing 12-Week Method

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Mike Carruthers:
If you made a New Year’s resolution a few weeks back you may be finding it difficult to stick with.

Kelly Traver M.D.:
And the reason for that is that your whole body and brain is really based on this homeostasis principle - which is to keep everything the same.
 

Dr. Kelly Traver, author of the book The Program... 

In a sense your brain doesn’t really get that what you’re doing today may hurt you tomorrow. It just says, “Look, I got you here you’re alive – keep doing what you’re doing because it’s working”. And so it really tries to keep us wherever we are right now.

So it’s not so much a lack of willpower it’s more of a fight between you and your brain.

The center of your brain is called the amygdala. There’s a little spot where it activates the stress response if you try to make major changes all at once. And so we get all excited about making some big change but we try to do it too fast. When we do that the amygdala fires, sets up the stress response and a couple days later you decide that you really didn’t really want to do it that bad anyway.

But you can trick your brain, says Dr. Traver.

The amygdala doesn’t fire if you do very small little changes (that your brain almost doesn’t notice) over and over and keep adding to it in a very small way. Then your brain doesn’t give you that big push back. And so you ultimately can achieve the goal you wanted to achieve but you’re just going to need to do it in those very small step-wise ways.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here