YOUR BRAIN is always trying to solve the same problem: what will you do next? It really, really wants to solve that problem because taking action is what it’s all about. It doesn’t want to take just any action, although the actions it takes might seem arbitrary or mysterious or at least contrary to the actions YOU would like it to take.
System 1 (the unconscious part of the brain that runs you) is what I refer to as YOUR BRAIN. System 2 (the conscious part of the brain you identify with) is what I refer to as YOU. YOUR BRAIN is not intellectually inclined; nor is it a long-term, goal-oriented, analytical, or reflective thinker. But it can definitely think on its feet, which is what it evolved to do. It’s fast and efficient.
The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. —John Medina, Brain Rules
Since YOUR BRAIN is focused on survival, when it’s trying to solve the problem of what to do next, it looks to your past experience: what have you done in the same—or a similar—situation. Obviously, you survived taking the action you took then, and that’s a good enough endorsement for YOUR BRAIN.
Little hits of dopamine supplied within YOUR BRAIN’s reward system spur your brain on to keep solving this same problem of what to do next over and over and over again. So speed is also a factor. The quicker YOUR BRAIN can come up with an answer, the quicker it gets its reward.
Remember that in the moment, YOU have less than two-tenths of a second to veto YOUR BRAIN’s impulse. Given that YOUR BRAIN finds solving the problem of what to do next rewarding in and of itself, if it already has an answer based on what you have done before, it has absolutely no investment in considering alternatives. That would only delay delivery of the reward!
This is what you’re up against if you want to change your behavior: a fast and efficient system operating outside of your awareness that assesses situations before you’re even know you’re in them, determines the action you’re going to take now based on the action you took in the past, and gets rewarded not for astuteness or for pleasing YOU but for economy of mental/neural processing.
What’s Normal for You
Whatever you have done before is what you are extremely likely to do again. The best way to surmount the situation is to work with it, not against it. This three-step method for doing so falls into the category of simple but not easy:
A. Identify what you want to change.
B. Determine your desired outcome.
C. Employ the appropriate contrivance (tool) to get you from A to B.
Since YOUR BRAIN is already getting rewarded each time it does what you don’t want it to do, you need to reward it each time it does what you do want it to do. Rewarding yourself for good behavior may seem contrived—meaning unnatural, awkward, or forced—to YOU. But it’s the language YOUR BRAIN understands.