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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Give Up Choice; Get What You Really Want

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boston snowstorm

Being clear about what you really want and why you want it is essential if you want to bring about a behavioral change. The what and the why provide you with direction: your highly desirable outcome. But if you don’t feel a sense of urgency about creating that outcome, you’re likely to continue operating on the assumption that you can choose whether or not to do what you need to do to get there.

If you want to change the status quo, the outcome you’re after has to be so compelling that you’re willing to give up the freedom to not have it. I’ll give you a personal example.

Vitality is a highly desirable outcome for me. One thing that contributes significantly to my level of vitality is a combination of physical activities, such as walking, hiking, using a treadmill, and strength training. I generally enjoy doing those things as much as I enjoy the results of doing them. A couple of years ago, I had a much more regular schedule that allowed me to walk nearly every morning, hike a couple of times a month, and get in four strength training sessions a week at the gym. But that hasn’t been the case for the past year.

When my schedule changed, my level of physical activity declined and became hit-or-miss instead of regular. At the beginning of last summer, I decided to start walking for 25-35 minutes every day. That seemed like something I could reasonably commit to. Although it wasn’t ideal, it was a start. So from May 31st through today, I have walked or walked and used a treadmill every single day, no exceptions.

In September, I decided to increase my target to 45 minutes a day and have reached that most days. In December, I took a deeper look at how important vitality really is to me (VERY!) and realized that walking wasn’t enough. I get a better aerobic workout on a treadmill. In fact, I’d made a few attempts to get over to the gym to use the treadmill in the fall, but didn’t get far because I felt like I had a choice as to whether or not to do it. On December 19th, after an insanely busy two weeks, I decided to start using the treadmill three times a week, no exceptions. Since the best I’d managed during the  previous 12 months was three times in one month, I may have been overly optimistic.

But even though my schedule isn’t any more accommodating than it was before, I am now using the treadmill three times a week. The difference is that having decided to do it, I stopped giving myself a choice. I schedule the day and time I’m going to go to the gym. I may have to reschedule once in a while, but because I have no choice, I always get my three sessions in.

Going to the gym brought home to me how much I miss strength training and how wonderful I felt when I was doing it. I had a portable weight bench in the garage and a few sets of hand weights in a closet, and I realized that even if I couldn’t go to the gym to do it, I could do some upper body strength training at home. So on January 1st, I decided to include three 30-minute sessions of upper-body strength training each week, no exceptions.

Of course, I feel much better as a result of all of the increased physical activity, but maintaining this schedule is far from easy or comfortable. It’s winter now, and on the days I’m scheduled to walk outside for 45 minutes, the wind chill might be in the mid-20s, and snow might be blowing directly in my face. Winter, to put it mildly, is not my favorite season. I’ve been known to hike in the Sandia foothills when the temperature was in the mid-90s. If I could dress in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals all year, I would be ecstatic. But as I’m writing this, we’ve just had three brutally windy and cold days in a row, the coldest so far this winter. If I gave myself a choice as to whether or not to put on multiple layers of clothing and subject myself to the elements, I would never do it.

But having made the decision to invest in my vitality, I’m willing to tolerate (not always silently) the discomfort and occasional pain in the moment for the medium and long-term outcomes I’m after. And because I don’t have a choice in the matter, I don’t waste any time whatsoever debating whether or not to follow through or trying to talk myself in or out of doing what I have decided to do.

When the path ahead is clear, why wouldn’t you take the obvious next step?

By giving up the freedom to not have it, I get to have what I really want. And although it isn’t always easy, it is astonishingly simple.

Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts. To follow the thread, select the category Making Different Choices in the box under Explore.

Do You “Just” Need to Make Different Choices?

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choice doors

A comment I often hear from people who are dissatisfied with some aspect of their lives is that they just need to make different choices. On the one hand, it seems like a no-brainer, right? And at least it acknowledges we have a degree of responsibility for the situations we find ourselves in.

It also sounds relatively straightforward: if you want a different outcome, make a different choice. But since making a different choice is anything but simple or straightforward, this isn’t an effective strategy. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s ineffective doesn’t stop people from believing it’s true.

Having choices—or believing that we do—gives us the illusion of having freedom.

But the illusion of freedom is not the same as actual freedom.

Would you rather have something that really matters to you or would you rather have the freedom to not have it? If you equate choice with freedom, you’re likely to opt for holding onto the freedom to not have what you really want. This is an even more obviously ineffective strategy, but it’s a seductive one and our culture is deeply mired in it.

Let’s break it down. Imagine there’s something you want: a highly desirable outcome that really matters to you.

  • Would you rather have the highly desirable outcome that really matters to you?
  • Or would you rather have the option to not do what you need to do to create that outcome (in other words, the freedom to not have it)?

Why would anyone in their right mind “choose” to not do the things they need to do in order to achieve an outcome that is highly desirable to them? That would seem counterproductive at the very least.

You Are Certainly Not the Boss of Your Brain*

The unconscious part of your brain, which has no interest in your highly desirable outcome, is invested in maintaining the status quo. When you “choose” not to do whatever you need to do to achieve that outcome, you end up reinforcing the status quo instead of getting closer to what you want. In fact, no actual choice is involved in maintaining the status quo.

It takes no effort or awareness or intention on your part to continue doing what you’ve always done. The unconscious part of your brain can have you continue doing what you’ve been doing ad infinitum, while you preserve the fiction that you’re consciously choosing to continue doing those things.

That’s how you end up with the illusion of freedom rather than actual freedom. Actual freedom involves learning how to change the status quo, not giving in to it.

Certainly you have reasons and explanations for why you might “choose” to not do what you intended to do to help you achieve that highly desirable outcome. You didn’t have enough time. You were tired. Something came up that you had to respond to. You just didn’t feel like it. You really wanted to do whatever it was you ended up doing. You’ll make a different choice tomorrow or the next day.

No matter how many times you run through this type of scenario, chances are excellent that you’ll prefer to believe you are actually making choices, even if those choices are clearly not in your own best interest or are the opposite of what you intended to do.

And, counterintuitive as it may seem, believing you have a choice about taking a particular action that would disrupt the status quo decreases the odds you will take it.

When you give up the freedom to not have what you really want—when you allow yourself no choice in regard to taking that action—you begin to change your own status quo. That’s far more powerful, far more freeing, than simply giving in.

Why settle for the illusion of freedom when you can have the real thing?

*Michael Gazzaniga

Note: This is the first in a series of posts. To follow the thread, select the category Making Different Choices in the box in the sidebar under Explore.

Freedom from Choice

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broccoli

You always have a choice. At least that’s what many people believe. No matter what happens, you can choose how to respond. And if you want things to be different, all you have to do is make different choices.

It’s a highly appealing belief to hold, yet you may have found that making a different choice is often tantalizingly out of reach, even when you know exactly what you want to do differently. So what’s going on? If you don’t make a different choice, does that mean you really don’t want to? Does it mean you lack self-control or will power? Does it mean you’re trying to sabotage yourself?

If you believe that you could make a different choice but don’t, why don’t you?

When you fail to make a different choice, you’re forced to explain yourself—at least to yourself. The result is often the beginning of a vicious cycle of rationalization, excuse-making, or self-blame that can drag on for years or even decades. This is a waste of time and totally counterproductive to changing behavior.

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and move toward the details of the biology. —David Eagleman, Incognito

The truth is that you don’t always have a choice. In fact, you rarely have a choice. You keep doing the same things you’ve always done because that’s how your brain is wired. It conserves precious energy by turning as many behaviors as possible into routines and habits. Once those routines and habits are in place, they’re extremely difficult to disrupt. When faced with a familiar situation, you will most likely do what you’ve always done in that situation, even if you want to do something else.

Minute by minute, second by second, the unconscious part of your brain is absorbing and processing an unbelievable amount of data, all but a small fraction of which you’re not consciously aware of. So at the moment you’re faced with that familiar situation, your unconscious has picked up on signals, made connections, and initiated the usual response all before you can consciously consider doing something different. When it comes to routines and habits, consciousness is simply no match for the speed and anticipatory responses of the unconscious brain.

Letting Go of the Illusion

It’s hard to give up our illusions about choice. We want to keep our options open instead of locking ourselves in. We want to be spontaneous. And we prefer to believe we’re exercising conscious choice, no matter how ineffective or detrimental those choices may be. As a result, we often refuse to make a commitment, even to something we really want or that really matters to us.

We repeatedly put far more trust than is warranted in our conscious brain’s ability to override our unconscious brain’s programming. We’re convinced that next time we’ll do things differently.

The reality is that keeping our options open really means leaving the outcome to chance. Yes, there’s a slim possibility that when the moment comes we’ll make a different choice. But the odds are not on our side. The unconscious operates automatically and at a much faster speed than the conscious part of our brain.

When we blame our inability to effect change in our lives on a lack of self-control or will power, our only option is to work on developing those mental muscles. That can be done, to a limited extent, but the source of the problem is not the lack of self-control and will power but our reliance them.

The situation is not hopeless, however. We’re not entirely at the mercy of the unconscious part of our brain. We do have a say in the matter. We can learn how to use both parts of our brain to our advantage instead of letting the unconscious have its way all the time.

But that requires changing the way we think about choice.

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. After all, what is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate.

But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

Decide Now so You Won’t Have to Choose Later

Changing behavior requires that you do something different ahead of time instead of counting on doing something different in the moment. Determine how you want to respond in a familiar situation when you have some distance from it and can think clearly about it instead of when you’re in that situation. And then make a pre-commitment. A pre-commitment eliminates the need to make a choice in the moment because you’ve already decided what you’re going to do.

  1. Formulate a clear and specific intention.
  2. Come up with a way to keep your attention focused on your intention.
  3. Assume you won’t be perfect out of the gate. Your unconscious brain is stubborn and set in its ways. With perseverance, however, your desired response will become the automatic one.

By giving up your so-called freedom of choice, you greatly increase the likelihood you’ll do what you’ve decided you want to do in order to have the life you want to have.

You can have what really matters to you

Is Your Head Ready to Explode?

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Scene of the explosion of a ConSec scanner's head
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have a head on the verge of exploding if you’re trying to operate under these two incompatible assumptions.

  • You have free will, and you choose whatever you do or don’t do.

Our brains have been shown to be highly proficient reason-generating machines. It’s part of their hardwiring for survival. And we seem more than happy to go along for the ride without questioning the process or the result.

Here’s how it goes:

  • We turn something into a reason.
  • We act as if the reason has an independent existence.
  • We impute a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the reason we have created and whatever we do or don’t do.

Maybe we think we freely chose whatever we turned into a reason for a particular action or non-action. But if we have to have a reason in order to act or not act, the reason doesn’t really matter. We still can’t simply act. We still have no power. And ultimately, we still aren’t responsible.

There’s no point in arguing for free will all the while operating as if we live in a deterministic universe in which everything that happens is the result of something that happened before. The mental gymnastics required to maintain these opposing beliefs keep us stuck in the status quo, chasing our mental tails, and sometimes going to extreme measures to defend our lack of power and responsibility.

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Clarity

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Opening (Zentangle art by Joycelyn)
Opening (Zentangle art by Joycelyn)

After I finished clearing out my garage three weekends ago, the path ahead (my path, that is) suddenly became so much clearer.

The garage clearing was the culmination of a purging and cleaning process I started at the beginning of May. I went through every room and every closet or cupboard in my apartment, getting rid of things I thought I’d still be holding onto when I died, things I’d never, ever considered letting go of before. A few times I woke up in the middle of the night imagining the contents of a closet and thinking, “That can go, and that can go, and that can go.” The next day, all of it went. Into the garage.

I amassed so much stuff to give away it filled a quarter of my garage. I couldn’t park my car in there during the hottest month of the year. Animal Humane came to pick it all up in July, and I haven’t missed a thing. In fact, I keep finding more stuff to let go of. Now I keep a box in the garage for items I’m finished with. Once it’s filled, I drop it off at Animal Humane.

The whole thing started spontaneously one Monday when I glanced down the hall into my bedroom, noticed something, and asked myself why the heck I still had it. One thing led to another, momentum grew, and soon I was tackling areas I’d been avoiding for years. I even replaced all the shelf liner in the kitchen cabinets. I got rid of the contents of three two-drawer filing cabinets—and the cabinets. I tossed decades worth of personal journals, donated eight or nine bankers boxes of books, gave half a dozen flower pots to a neighbor, and found new homes for drawers full of art supplies that need to be used, not stored.

Just Do It!

It felt great to lighten the load. It also felt great to attend to all those nagging things, large or small, I’d been noticing several times a day (again, for years) that needed fixing or changing. I took care of all of them. I had a whiteboard in my office, and as soon as I thought of something or noticed it, I wrote it down. Had I been putting off making an appointment or checking something out? I put that up there, too. Sometimes I’d take care of something so quickly the ink from the dry erase marker was still wet when I erased it.

I had expected it would feel good to have accomplished so much. I had expected to feel a sense of satisfaction. What I didn’t expect was how much clarity getting rid of all this stuff would create in my life. I’d like to believe that if I’d known, I would have done it much sooner. But no one can see into the future. I don’t think I would have believed it if anyone had told me it would be like this.

Last winter, I came across this quote from Krishnamurti:

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

I wrote this post about it in February, but only now am I really getting it. Only now do I see that having all these messy, undone, or unfinished things taking up space in my head actually creates confusion and distortion. Suddenly, there are very few choices I need to make. I’m not having the usual mental debates about what to do or rationalizing why I’m doing or not doing something. The path ahead is clear. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or guaranteed. But it is clear. Clarity is a game-changer. It’s also a huge payoff to get for doing nothing more than taking care of business.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677