There’s a lot of dumb advice in the world, and it seems like a good proportion of it relates to aspects of change - changing our behaviour and habits; our mindset; our health etc. Of course there’s lots of great advice too, and in my opinion, the way to tell the difference - the dumb advice treats change as simply an information problem, whilst the great advice acknowledges it as a transformation problem. Because let’s face it, if change were as simple as following ‘the five steps to…’ then we’d all be successful, rich, sculpted, happy. You name it, whatever change we wanted would simply be a google search (or chatgpt query) away. But I think, deep down, we all know that’s rarely true. Yet, in our continuous search for quick fixes we lose sight of that. We expect change to be rapid and progress to be linear; then, when life fails to live up to those false ideals, we go in search of the next book, the next diet, the next person. But there’s just no getting around the fact that change takes time, patience, and a healthy dose of persistence.

And there is good reason for that. The saying old habits die hard is not just proverbial wisdom, but a statement of scientific accuracy as it relates to what’s going on in our brains. At a neurological level, our brain structure changes in response to stimulus, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. So the more we do something, the more we’re etching a habit into the neural structure of our brain, which in turn means we do the thing more often, and we end up in a mutually reinforcing pattern. It’s like sledding down a hill after fresh snow. The first time you do it you might follow any path. The second time, you might fall naturally into the grooves of the first run. By the time you’ve been down the hill ten times you’ve probably worn grooves that are hard to get out of, even if you tried. You seem destined to sled the same route forever more.

In the context of things we might be trying to change e.g. a behavioural pattern, an emotional response, or a way of thinking - we may have been sledding down the same hill for decades. The grooves are so well worn that following their path seems inevitable. And whilst our brains will change with new stimulus, it’s typically not a rapid process - we don’t often get the heavy mental snowfall that would fill the grooves and allow us to start again. For the most part the change requires a persistent process of re-patterning with many attempts and many failures needed in order to forge a new groove.

Now there are exceptions of course. Sometimes a dramatic, life-changing experience can be a catalyst for rapid change; and there’s an increasing body of evidence around the role that psychedelics can play in rewiring the brain. But as of yet, science and society haven’t really worked out how best to harness this information in ways that are simultaneously impactful and legal. So no promise of quick fixes just yet.

And all of the above assumes a level of conscious change i.e. things we’re aware of and deliberate about. But the best estimates from the world of neuroscience suggest that we’re conscious of only about 5% of our cognitive activity. So much of what is happening and how we’re responding is occurring beneath the surface of our conscious experience - in what psychologist Daniel Kahneman might call system 1, or psychiatrist Carl Jung would call the shadow. This puts the concept of change into an even more complex light - I mean how can we change what we’re not even aware of?

‘Shadow work’ is a term you might hear to describe an array of different practices designed to shine a light into these dark corners of our unconscious - ultimately with the aim of getting to know ourselves better. Jung saw the shadow as being primarily made up of the rejected or repressed parts of ourselves, kinda like the mental closet in which the skeletons are hidden. There are lots of different techniques to bring the skeletons out into the open - I personally have the most direct experience with Internal Family Systems (IFS), also sometimes known as ‘parts work’ - through which you get into an internal dialogue of sorts with the different parts of yourself; and as with more conscious aspects of change, it too is complex and takes time.

So I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from making positive change. As previously discussed, growth is our natural state of being, and when it comes from a healthy place of self acceptance, then I believe it’s one of the most unique and special parts of what it means to be human. But I see a mismatch between all that we know to be true about change, and the kind of information that our algorithms are optimising for - bite-sized, simplified and lacking nuance. So I write this in the hope that it helps just one person to set more realistic expectations with themselves. To be a little bit more understanding. And to persist that bit longer in the face of frustration.