The #1 barrier to change… and how to overcome it

Ever tried to change? Difficult, isn’t it? Most of my clients come to me knowing that they need to change. They’ve read books or articles and watched documentaries on nutrition, health, happiness, relationships, or whatever isn’t going well for them; thought long and hard about their current situation and what it will take to improve it; and made a rational decision to change. And they seek me out so I can help them map out a plan for the change process. Having made the decision to change, they assume that change will automatically follow.

If only it were that simple.

The majority of people who’ve decided to change any aspect of their behaviour, whether it’s quitting smoking, improving their eating habits, exercising regularly, being tidy, not yelling at their kids – you name it – find that they keep slipping back into the old unwanted pattern.

As frustrating as this is to the person trying to change their habits, to neuroscientists there’s no mystery as to why this happens. Repetition of a behaviour creates neural circuits – connections between neurons in various regions of the brain and nervous system – that become stronger with each repetition, until the behaviour becomes automatic.

You don’t have to think deeply about how to get home from work, or how to drive your car, or how to write your name, because even though each of these is, neurologically speaking, a fairly complex task, you’ve performed these tasks so many times that you could practically do them in your sleep. The neural circuits in your brain that are responsible for these tasks enlarge, like a muscle that’s been repeatedly worked. Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent.

But when you set a goal that requires a change in behaviour, neurons involved in this goal-directed action must compete with the circuits that govern habitual behaviour for control of the decision-making area of the brain, known as the orbitofrontal cortex.

You’ve almost certainly experienced this power struggle many times. You wake up in the morning determined to eat only healthy food all day… but at 3 pm on the dot, your chocolate cravings kick in with a vengeance, and you find yourself in front of the vending machine with a chocolate bar in your hand, thinking to yourself

“How did I get here? I can’t even remember deciding to buy this chocolate!”

What just happened is that your habit circuits overrode your goal-directed circuits, causing your orbitofrontal cortex to make the decision to buy the chocolate, without you even realising that you’d made the decision.

Can you see now why will-power is so ineffective at creating lasting change? Will-power is the expression of those goal-directed circuits, and much of the time, it’s no match for the habit circuits. To reset those habit circuits, you quite literally need to rewire your brain.

That’s where Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) come in. In over 20 years of clinical practice, I have never encountered a tool for overcoming barriers to change that’s as powerful as EFT. The EFT process can be used to address both conscious and unconscious barriers to change, breaking apart the old neural habit circuits so that you can lay down new ones in their place – ones that actually contribute to your health and happiness rather than undermining it.

A client who I’ll call Jamila is the perfect illustration of the habit-changing power of EFT. Jamila has struggled with her weight since she was a little girl. Her habit of turning to food for comfort was unwittingly reinforced by family members who gave her sweet treats whenever she was upset or lonely. The more overweight she became, the more isolated she felt, and the more she turned to food.

By the time she came to me, she had tried every diet program ever devised, and her relationship with food and with her body was about as messed-up as you could imagine. Food was her best friend and her worse enemy; her refuge and her punishment. Nothing that she ate gave her any pleasure, but she continued to overeat compulsively, knowing all the time that she was destroying herself. Her self-esteem was cripplingly low, and she felt so overwhelmed by her responsibilities as home-maker and mother to 2 young children that she never knew which of her many tasks she should start with, and consequently she never got started at all.

After several months of aiming EFT at every problematic relationship in her life – with food, her husband, her friends, her mother… – Jamila’s weight has dropped down to double digits for the first time in years; she is finding it easy to make healthy choices when it comes to food; and she’s even got her housework sorted – in fact, recently she went through every room in her house, clearing out the junk and organising what remained to make it all easy to clean and maintain. She’s enjoying the time she spends with her kids far more, because she’s no longer plagued by nagging thoughts of all the uncompleted tasks on her to-do list.

Jamila had tried using will-power to change her habits many times before, and it had never worked for her. EFT-ing her blocks to change away has set her free to become the healthiest, happiest version of herself.

Do you need help with overcoming your barriers to change? Apply for a Roadmap to Optimal Health Consultation today!