Which ‘you’ are you changing for?

It’s a truism that you should never try to change yourself to please somebody else. People who attempt to quit smoking, lose weight or get off drugs or alcohol because a loved one told them to, rarely stay quit, slim or sober… assuming they made any attempt to change in the first place.

The only sustainable way to break bad health habits and maintain good ones, is to do it for yourself – because you want what the habit changes will bring.

So far, so good.

But which ‘you’ wants those changes? Huh??? To explain, here’s what I hear all the time from my clients:

“I really do want to quit binge-eating/exercise regularly/quit smoking/whatever. I know what’s going to happen if I keep on going the way I have been, but every time I try to change, I end up sabotaging myself. It’s like there’s another ‘me’ inside who keeps stopping me from making the changes I want to make.”

The way I’ve always interpreted this self-sabotage, up until recently, is that it comes from the ‘you’ who fears leaving the ‘comfort zone’ in which most people spend most of their lives. The comfort zone is a place of total predictability, in which we know exactly what will happen when we engage in certain activities.

That doesn’t mean it’s a wonderful place; people often describe feeling stuck, suffocated or strait-jacketed when they’re living in their comfort zone – because there’s another ‘you’ who knows that you can be and do so much more than you are now, and is chafing at the restrictions and limitations that the comfort zone imposes.

The problem is, leaving your comfort zone in order to grow, change and develop as a person (whether that’s getting a new job, leaving a dead relationship, fulfilling a dream to travel, taking up salsa dancing…) necessarily involves getting uncomfortable. So I’ve worked with my clients using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to address this discomfort around change and reconcile the ‘you’ that fears change with the ‘you’ that desires it, and that has proved to be quite a successful approach.

Recently though, I heard about Hal Hershfield’s work on how our brains view our future self through Howard Jacobson’s Plant Yourself podcast (on which I’m honoured to have been a guest), and it has added a whole new dimension to my understanding of the different ‘yous’ that make habit change such a vexed issue. It’s also made me much more effective at facilitating the habit changes that my clients want to make.

I’ll summarise a fascinating and complex body of work as succinctly as I can:

• When we think about ourselves, different parts of our brain are activated than when we think about other people. When we think about ourselves in the future, the ‘other people’ part of our brain activates – as if the brain sees ‘future me’ as a different person to ‘current me’.
• There’s some variability between individuals in how much this tends to happen, and the more it happens – the more our brains view our future selves as a stranger – the less likely we are to make decisions that will benefit that future self, but at some cost to our current self.

Researchers call people’s tendency to value immediate gains over future gains ‘temporal discounting’. Hershfield has focused on economic decisions that are affected by temporal discounting; in particular, on saving for retirement. People who feel very disconnected from their future self are more likely to spend their money now, on things that give them pleasure in the pleasant moment, than to save money in order to help some silly old bugger that they don’t really care about that much – that future self who feels like a stranger to them – to have a more comfortable retirement.

But his research is hugely relevant to health-related decisions as well. And it explains why much of what is done to try to change people’s health-related behaviour fails so miserably.

When a smoker sees the graphic images of gangrenous toes, tar-filled lungs and diseased blood vessels on the cigarette packet, he or she might briefly think,

“Oh God, I hope that doesn’t happen to me!”

In most cases though, those scary conditions aren’t apparent right now. If they happen, they’re going to happen to the future self, not the ‘me’ that the smoker is experiencing right now. And if ‘current me’ badly wants a cigarette, he or she is going to be pretty unlikely to forego the pleasure of a smoke, and endure some nasty nicotine cravings, in order to help that far-off, disconnected future self avoid a limb amputation, lung cancer or a heart attack.

Likewise, a person who’s just been warned by her doctor that if she doesn’t lose weight, she’ll end up with diabetes just like her mother, is faced with a stark choice as she leaves the clinic and passes a bakery: eat that rich, gooey chocolate chip muffin that’s singing to her from the window shelf right now and enjoy the sensory gratification and the (temporary) relief from the craving, or forego the pleasure of eating the muffin and endure the craving in order to help ‘future me’ lose weight and stave off type 2 diabetes.

Interestingly, Hershfield found that when people interacted with age-morphed virtual reality avatars of themselves, or were shown age-progressed photographs of themselves as seniors, they were more likely to elect to save more of their current income for retirement. When far-off ‘future me’ feels up close and personal, our temporal discounting diminishes.

Delving into Hershfield’s research illuminated something that Dr Dean Ornish, the medical trail-blazer who proved that a plant-based diet and other healthy lifestyle measures can reverse coronary artery disease and prevent prostate cancer from progressing, has been saying for years:

Fear is not a sustainable motivator. Joy is.

When patients first enrolled in Dr Ornish’s studies, they had just been given a terrifying diagnosis of advanced heart disease or cancer; some had even had a heart attack. The gap between their current self who enjoys greasy food, smoking, drinking alcohol and being a lazy slob, and the future self who would end up paying the price for those bad habits, abruptly closed up. Far-off future risks were suddenly current realities. They were afraid of dying, and willing to sacrifice the pleasure of indulging in their bad habits in order to stave off the pain of disease and death.

But as the days go on, and people who’ve had a health scare like this find that they’re still alive after all, the gap between present and future selves starts to open up again. The temptation to slip back into poor eating habits and let the exercise routine lapse will creep up again – because, after all, you ate a burger and it didn’t make you drop dead on the spot, so why not have another one? –  unless, as Dr Ornish’s patients reported to him, they discovered that they were feeling so much better now from all changes they’d made, that the pleasure of living healthfully outweighed the pleasure of reverting to their old way of living.

Thinking about the interface between Dean Ornish’s clinical experience and Hal Hershfield’s research helped me identify two primary strategies to use with my clients, to help them break health-destroying habits and replace them with health-building ones:

1. Visualise your future self enjoying the benefits of your habit changes, focusing on the benefits of adopting healthy habits rather than the harms of continuing unhealthy ones (remembering Dr Ornish’s discovery that joy, not fear, is the sustainable motivator).
   Many people struggle to visualise themselves having already achieved their goal. I’ve found EFT is an amazingly effective tool to break through this resistance, which often arises out of a sense of deep shame that results in us feeling unworthy of having and enjoying what we desire.
   The more intimately you can connect with that future self who will be the beneficiary – or victim – of your current choices, the more committed you’ll be to ensuring his or her health and happiness, so keep on doing EFT until you can see, hear, touch and feel the bond with your future self.
2. Focus on the benefits of the behaviour change that you can enjoy right now.
   Your gym workouts will eventually result in a leaner, fitter body, but you won’t see a before-and-after difference in the mirror or on the scales, at the end of each session. What you will notice though, and even more so if you choose to focus your attention on it, is the boost to your mood from all the endorphins, enkephalins and ‘happy hormones’ pumping through your system, the sense of accomplishment you feel from having pushed through and completed your workout when it got hard and you were tempted to quit, and the feeling of pride that you have in yourself for having stuck to your exercise schedule even when you were tempted to ditch a class and crash on the couch instead.
   Once again, when it’s hard to even come up with any up-sides of cultivating your good habits because all you can think about is how miserable you’re going to feel if you don’t indulge in the bad ones, it’s EFT to the rescue. EFT is the fastest, most effective way to cut through the emotional static that comes up when we try to change our habits.

Bridging the gap between your current and future selves is an incredibly effective strategy for dissolving resistance to change and heading off the self-sabotage that dogs so many people’s attempts to change.

Need some personalised guidance on how to harness these exciting discoveries to fast-track your change process? Apply for a Roadmap to Optimal Health Consultation today.