So many resolutions dead already. SHOCKER? Not at all…
Let’s start this new year by being brutally honest with ourselves. There is a bleak reality most all of us face: Our grand intentions of “A new year — a NEW YOU!” are all but doomed to fail. And fail quickly. A week in and many have likely already done so. This was almost completely predictable.
Does this sound familiar? Are you living this reality? You survived the onslaught of the holiday craziness with a burning desire and renewed hope to make the new year one of transformation… of becoming healthier… happier… wealthier... sexier and full of VIM and VIGOR!
It depends on the source of the information, but it is estimated that only 1 in 19 New Year resolutions will be alive come Valentine’s Day. Most of the excitement and enthusiasm that we felt in late December or January 1st (or January 2nd if we partied too much watching the ball drop) — and nearly all of the promises that we can “Have that SEXY and healthy body in just 30 days” — gone by the day we celebrate love. The overwhelming majority of “This was supposed to be MY year” hopes will have gotten either crushed by the gravity of normal life or will have gently traipsed down the well-intended path to nowhere.
This may sound a bit pessimistic because those of you who know me know I am Dr. Enthusiasm and that I believe 100% in the power of positivity and human potential. Why, then, begin my Medium writing tenure (as well as this year) with such an unsightly reality spoken about in stark terms?
Because, by looking honestly in the mirror we can see that there are many ways to turn the situation around. Sure this is self-serving, as most resolutions are, but my intention is to help people go beyond themselves and help change the world. [Our lives, quite honestly, don’t have as much to do with ‘us’ as individuals as our egos like to think?]
There are dozens of reasons why resolutions fail: The lack of will power, lack of way-power (the means to get something done), psychological barriers, and more. I want to concentrate today on one that most people don’t even realize exists:
On a daily basis, your brain and your body are ideally suited to keep you in the state you’re in, whether it is healthy or unhealthy.
Yup, you read that correctly — if your body is diseased it will do everything it can to maintain that state. Your good intentions to become healthier will be fought. Not in question.
WHAT? “This can’t be true” you’re saying (knowing deep down this is exactly what you’ve experienced many times in the past). The key part of the sentence above, and actually the saving grace for us ALL, resides in the “on a daily basis” aspect. Over long time periods the mind and body CRAVE adaptation, but NOT in the short term. Plus, the system never entertains attempts to change simply for change’s sake — the body defeats any potential change without being overwhelmingly convinced the effort is worth it.
The power to change, therefore, depends on HOW we approach the change because we can either have the body FIGHT our intentions or we can have the body HELP us.
If you’ve ever failed at changing some part of your life you might want to keep reading…
Short-term stability rules (in the short term, thankfully…)
Let’s look at something graphically that most people are unaware of but should be thankful for:
We generally live ‘healthy’ lives. Our baseline, if you will, not really deviating in significant ways from its set point. When we encounter an insult or injury (red arrow) we deviate from that baseline and the body responds vigorously and beautifully with every tool it has in its toolbox to get us back. Inflammatory mediators and stress hormones flood every cellular nook and cranny; we develop antibodies to attack the attackers; our sympathetic nervous system hijacks every organ and our mind literally (and figuratively) helping us ‘fight or flee’ the situation. Thankfully we have an extremely complex system, with thousands of redundant pathways, that works to keep the system ‘as was’ (with no thought required!). This is what largely keeps us ticking to greet another day. And it even gets better with age and experience (cue shouts of praise from the readers over 50!). When the insult/injury is repeated (green arrows) our system can become so powerful as to not even notice it (i.e., resistance). Wow, great set up, eh?
That’s not all the story, however. There is a dark side: The mind and the body are AGNOSTIC to the terms ‘health’ and ‘disease’ and they fight just as aggressively to keep you in the state you’re in regardless if you’re asking it to become better. This is what it looks like graphically:
The intellectual mind may think so, but in actuality the more survivalistic brain regions, along with the mostly unthinking body, don’t define themselves as either term (why ‘health’ and ‘disease’ are crossed out). The real rulers of our lives simply comply with our demands that they operate in a particular way. The conscious or subconscious decisions we’ve made collectively over the course of our lives have built a strong house for us to live in: Our baseline is our baseline, completely designed by us. (Yes, there are genetic influences… but our ‘nurture’ is just as influential as our ‘nature’ if not more so in many cases.) When we come with grand intentions (like ‘treatments’ — red line), even if they are GOOD for our system, the system simply notices a deviation away from the baseline and REACTS just as viciously as if it were a threat. And just like when it’s presented with insults or injuries (above), the system gets stronger as more attempts (green arrows) are repeated. It learns, after all; just the way it is designed.
So, even IF we present our minds and bodies with wonderfully beautiful ‘treatments ‘— exercise, eating healthier, yoga, mindfulness, medications (yup, they can be…), positivity, and others — they can be fought.
Not our ‘fault’ yet 100% our doing/fault. Thankfully this doesn’t mean we’re stuck forever in the state we’re in. We weren’t like we are now our whole lives, right?
The KEY? Enter what I’ve termed the potato chip rule. For those of you more scientifically inclined you can think of it as evolutionary health. (I’ll write on this in more detail later.)
For now, know that we are gradually transformed from vibrant youth to rather non-vibrant adults (“de-evolutionary health” or “evolutionary disease”) because of the small and seemingly innocuous stressors that happen and accumulate over the course of our lives. “Allostatic load” is the technical term — like the straws gradually placed on the camel’s back, each aren’t weighty but collectively they will eventually break the animal down.
ALWAYS KEEP IN MIND: What is small and innocuous is NOT without effect.
Why are these not fought by the mind-body system, you might ask? Because they’re within our background ‘noise’ of our daily living. A little more of something here, a little less of something there… all part of daily existence. For sure because every biological system is ripe with variability, and the system accepts what it believes is natural variation. Over time, though, they pressure the system to adapt. To evolve. But they don’t care which way they’re being pressured.
When the stressors gently pressure us away from what we know supports health, they gradually transform us from vibrant kids to non-vibrant adults, or semi-vibrant adults to worse. When they gently pressure us away from what we know supports disease, the converse absolutely happens.
How to make this work in actuality is to strategically go LOW and go SLOW(ly) (to be grammatically correct?), allowing the body to naturally evolve, to harness what it craves to do via adaptation and evolution. Not going so quickly as to flood the body with inflammation and stress hormones, to not injury the body OR the ego, to see the finish line is NOT the beach during Spring Break 2018 but running and playing like a child in our 70s, 80s and beyond — as well as out running our GRANDCHILDREN!?
In order to be successful we MUST stop fighting ourselves — and encouraging others to have an internal battle waging because of aggressive practices (and anything greater than 5–10% is aggressive). We must NOT support any action that deviates a fraction more than the background noise of the person’s ‘normal day.’ I’ll write later what this means when it comes to things like ‘detox regimens’ and ‘cleansing diets’ because most of these fail to do what they’re fully intended to do — and for good reasons. This is not to say they don’t have a place — they DO — just like High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has a place in training. It is HOW they are placed in the spectrum of activities that matter. And the way most people weave them into their resolutions kills not only the desired outcome but the hopes that change can ever happen.
If you’re already killing your recent resolution by your excitement and enthusiasm, don’t bury it prematurely. Look at it closely to see how it might be modified into what your life looked like before it began. Go back mentally to see if you feel yourself being fought and then look for ways you can ease OFF the accelerator and let the system cool a bit before more gently engaging it again?
