Imagination, Intention and The Science of Habit

New Research from Scientists proves it:
You CAN leave the Rat race behind (and it’s actually easy)

Let’s say you need to do your taxes. Or complete some other task that’s been nagging at you for too long. Maybe there’s a dreaded phone call you DON’T want to make, but you know you have to.

Uh-oh, the stress is rising, which triggers a whole cascade of biochemical changes and hormonal responses that you notice right away.

Breathing, heart-rate, maybe even sweating.

You FEEL stressed.

What do you do to GET yourself to do the task? What do you say to yourself, or picture in your imagination ? HOW do you get the job done when the pressure’s on?

Researchers in Portugal recently discovered a remarkable thing about brains…

It turns out that when your body is under stress, you are MORE likely to repeat behaviors, even behaviors that are BAD for you.

Which sounds counter-productive, doesn’t it?

Precisely when you SHOULD take bold NEW actions (and PROACTIVELY make some NEW decisions), your body pulls you into old habits .

This research, published last month in the journal Science, MAY help explain why the pressure to get something done may actually TRIGGER procrastination.

Mother Nature is a comic genius

The technical term for it is perseveration, or “uncontrollable repetition,” and it’s astonishing how simple it is to make it happen.

Just add stress. A lot of it.

The more the better.

Obviously scientists can’t use humans to do this research, so they reach their conclusions by testing lab rats. (Personally, I abhor this type of testing but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the results.)

To create stress, researchers used repeated electric shocks, encaged the animals with aggressive dominant animals, even held them underwater. The rats were helpless to prevent these negative stimuli from happening.

In just a few weeks of this environment, the relentless stress produced two physical changes in the animals’ brains:

1. Brain regions associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shriveled2. Brain regions associated with habit formation bloomed.

These twin brain-changes showed in their behaviors quite clearly.

The rats fell back on familiar routines and habitual responses, even when there was no present-time value to doing so. (Such as pressing a lever to get food pellets they were not going to eat.)

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, commented on the research: “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”

Humans have bigger brains than rats, so they learn these reactions even faster

There is a BIG difference between rats and humans. (Okay, MOST humans, anyway.)

The difference is this: Humans don’t need to be physically exposed to the stress to feel it.

Yes, we do have physical pressures that show up – war, crime, traffic jams – but MOST of the ‘pressure’ is created on the INSIDE -- in your
imagination .

Like a coaching client of mine who was forever postponing completing her taxes.

Just the thought of her taxes triggered a whole series of mental pictures – of the frustration doing the forms, and the worry that they’re done properly, not to mention vivid pictures of an audit, and then being in jail, and seeing her family visit her at the jail, and her children crying as they look at her through the bullet proof glass of the prison visitation room.

Nooooooo…..

Sounds funny, right? It is, until you think about that brain research I mentioned before.

Our human brain’s stress-coping mechanism is identical to the rat’s, except with our bigger brains we can create the stress FASTER and STRONGER and continue the torment even while we are sleeping – visualizing things that are even more terrible.

Remember: Our stress is not limited to what is physically possible. It’s limited to anything imaginable.
If you could peek into the imagination of 100 random people, you’d probably find a 3-D horror show that makes the lab rat research look like a holiday.

There IS a way out of this

So – if relentless stress keeps your brain stuck in a bad-habit loop, and the deepest source of nonstop stress is the parade of images running through your imagination, then what should you do?

Two things:

1. Learn how to direct your imagination for relaxation and focus.

2. Put systems in place in your environment that make results easier.

My clients and seminar attendees are often surprised when I teach them techniques of deep relaxation .

As if relaxation – and the skill of mastering your imagination – is somehow a distraction from the goal-driven tasks we cover in our work together.

It’s not a distraction. It’s the fuel that allows the results to happen.

When you start directing your imagination, and replacing the scary nightmare movies in your mind with their opposites, it’s inevitable that long-craved goals will start showing up in your world.

Being able to control the images that flow through your mind means being able to remove the internal stress triggers that hijack your attention.

Stress control is the ‘secret sauce’ in my coaching practice, and one of the main ingredients of a happy successful life.