Tag: growth

  • Personal Growth and Embrace change

    Personal Growth and Embrace change

    Personal growth and embrace change means to understand your own behavioral patterns and why you do the things you do.

    Once upon a time, we had patterns that helped us, and then at another point, later in life, those same patterns that helped us, are the beasts that hold us back. For instance, a person may experience a behavior that they don’t like in themselves, perhaps they are afraid of conflict, above average introvertenes, an inability to feel anger or an excessive need for control. Feeling those things are quite normal, and many people spend years in therapy trying to overcome it, while other people live with them, believing that there is nothing to be done. 

    However, in order to have a great relationship with ourselves, we need to look into where those behavioral patterns originated from. We need to do this regardless of how we feel about ourselves because shining a light on all aspects of yourself is a key ingredient in self-development. 

    The secret of our brain

    The most important job of our brain is to keep us safe. A lot of people believe that our brain is helping us to be happy, but it is in fact categorizing information in order to generalize it and make sense of the world around us. It does this to keep us safe and this is where human behavior and self-development becomes really interesting. 

    Imagine a child growing up with parents who have high traits of neuroticism, while being highly extroverted and a low degree of openness to experience, it can be argued that such a person may have very “loud” emotions and an inclination towards keeping safe. A child with parents like this may experience a chaotic environment with lots of emotions and perhaps less room to express their own emotions. 

    One way our brain then operates to keep us safe is to generalize our parents’ behavior and build neurological connections that structure our own behavior in ways that keep us safe around the emotional instability of our parents. 

    Emotional trauma

    For instance, we have a family with a dad who gets extremely angry when the child breaks something, and a mother who gets extremely concerned when the child expresses discomfort. This family could inadvertently create a future adult who expresses an inability to express anger or other emotions, a people pleaser or an above average introvertedness, because keeping safe as a child meant locking away certain emotions as an adult. 

    The behavior that once was designed as a blueprint to protect, now serves as the beast that holds us back from a fulfilled life. 

    The Neuroscience of Behavioral Change

    How do we create real personal growth and embrace change? Real change is deeply rooted in the brain’s ability to adapt and rewire itself. This is a process known as neuroplasticity. When we engage in new behaviors, we create new neural pathways. The behavior you’ve done for years is like a highway, while the new behavior you are just starting out with is like a dirt road right next to the highway. Which road do you think your brain is wired to automatically take? Repetition is the key to building a strong road and by repeating new behavior, the new behavior becomes more automatic over time. 

    Our behavior is often a response to a specific trigger, and when we know that behavior can become automatic, it means that a trigger can create an automatic response.

    Identify triggers

    When you identify and modify these triggers, it can help change the behavior associated with it. For example, if stress triggers emotional eating, finding alternative stress-relief methods can help break this pattern.

    Another way to work on modifying your triggers is emotional regulation. Emotions play a significant role in behavior, and some also say that emotions are the fuel for any behavior. Techniques such as mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral strategies or specific supplements can help individuals manage their emotions more effectively. This in turn can reduce the likelihood of reverting to the old patterns you want to avoid. 

    Going from blueprint to beast can definitively be a stressful process because it takes courage to explore yourself. Just like some people bring a flashlight when they go down to the basement, it can feel scary to explore some parts of us without the right tools. 

    Explore our cognitive flashlights here.

    Sources:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

    The Neuroscience of Goals and Behavior Change (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5854216/)