It is a fact, of course, that every one of us will at some time or another have said: “OK, that’s it! I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to make some changes around here!”

It is another fact that while many, maybe most, do get around to making those changes, they more often than not soon slip back to their old way of doing things. Sometimes, that slipback can be so gradual, they don’t even realise it’s happening until it’s a done deal.

The psychology of change

It’s all to do with a special psychological “safety feature” we’ve inherited from our ancestors of long ago, from a time before it was important to be a social media influencer, or to have a big house, a big car, and an important job. 

Then, the “influencers” were the survivors – the ones who didn’t get eaten by a tiger, dispatched by an irate member of another tribe, get spiked to death by falling into a bear pit, or eat something nasty and rapidly expire. 

They were the unadventurous ones, the wise elders, who always did the same thing in the same way and lived to tell the tale. They survived longer than the more adventurous ones,  and so more of their careful-but-boring genes got passed on to their descendants.

That means to most of us, too.

So, we’ve all inherited a subconscious urge to follow a habit, a pattern that we know works and is reliable. In other words, do the same thing in the same way to get the same result. For the subconscious, it’s all about survival.

And even if you’re grabbed by some absolutely fantastic new idea, the subconscious just quietly bides its time and gently guides you back to the same old, same old almost before you realise it.  

But you can beat it, and here’s how:

Creating a plan to overcome old habits

Take a physical sheet of paper and divide it up so that it has a quarter at the top, half in the middle, and another quarter at the bottom.  In the top quarter, write in full about what it is you’re going to change and what made you decide to do it. Don’t abbreviate anything; spill it all out.

In the bottom quarter, write about how life will be once you’ve made that change, what will be better and what might be not quite so good and what you’ll do about that (there’s almost always something.) Write it in detail and love it.

Now, in the middle section, describe that change in detail and how you will make sure you keep to it and what you will do if it slips. In other words, how you will get from the top quarter to the bottom quarter. Write it all in detail.

It is important that you write it all up the old-fashioned way, with a pen or pencil and physical paper, because this is far more tangible and “live” compared to typing in a word processor, takes a bit more effort, and activates more brain cells. 

Visualising the new you

In your mind’s eye (or just imagine vividly if you don’t “do” the mind’s eye thing), see the you that you are right now as if from the outside looking in. See yourself looking really fed up with the way things are in that top quarter and stare at it so hard you stop it in its tracks.

Next, jump forward to when the change has been made. Looking in from the outside again and seeing you looking absolutely super happy with the changes you’ve made, make that even more vivid and feel it even more strongly.

Keep focused on that second image and when you’ve made it feel so good, you know the changes you made were absolutely perfect. Dive right into that scene so you become an actual part of it, remembering the changes you made in the middle section.

If you repeated those three stages several times, it would work well enough, but we can make it even better.

Now that you’ve got the stages in your mind, you can learn the shorthand way of working that you can repeat several times with your eyes closed to lock it in to your subconscious:

• Step 1: See yourself as in the top quarter of the paper as if from the outside looking in. Make it vivid and stare so hard at it that it freezes solid. You can move but nothing else can.
• Step 2: See yourself walking out of that frozen scene slowly at first, then rushing like a speeded-up video through the changes in the middle section as the scene gets brighter and more alive.
• Step 3: The scene morphs into that bottom quarter where all the changes have been made, and you’re striding triumphantly through it all, then zoom right in to actually become that best-ever version of you.
• Step 4: Bathe in that fantastic feeling for a few seconds, then repeat three or four more times from step 1. It doesn’t matter if you do more, because even just three is good.
• Step 5: Relax for a few moments, counting from sixty to zero backwards, thinking the words “sixty… fifty-nine… fifty-eight…” and so on at one-second intervals and when you get to zero, open your eyes and smile because you finished the task. 

And that’s all you need to do – most people find that repeating that exercise a couple of times allows them to easily make any changes, big or small… and keep the change.

Terence Watts is the creator of Brain Working Recursive Therapy (BWRT).