Feeling Forced To Change? It Won't Work.

Hey there. It's me, Kore. Hope you're doing well.

Today on Exercising Self-Control: From Fitness To Flourishing, I wanted to add some thoughts on yesterday's topic.

Yesterday we considered the importance of looking for and using resistance to grow. I mean, for physical strength development, it's literally called resistance training, isn't it?

For the brain and body to change, there needs to be a good return to justify the investment required for growth, so to speak. Building muscle, strengthening tendons and ligaments, rewiring the neurons of the brain–these processes are expensive in terms of energy and resources needed by the body to make these changes.

Andrew Huberman talks about the importance of engagement, alertness, and focus for learning. Now, he's a neuroscientist with a fantastic YouTube channel. If you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it. There's an ocean of content on the neuroscience of human behaviour there.

Anyway, for adults after roughly the age of 25 it requires intention, focus, and commitment to learn. Learning no longer occurs passively when you're a mature adult. When you're young, the brain is primed for learning. Just mere exposure to circumstances, environments, information creates that learning process. But as an adult, not so easy anymore.

The deliberate engagement is one of two main requirements for what's called neuroplasticity. The second requirement is sleep or non-sleep deep rest as it’s called. And that’s actually when the brain changes occur. Without that purposeful engagement, the adult brain won't make the necessary changes for learning to occur. You need to demonstrate a high level of conscious effort to get the non-conscious processes of the brain to pay attention.

That can feel frustrating. It's choosing to work through that frustration that gets the non-conscious processes of the brain active. That's the brain's way of saving energy. It costs the brain a lot of energy to think consciously. Much more efficient to use more powerful, less energy-draining parts of the brain to take over.

Now we can't choose to think non-consciously, unfortunately. We can only choose to consciously direct our attention, intention, and effort consistently enough to initiate the brain to change as, and at the pace, it will. Remember the body, including the brain and the nervous system, does what it does. We make choices and events unfold, even within our own bodies, as they may.

Here are a couple of examples to demonstrate what I’m getting at.

First one is a tale of two rats. Now, this was an actual study done, and there was more than two rats, but that doesn't sound quite as dramatic. So, there you go.

So rat one was able to run on a wheel voluntarily. Like a little hamster in a wheel, a gerbil, but in this case a rat. And once the initial study was done, however long the terms were, that rat had lower lipids, lower stress hormones, lower blood pressure. Essentially, it was a healthier rat.

Rat number two, however, was forced to run when the first rat was running. And the effects on that rat were the reverse: higher lipids, higher stress hormones, and across the board worse health outcomes.

Now this has been done with human studies. Although, in these cases, there was no wheel involved, but there was exercise and very similar results. Those who engaged in exercise voluntarily had better health metrics at the end.

Those who did so non-voluntarily or involuntarily, they kind of went through with it but didn't really want to do it, or they were made to do exercise that was more strenuous than they would have preferred. They had negative effects: less positive brain health impact, less effective in reducing stress hormones, and essentially didn't get the effects that the people who did it voluntarily, who chose to do it, experienced.

Now a second example is from the field of cognitive therapy. And when you’re dealing with somebody who’s phobic, for example maybe claustrophobia–a fear of enclosed spaces–there’s something called exposure therapy.

The way this works, let's say that somebody is afraid of going into an elevator. So what you would do with exposure therapy is you'd first have them look at elevator pictures with the doors closed. Then they may…next step is stand 20 feet from an actual elevator with the doors closed. And then the next stage is stand in an elevator with the doors open for five seconds and then exit. This continues in a progressive exposure to clear their traumatic response to enclosed spaces, in this case elevators.

Now my example is not actually clinical. I made those up myself, but you get the idea. What they found with research was that when an individual chooses to go through each step voluntarily, they get much better results. Much less effective when the patient or the client is forced through the process. That can act