Season 3 Episode 2: Change in the Brain

In this episode, Nancy learns how hard it is to form habits and goals all from a psychologist and neuroscience expert.

Nancy tells us about her journey to accept her new physical limitations in her workouts, and why learning about how change works on a scientific level, can make space for kindness and grace. Nancy talks with Dr. Elliot Berkman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who studies the science of habits. He'll tell us what's really going on inside our brains when we try to do something new and make it stick.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

- Nancy's personal experiences with trying to form habits and routines.

- The science behind forming habits and achieving goals from Dr. Elliot Berkman.

- How to learn more about Self Loyalty School.

Resources Mentioned:

Learn more about Dr. Elliot Berkman:

- Go to the University of Oregon website: https://ctn.uoregon.edu/profile/berkman

- You can follow him on Twitter @Psychologician

+ Read the Transcript

Nancy: Hey guys, it’s me! Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to the Happier Approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships.

This season we’re talking all about change. How hard it is, how to make it seem not-so-scary, AND how it feels in our bodies. Today’s episode is all about that last part– how change works in the brain, from a scientific perspective– specifically a translational neuroscientific perspective… but we’ll get into all of that in a sec!

Change is such a BIG concept, that it can be hard to wrap our heads around how it actually happens on a day-to-day basis. Like, in our last episode when I slowly brought more storytelling and authenticity into my business and ended up changing my whole approach. It seems like I snapped my fingers and WOOHOO change. But of course, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

So today we’ll talk to an expert in psychology and neuroscience about all the little steps that go into making a big change– basically how building small habits can all add up to reaching our bigger goals. From habits as little as washing your face every night, to larger ones like building a new fitness routine. That’s something I’ve been working on for a while now…

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ACT I: Change in the Brain

Nancy: "You used to work out every day–remember when you could run a mile in under 8 mins now, you probably can't even run a mile."

Aw, the familiar voice of my Monger, my name for the voice of the inner critic.

Fitness has always been a part of my life. Exercising has been critical to both my physical and mental health. Almost a decade ago, I was in the best shape of my life–doing a mix of cardio and weights for over an hour a day. The vision of who I was was someone strong who could handle any physical challenge if I pushed myself hard enough.

In the past decade, I broke my ankle in a segway accident and had major surgery, which left me unable to work out for almost a year. Then a few years ago, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and Ankylosing Spondylitis, 2 chronic auto-immune illnesses. In the span of a few years, I went from being in the best shape of my life to living with chronic pain and most days feeling lucky if I can walk the dog.

Since those diagnoses, I have struggled to get back into a regular workout routine. It’s been a war between the Monger and the BFF. My Monger saying, "If you pushed yourself more, you COULD get into shape. You are just lazy and old, and you use pain as an excuse.”

My BFF responds, "It doesn't matter if you move or not; you are still in pain, so you might as well not move. You will never get back to where you were–why even try."

At the end of last year, I decided to try physical therapy to learn how to move my body in a way that didn't cause pain… I loved working with the physical therapist– I worked out twice a week with the PT and three days on my own. I was getting back in the groove. "This is working," my Monger said, "just keep pushing, and you will be back to a good place in no time."

For a couple of weeks, I was riding the high that I COULD get back to where I was. Squats–no problem! Lunges-I got this! Weights with lunges–bring it on!! My Monger was right; I just needed to push harder. So I did. I kept pushing myself harder. And then one night, getting ready for bed, my leg gave out, and I couldn't walk. I had inflamed my Achilles heel, and it was excruciating.

The next time I went back to PT, he decreased my exercises, and I was devastated–"It’s ok," he said, "You will recover. You just need to rest it and go easy. No more lunges, no more squats." And then a few weeks later, after I hadn't made any real progress, he said, "ok, I think we have maxed out what I can do for you. You have the exercises, keep doing them at home. But I didn't. I stopped altogether. "If you can't get back to where you were, there is no point," said my BFF.

Around this time– when I was discharged from PT and feeling pretty discouraged about my attempts to build a new fitness routine– I interviewed an expert, who made me think about my approach in a whole new way.

ACT II: Elliot Berkman

Nancy: Have you ever seen the Bob Newhart skit where he's a psychologist Elliot: Yep. I think I know the one you're talking Nancy: and he says, just, just stop it. Elliot: Haha, yup. Nancy: Um, that's my husband's favorite quote, whenever I'm like, I want to start doing this and he's like, just stop it. Stop it. Okay. But that always comes into my mind when I'm thinking about making changes. Elliot: Just stop it! Nancy: That’s Dr. Elliot Berkman. Along with being a good sport and going along with my jokes about Bob Newhart– he’s a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. Elliot: I study goals, motivation and behavior. I love studying goals because of the kind of duality of the fact that humans are. Some of the only creatures. I think the only creatures that we know of that really set these fancy long-term goals for ourselves.

Nancy: If you think about it, Elliot’s right! Humans are always thinking about the future. We have five year plans, ten year plans! Elliot: Famously you know, dogs are happy in the moment. They're not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday. Right. They don't ruminate. They don't worry about their inadequacies of relative to other dogs, you know?

Nancy: But for us forward-planning humans, if we fail to live up to a goal that we set… it can make us pretty miserable. And Elliot has some bad news for us on that front.

Elliot: A lot of the research on goals shows that we're really, really bad at it. You know, most goals fail, um, where there's all sorts of pitfalls in terms of how we set goals for ourselves. Are they too hard? They're too hard and often they're too big. Which makes them kind of unattainable.

Nancy: But not all is lost. Elliot studies how we can use our natural, if somewhat flawed, neuro-hardwiring to actually create behavior changes and reach our goals. It’s a field called translational neuroscience.

music Elliot: Translational neuroscience is taking what we know about the neural systems of human behavior and human thoughts and emotions. And using that information to create interventions or programs that help people change their behavior in some way, My particular interest in that is thinking about how we use information about how the brain creates habits, how the brain is motivated to obtain various things and using that to help us change our behavior more effectively.

Nancy: For those of you struggling with some of this vocab like I was in the interview, a neuro system is basically a term that describes how all of the different parts of the brain work together.

Elliot: Parts of the brain and the way they are active during different mental processes, like thoughts and emotions and how the brain is interconnected sort of within itself. So different parts of the brain. Talk to each other. And thinking about, you know, okay. So during say a motivated state, what are the parts of the brain that are active?

The way to think about it is you, you can use a computer analogy if you want. So there's each little part of your computer. Does something on its own, right? The CPU does kind of computations, right. Or the Ram stores things temporarily. But of course the computer doesn't work the way that we would want it to work without all those pieces talking to each other.

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Nancy: So explain what happens in our brains when we're forming habits.

Elliot: What happens when we form habits is our brains have the capacity to form an association between a particular behavior and a particular cue. Usually it's something that gets rewarded.

Nancy: So, for a very basic lab-ratty example: the cue could be a red light. A red light turns on, you press a lever, and you get a reward. Maybe the machine spits out a nice slice of chocolate cake.

Eliott: And the way that works at the level of the brain is the reward serves to form a connection between the cue and the behavior. The idea is once that happens a few times you no longer really need to be rewarded. Eventually when you see the cue, the behavior will become the kind of dominant response that happens.

Nancy: But in humans, a cue isn’t necessarily something as simple as a red light. It could be something higher level.

Eliott: Getting in my car in the morning or finishing a meal, which would, for example, for a smoker, be cues that they've associated with smoking a cigarette.

Nancy: Elliot says that those “cues” are the most important part of creating habits. Eventually when we see the cue our brain will start to release hormones that reinforce the behavior before the reward even appears. Eliott used the example of building a consistent fitness routine.

Elliot: Behavior change is at first, very deliberately building out the structures in your world to support the behavior, to make sure that there's always a cue that goes with the behavior. So a lot of people will do things like put their running shoes or their gym bag somewhere, very visible or accessible. So that later when you see the cue, it reminds you to go work out. They might even structure their world or structure their day so that there's a chunk of time in, you know, sort of in their world reserved for the exercise. And so that even that time can then become the cue or it's like, oh, I'm free for an hour right now. I have nothing to do. That's a good cue to go, go out and exercise.

Nancy: But one of the biggest barriers to making sure that cue is recognized? Building it into our already busy schedules and routines in a consistent way.

Elliot: Sometimes you have to ask the question, not so much, why am I not doing the new thing that I want to do? Right. Which is working out, but why is it that my life is already so full?

Nancy: And all those things that fill up your life? They’re like an endless maze of other habits that you’ve already built into your routine, that you have to contend with in order to build a new habit.

Elliot: I would say that's sort of a second theme of what can become barriers or what can become a challenge for behavior changes. You're never just creating a new behavior. You're always overcoming old ones.

Nancy: Another barrier? Often those old habits are connected to a way that we see ourselves. A sense of identity that can be really hard to overcome if your new habit doesn’t fit with your picture of yourself.

Elliot: So the idea is you're never just changing a single behavior, right? There's other things that you're working against, you have existing behaviors in your life that you're working. And you also have existing identities, right?

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I have family in Louisiana and for them to say, you know what? They are pork people like that is a part of their identity in Louisiana is it's absolutely true. Right. And it's all well and good for somebody there to say, I want to start eating more healthily. You know, that seems like a reasonable goal. But if you think about a goal like that within the broader context of like, it's actually quite important to us at a cultural level, at a personal level, To have, you know, to eat these things, you know, fried pork products or ham bacon, you know, probably more than is advisable, right.

Is, um, an important part of their identity. And so the point of that argument is just to say that before you embark on some behavior change, it's important to think about what are the processes in our lives culturally. Individually, personally, that maintain the behaviors that we have, not just the fact that they've been reinforced in the past, but also the fact that they're kind of embedded in our, in our life and our social systems. then on the flip side of that, you can imagine, well, what would be ways that I could connect that new behavior that I'm trying to do up to my broader identity?

Nancy: So how could I be still be eating pork but in, in a healthy way.

Elliot: yes, exactly. Or maybe thinking about recasting or reframing the identity and say, you know, yeah. You know, pork is sort of part of our culture here, but, but so is, you know, so are collard greens, right? And maybe green, maybe that is the thing that I'm going to attach to say. That's what I identify with in terms of food in Louisiana.

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Nancy: All this talk of identity made me think about MY fitness habits. How my identity had always been really attached to working out. I’d had a lot of pride in it. But now with my physical limitations, I didn’t have that anymore. I wondered if my situation might be similar to the pork-eating example that Eliott mentioned.

Elliot: Sometimes it's really thinking of. You know, well, what is, what, what are other parts of your identity that, that you do care about that you could potentially attach to physical activity? so maybe it's not now activity for activity's sake. Maybe it's something about, um, self care, right? Maybe the idea is I'm a person that takes care of myself and, you know, I do have this condition of arthritis, but in fact, physical activity is part of caring. You know, it's part of my sort of medical regimen for caring for myself. Nancy: So it would be more tied to another example would be, oh, I want to be able to go to an event and stand there and not be in pain. And in order to do that, I need to be doing these stretches and working out in this different way than I'm used to.

Nancy: But that still left me with a question. WHY did I even want to work out in a different way? What was the larger goal here?

Nancy: You started out at the very beginning and you said something about setting big goals. We set big goals as human beings, is it? And so then the common wisdom is to make it make the goals bite-sized, but then that's, but that's less exciting.

Elliot: It's less exciting and it's less satisfying. Which is a trick from the science of habit formation. At first, when you're starting, you want to set small goals that are attainable, that are rewarding, right? That's how you build habits by reinforcing, you know, small wins. But from the bigger picture, what makes goals rewarding intrinsically for humans? If they're not things that are sort of primary rewards…

Nancy: Primary rewards are things that give us immediate satisfaction like food, sleep, drugs, sex… On the flip side, are higher-level rewards.

Eliott: Like feeling a sense of self fulfillment, becoming the best version of me, right. It's hard to feel that way if you're just taking these baby steps. And so another insight I think from, and this comes more from psychology and the neuroscience, is the idea of a goal hierarchy.

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The idea that even those big goals can get connected down to small things. And the way that we organize our behaviors and our goals in our minds is actually really, really important. The way you understand those small steps as being connected or, you know, a small instantiations of a larger thing are really important. Sometimes people refer to it as a why, how hierarchy. You can start at the top level. Like I want to be a healthy person, right? That's a big goal. It's a sort of a lifelong goal, but you can break that down and go down the levels of the hierarchy by asking the question of how right.

So healthy person, how do I do that? Well, I can imagine several ways I can eat healthily. I can be, be more physically active and after each of those. You can ask how right. And in fact, you can always continue to ask how do I eat healthily, eat more vegetables? How do I be more active while I maybe start jogging.

Nancy: And it’s just as important as you’re breaking down the “hows” to go up the hierarchy for each small goal you have and ask why?

Elliot: Like, okay, I just had a salad for. That's great. You know, good for me, but think about the question of why, right? Why was I doing that? Well, I did that because I want to, I want to have a healthy diet and why do I want that? Because I want to have be a healthy person. So understanding the connections kind of up and down the hierarchy is really important because it helps us make connections between small victories, which can be satisfying. And then the really sort of truly fulfilling thing, which is making progress on those big high level goals.

Nancy: If you reach high enough for the “why” you could end up getting some pretty deep, introspective answers to that question.

Elliot: Usually the ultimate answer is you have some sort of vision of yourself, right? Whatever it might be, and that you're trying to attain that kind of vision.

And so this behavior will help you get to that and it might not necessarily be connected to health. Right. So a lot of people want to change their behavior because they want to live long enough to, you know, seat, know their grandchildren and they care about that. You can even ask that. So why, why do you want to meet your grandchildren?

Right. Well, because it's really important to me to feel a sense of my, you know, lineage carrying on through time. Okay. That's a big high level. And you can say, yeah, well it's connected to eating this salad, whatever it is, that's connecting those specific behaviors to something that is truly meaningful for you.

Music out Oftentimes in general, people will sell it, set a goal and backslide because it's not connected to some sort of higher level purpose.

Nancy: But take comfort. Even experts in goal setting and habit forming aren’t necessarily good at it.

Nancy: Are you really good at making habits and change or?

Elliot: I'm less terrible than I once was. Now in academia, we have a saying research is me-search right. You study the things that, that are really challenging for you. And so goals has always been something of a personal fascination because of my frustrations with it. Beat

Elliot: I would say change is hard at first because of the demands of planning. It’s a confluence of two things that are very hard, right? Planning, which is the very kind of abstract forward-thinking kind of, you know, only humans do this kind of thinking type of thinking. And at the same time, you're overcoming really powerful ancient brain systems that support and maintain habits.

Nancy: And giving yourself grace in the face of those ancient brain systems– something that is honestly SUPER hard to do, even from an evolutionary perspective– really seems to be the key to making change last. Maybe music till out

Eliott: We're beings that are designed to form habits. We're designed to get into a rut. I mean, that's sort of how our brains work. I think humans are kind of adapted to have the capacity to change, have the capacity to do new things, but it comes at a very high cost, right? To do something new. It really demands all of your attention. It demands focus, and that in some ways is our most precious resource. So anytime you're changing, you're sort of working uphill, right? You're going against that machinery. Beat

I think a lot of people on into intellectual level understand. The sort of rejection of dualism, this idea of like, well, are the mind and the brain, you know, is, is there some S is, does the mind exist separate from the brain, you know, as the body and the soul kind of thing.

Like they get that like, no, no, there's not really a soul separate from your body. You know, if one dies, the other dies, that kind of thing. But it's, it is still like very extremely appealing intuitively to think of a separation between them. And I think that even plays out in science, right. People very much think about, well, I'm studying psychology and that's separate from the brain. But even though you're kind of acknowledging like, no, they really can't be. A CT III: Nancy Changes Her Brain… slowly but surely!

Nancy: Since I was discharged from PT around the time I interviewed Elliot, talking to him opened up a whole new way of thinking for me. He talked about the vision of yourself– your identity– and how that can prevent us from making change, and I had a major ah-ha!

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I hadn’t created a realistic vision for myself that holds my physical limitations and the need to move my body. I have not been able to change my image of myself from someone who had no physical limitations to someone who has chronic physical limitations. AND I hadn’t realized how hard change is to actually implement– because of the way humans evolved! I needed to accept a new vision of myself, give myself grace, and take small steps towards a larger change and a powerful “why”-- connected more to my own self-care, than to an outdated vision of myself.

I wish I could tie this story up in a neat little bow. And say after that ah-ha, I did successfully change the vision in my head from one of being fit and strong to one of having grace with my body and being kind even though I probably won't ever get back to the level of my 30s. But I know that isn't how change works. It takes time and baby steps.

I have been trying to build a relationship with myself that isn't one of pushing but one of kindness and curiosity—noticing where my body hurts and how it feels after gentle stretching. Reminding my Monger that my body is different now, not better or worse, just different, and while I probably won't get back to where I was in my 30s, that doesn't mean I should do nothing.

Changing the picture I had of myself in my head, the standard I’ve always held myself to, has been hard. There is grief and sadness, mourning what I used to be. AND there is hope that I can figure out how to be in this body and find the sweet spot of challenging myself but not to the point of pain. It’ll just take lots of deliberate baby steps, to get to that ultimate place of change.

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That’s it for this week! In our next episode we’re going to look at how entrenched beliefs– from politics, to long-held ideas about ourselves– can keep us from change. I’ll speak to an author and creativity facilitator, who had to break down her entrenched beliefs about herself in order to keep moving down her own path. That’s next time, on the Happier Approach.

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Nancy: The Happier Approach is produced by Nicki Stein and me, Nancy Jane Smith. Music provided by Pod5 and Epidemic Sound. For more episodes, to get in touch, or to learn more about Self Loyalty School, you can visit nancy jane smith dot com. And if you like the show, leave us a review! It actually helps us out a lot.

Special thanks to Dr. Elliot Berkman for speaking with us today.

The Happier Approach will be back with another episode in two weeks. Take care, until then.