Why can't I make myself do the things that are good for me? The knowing - doing pitfall.
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 202
So this week I wanna talk about why we can't make ourselves do the things that we know are good for us.
How many times have you found yourself saying you know what you need to get done, and it just isn't happening.
Knowing and doing live in completely different parts of our brain. This is why sometimes we don't treat ourselves with the same kind of morals and ethics that we would apply to everybody else. There is probably a fair bit of you that knows that your lower back really needs to do some Pilates, but actually getting down and doing it is a completely different story. I often think about how it is far harder to put your shoes on and get to the gym than it is to go and do 20 sit-ups.
The part of you that has the knowledge that this is something that is good for you is not the same part of your brain that activate standing up off the sofa and going and taking the action.
And this is really important for us to know, right? Because we bully ourselves when we don't take the kind of action that we say that we know we need to do.
But information is not motivation.. It doesn't activate us. But there's such a social judgment on it. I think most of us have been brought up with this idea that "laziness" is a terrible thing that we definitely shouldn't be. And that gap between what we know and what we actually do is exactly the free-fall open pit to which the label of "laziness" can be slapped on top of, especially by ourselves.
It might have been something that you heard a lot when you were younger or maybe that you heard at school. If you're not able to activate that, if that isn't something that you do with ease, then you get labeled as "lazy".
And in a culture that celebrates burnout, overwhelm, and us always being busy, we are celebrated by our doing, then anything that doesn't form any kind of activation action is probably gonna be pushed into that laziness pit.
So to put that into a small little nugget, I would say if you're not burnt out, you're probably considering yourself to be lazy.
Only about 99% of the people in my world think that. It's really, really common: if we are not absolutely burning the candle at more ends than we even know that we possess, we begin to berate ourselves for not being "productive enough".
This gap, this pit that we assign " laziness" to, it's usually a form of protection. There's some part of you that processes any kind of change as dangerous. Your brain loves to keep you sedentary in the cave and definitely not step outside, 'cause there might be bears there.
But it does this in all kinds of sneaky ways. Like, it tells you that you don't deserve something, or that you might get it wrong, or if it's not good enough, you might as well not do it at all. This one's for the perfectionists and the procrastinators all bundling themselves into that hole there.
Your brain's doing its job. It's what it's meant to do. It's trying to conserve energy, 'cause it never used to know when the next energy source would come from. It has no idea that you could go and buy a packet of salt and vinegar Squares at the corner shop.
So it tries to keep us as small as possible, and it does it in the most effective ways as possible. So telling you that you're probably gonna get wrong or people might not like you if you do that thing, that's why you don't do many of the things you know would be good for you.
Now, you might think that doesn't apply, but how many times have you thought, "Oh, do you know what? I could join that yoga class, but what if I look weird in leggings? What if everybody else there is like a Lululemon, super fit flexi bean, and I walk in with all of my rolls and ripples and don't know how to do a shoulder stand? I'm gonna look like a wally. Actually, what I'd probably rather do is see what's on telly tonight."?
These ideas to try and slow us down and get us to conserve energy can be so sneaky. And our brain then doubles down on it by telling us that if we had enough willpower, we'd just get on with it. But we're probably not a "good enough" person to have willpower, so that's why we're staying here. We bully ourselves for not doing the thing that's perfectly human.
Willpower is a finite resource, and you've probably spent most of yours managing 400 other people's emotions today. Let alone navigating all of the life stuff that it takes to run a household.
The question is rarely "why can't you do it?" It is often more useful to try and identify the story that you are making it mean that you are not doing the thing, because that's where all of the juicy information lies. That's where you will find all the stumbling blocks that are preventing you progressing, because it's all the mean things that you say to yourself, and all of the things that you're not willing to feel.
So I might not want someone to judge me because I'm frightened of feeling rejected. Then I've identified that I don't want to feel rejected. Perfectly normal. But where else in my life is that worry of being rejected holding me back?
Maybe I don't want to do something because I know that I've messed it up before, and I was really mean to myself about it then. So what I don't want to feel is like a failure.
Okay, well, if I've got that in my brain, where else am I not trying things because I'm worried that I will be a failure?
A great example of this, I spent years telling myself that I was terrible at maths, and the fact that I told myself that I was terrible at maths made me feel really bad about it. I didn't like feeling bad, and so I've avoided maths, and so therefore I became worse at it. Because I wasn't willing to feel my feelings, I didn't sit down and learn the thing that I found difficult. I had to be willing to feel quite uncomfortable and get a lot of things wrong in order to get better at something.
That's literally how we learn.
And yet we have these narratives in our brain that are like, "If you just tried harder, you'd be good at this already." In order to be good at something, you do have to get it wrong quite a lot of times.
But we cannot get to that point of getting it wrong a lot of times if we don't take the action, and the thing that prevents the action is the stories that we tell ourselves.
Now, this is really interesting to note because most of us think that the reason why we feel bad is because we're not doing the thing, and this podcast today I hope is helping shine a light on the fact that the reason why you're not taking the action is because of the way that you feel about yourself. It is not you feel that way about yourself because you're not taking action.
You have to decide that you're not gonna be mean to yourself, or that maybe you are gonna be mean to yourself and that you're gonna do it anyway.
And that expanding of the window of tolerance is what's going to allow you to explore what emotions you're willing to feel and see what bits of your life you might be shying away from because you don't want to experience that emotion.
Identifying the stories that we tell ourselves behind all of these little hiccups that come along with life, is the way to be able to fast-track yourself away from some of these old spinning patterns where you keep doing the same thing, getting the same results, and being more and more and more unkind to yourself. That is the essence of what self-sabotage is, and that's why I teach how to change that.
So next time you ask yourself why you're not doing the things that you know are good for you, I want you to remember that consistency doesn't come from motivation. It doesn't come from willpower. It isn't about brute force. Consistency comes from lowering the stakes until that thing stops feeling like a test of your character and a test of your own judgment, and it starts feeling as commonplace as brushing your teeth.
When we start having these small habits that are like, "Okay, this feels a little bit uncomfortable, and I'm gonna try anyway," rather than waiting until we have that lightning strike of motivation to take the action in the first place, this is how we build our tolerance and expand our ability for the things that we're able to feel, so we're not trying to shut our life down so that we don't feel particular emotions.
This, I hope, has given you some fair old clues as to why you can't make yourself do the things that you know are good for you. I hope it's been useful, and I'll speak to you next week.
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