Getting Ahead of Your Own Brain

Welcome to Resolution 1.5

Look, if you’re like most of the people who bothered to make a new year’s resolution, you’ve probably failed at it by now and you probably discussed quitting – at least with yourself, kinda like mind chatter there. And if you’re normal, I use that loosely, you’re probably going to quit this week or next, if you haven’t already.

Welcome to resolution 1.5 – halfway through the first month. The key at this point is to not give up but recognize what you have tried and learn from it. Pretty obvious. So how come, if we know that, we all ordered take out this weekend and pretty much didn’t buckle down?

Well, turns out your mid-brain didn’t get the news. Our mid-brains do our driving. Literally. When we’re learning to drive, we have to focus. Nothing comes easy. We have to concentrate. All of that effort starts forging a connection between your executive function ( Frontal Cortex or Big- C) and your mid-brain. Like the bridge in the picture, information starts flowing between the two. Mid-brain starts to work on how to make all of that activity more efficient. See, it’s not just watching football in there.

Eventually, the information on the bridge is redundant. Mid-Brain has seen it all and it stops paying attention to that information flow, and Big-C stop sending so much data. After all, Mid-Brain has programmed how to turn to left, how to turn right, stop when brake lights come on and tons of other stuff. Big-C goes off to figure out how to pay for the car. Eventually, the connection between the two, degrades. The bridge isn’t maintained and soon, it’s barely usable. At this point, you sometimes arrive at your destination without remembering the drive. Oh, yeah! That!

You can feel the effect of the missing connection just by imagining going to a country that drives on the opposite side of the road. Feel the resistance? Hear that voice that says, you better plan on taking mass transit? That’s Mid-Brain telling you – safe, easy, fun while Big-C flounders around trying to find the connect between itself and Mid-Brain.

Same thing for your resolution. No bridge baby. You gotta build one and it’s going to feel a lot like learning to parallel park. It’s going to be easier if you’re not studying for your SAT’s at the same time. Get it? Constrain yourself when new synapses are required. Focus on the one thing you want, in order to get some wins under your belt at first. It should feel like learning to drive if you’re doing it right.

And here’s the thing, if you try to build the bridge on the fly while traffic is moving, you’re going to have a hard time. So the key to connecting is to plan ahead. 24 hours before you want to take the action, plan it. That means planning what you’re going to eat the day before. Going over your calendar and setting aside time for your tasks, one day ahead.

Sounds Great. How Come It Doesn’t Work?

Next Monday…. the three ways planning goes wrong. For this week, just dust off the resolution, hand your Big-C it’s hard-hat and start planning your dreams … one day ahead of time.