Whether you want to change your life completely or simply improve it in certain areas like your relationship or career, for example, it is not an easy thing to do. If it was, we’d all walk around with everything we ever wanted.
As it is, many of us walk around wishing things could change, we hope that we can have something different and there are certain things that we believe are impossible to change.
We have to look a little at how our mind and body works to understand why it so difficult to change something about yourself.
Change can be overwhelming
Think of your body as an ecosystem. Its main job is to keep you alive and safe.
Firstly, it keeps you alive by taking care of the essentials. Your heart beats without you paying attention. Your blood takes oxygen to your muscles. Your digestive system ensures that you get the energy you need to move, think and act.
Then, it also keeps you safe by letting you know when trouble is coming.
When you are in a dangerous situation, alarm bells start going off in your amygdala which is the part of your brain responsible for detecting fear and preparing you to either fight it out or run for your life.
It sends a delightful selection of chemical concoctions, into your bloodstream to charge you up and prepare you to defend yourself.
Here is the problem though. We can become addicted to all the neurochemicals that get released by the brain and flushed into our system. Not necessarily because they make us feel *good*, but for another reason altogether.
The situations that your amygdala responds to include many different things, from being stuck in traffic, to public speaking. It can be triggered by your boss, your partner, authority figures, even receiving a bill in the mail.
And, maybe most surprising, even just thinking about any of these things activates your stress response.
If you’ve ever felt yourself getting angry all over again when telling the story of how someone was rude to you / almost caused you to have an accident / refused to help you, you’ll know what I mean.
Our brains are don’t care if something is happening out there (in traffic) or in here ( remembering the rude driver). The amygdala gets triggered whether you experience a stressful situation or whether you simply think about the stressful situation.
You are what you think
Our thoughts lead to actions, which leads to experiences and emotions which in turn reinforces our thoughts.
You might have heard the expression neurons that fire together wire together.
You can say that your brain keeps on working in the same way, and follows the same thinking patterns, and keeps on releasing the same neurotransmitters.
Now, when we are constantly living in a high state of stress, and we continually get bombarded with neurochemicals, after a while our body starts to think *that is the way it should be*.
As soon as you try to change your behavior, your body goes into high-alert because you are trying to change the status quo here. The amygdala gets all alarmed again and you are back in the stress-cycle.
You are effectively changing the inputs of your ecosystem and the body and mind will do what it takes to keep you alive and safe and get the system back on track.
So you sabotage yourself, you don’t keep your resolutions or you give up on the goal you set yourself.
Change from the inside out
Can you see, this is NOT your fault because you didn’t try hard enough.
You are playing against a giant who is set up to win from the start, I mean it’s your survival we are talking about here.
If you just tried to change what you were doing, without changing anything inside of you, can you see how it never will work?
When we try to change, our body will do anything to get back to the status quo and the emotional make-up of our old self.
In other words, if you want to have something change for you, for example like having better relationships, or stopping procrastinating, or no longer being anxious in social situations, it is no good if you just try harder.
Trying harder using the same ingredients (your thoughts and actions) will simply just give you more of the same.
Changing the way you think is not easy to do. The way that we see ourselves and the world around us, has been formed by our experiences, our environment and the things we were told by others.
It is often so deeply weaved into our being, that we can’t even see how we think or perceive the world.
Change yourself completely
This is where EFT is such a powerful tool. It can help to collapse those beliefs and perceptions that we don’t even know we have, but which are limiting us all the same.
Remember the amygdala that gets triggered when we are in a stressful situation? Research done over a 10 year period by Harvard Medical School, showed that stimulating certain meridian or energy points in the body sends deactivating signals to the amygdala. Basically, the activity in the areas of the brain that is associated with fear decreases.
During EFT, we stimulate the same energy points as in the research. In effect, we are changing the stress response of the body which then has an influence on the way that we think and behave.
One of the unique things about EFT is that you can do it yourself, meaning anyone can learn how to do it. But, very much like working with electricity, anyone can learn how to change a plug, but when you are rewiring your house, you’d better get someone who has experience!
If you are interested in working we me to help dismantle the thoughts and behaviors that you feel limit you, simply fill in the contact form, or send me a message via Facebook