River of Misery

Before we decide to make change in our lives, we start in the pond of misery, its shallow and kinds yucky, its not a super comfortable place to be, but its manageable because it's where we've been hanging out for some time.

Then comes the River of Misery

When we decided to make a change our brain goes into protest mode. 

That pesky part of the motivational triad....

reducing effort!!

Any change we make will take effort and our brain protests because it thinks that effort may cause us harm. Our primitive brain thinks that the energy we need to make the change is better saved just in case we need to outrun a lion later, or to go hunt for our next meal.

It makes sense our brain would think this, however, we know better. We have a developed prefrontal cortex that can override that natural primitive man and use that higher brain to achieve our goals.  

The river of misery is that place where we've started the process to change, but we haven't created new neural pathways yet. We have to keep going, we have to celebrate those wins, and recognize our progress. Until we can eventually achieve our goal and climb out of that river on to the sunny sandy river bank! 

Let's do this!!