KNOW YOUR SELF UNDERSTAND HOW YOU THINK. CHANGE WHAT YOU DO.
www.12MinutesToday.com
Why ’12 Minutes’?
You are reading this because you want to change your life in ways that are important to you, whether that’s breaking bad habits, dealing with stress, making a major change like losing weight or quitting smoking, boosting your willpower, making better use of your time, or being more creative. To successfully make these changes and make them stick, you need to understand how your mind works. This book explains why your brain has a natural tendency to work against you when you decide to change your behavior, and how you can work around that to make the changes you want to make. At the same time, it’s likely you’re a busy person who can’t just take hours out of each week to learn more about how your mind works and then apply that to your own life. But, while you may not be able to find hours to dedicate to such important
challenges, you can surely find 12 minutes a day. The great news is that 12 minutes is enough. If you spend just 12 minutes a day – but make sure you spend 12 minutes every day – you can make rapid progress. You can learn more about how your mind works and put that knowledge to use. That is why the 12MinutesToday program has been designed to give you the information you need, experiments to undertake and practical guidelines that will take you – on average –some 12 minutes a day. This book is the foundation on which all the 12MinutesToday programs rest. Once you understand how your mind works, you will find it much easier to make the changes to your life that you want to make.
For more information on 12MinutesToday programs visit www.12MinutesToday.com
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Contents 12MinutesToday: The Know Your Self ebook 01
Your most valuable asset: Your ability to change ...................... 5
Changing what you do is difficult – but it can be done!
02
We all have two minds .................................................................... 6
You have a Doing Mind and a Thinking Mind, and this determines how you think, feel and behave.
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Six insights into how your minds work ........................................ 10
What you need to know to successfully shape your behavior, and maintain those changes.
04
How you can shape your behavior ............................................... 26
The three keys to successfully shaping your behavior are training your brain, managing your memories, and changing the context for your actions.
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Where to from here: 12MinutesToday online ............................. 31
Programs you can use to address specific changes you want to make.
About the author ...................................................................... 33 You are invited to download, print, copy and share this ebook. There are no restrictions on its use except the obligation to recognize its source (12MinutesToday) and author (Dr Peter Steidl) if you use only sections of this publication. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the author has used his best efforts in preparing this book, he makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaims any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should
consult with a professional where appropriate and before altering your circumstances based on or because of anything contained in this publication. The author shall not be liable for any loss or any other damages, including but not limited to liability in tort including for negligence, special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. For information email Dr Peter Steidl at peter@12minutestoday.com Copyright Š 2018 Dr Peter Steidl
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12MinutesToday: The Know Your Self ebook The person you should know best of all is yourself. Yet most of us actually know very little about ourselves, especially what drives our actions. This is why it’s so hard to shape our behaviour, whether that’s making difficult changes like losing weight, quitting bad habits, eating better, exercising more, making better use of our time at work and at home, or learning important skills like dealing with chronic stress or increasing our willpower. To turn bad habits into good ones, to follow through on good intentions, to
enjoy life more and do more, you need to first know your Self. This introductory book includes a number of experiments you can do to discover first-hand how your mind works. To get the full benefit from the book you need to invest time and effort into doing these experiments. They don’t take long, they are enjoyable – and they are the best way to understand why you feel, think and act the way you do. This understanding will help you to build a more successful and enjoyable life for yourself.
Know Your Self gives you a solid foundation for undertaking other 12MinutesToday programs that address specific challenges you may be facing, such as: √ The 12MinutesToday Stress program helps you to manage and even eliminate chronic stress √ The 12MinutesToday Willpower program offers practical ways to boost and maintain your willpower when you need to get things done or stick with what you planned for. √ The 12MInutesToday Bad Habits program helps you to break the bad habits that hold you back and develop new, desirable ones. √ The 12MinutesToday Creativity program shows you how to boost your creativity so you can find new solutions to old problems. √ The 12MinutesToday Weight Loss program presents an approach based on breaking down the barriers that prevent you from losing weight and, in particular, from maintaining your weight gains. It is a weight loss program without a diet! When you have finished with the Know Your Self eBook you are reading now, have a look at the other programs that will help you to address your own specific challenges and goals. You can find information on these programs on www.12MinutesToday.com
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1. YOUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET: YOUR ABILITY TO CHANGE Do you find it difficult to change? To lose weight, eat more healthily, get fit, be more organized, focus your attention on the most important tasks, keep your home or work space clean and tidy, stay in touch with family and friends, develop new skills, be more assertive, or whatever else it is that you would like to change?
Here are some of the difficulties people experience when trying to change their behavior. You have probably experienced at least one of these when trying to make a change to your life in the past.
√ I am constantly in a hurry and don’t have the time to really focus on making a change. √ I am too tired to make a change and stick with it. √ I am under a lot of stress, and when I’m stressed I tend to fall back into old habits. √ I think the change through thoroughly, the reasons why I should change, the benefits I can gain, and I am convinced that changing is the best thing for me to do - but after a while I still fall back into my old, unwanted behaviors. √ There is already so much change around me - in my work, my family life, with my friends, my financial situation - that I can’t concentrate on the change I would like to make. √ I commit to making a change, but one day I realize I have gone back to where I started from. √ I have tried and failed so often before that I have stopped expecting to successfully make the changes I want. √ I am too stressed to be able to work out what I need to do to make this change. Of course, everybody faces their own particular challenges. But the good news is: if you are struggling to make changes, you are not alone. In fact, many of us find it very difficult to make even the simplest changes to our lives. We may have the very best intentions but, for most of us, most of the time, it’s near impossible to turn these intentions into reality. Did you know that more than 90 per cent of people who go on a diet don’t reach their weight loss goal or, if they do reach it, put most of the weight back on again within a year? Or have you noticed how nobody seems to keep their New Year’s resolutions, even though these resolutions are presumably about something that is important to them?
Do you know that many gyms only survive financially because many of their members hardly ever turn up? How can you become the person you want to be, or live the life you want to live, if you can’t manage to change your own behavior? When you understand how your mind works, you can immediately appreciate why it is so difficult to change. And having this insight allows you to find effective ways to make a change and then stick with it. After all, unless you understand the true challenges you are facing, you’re just dealing with the symptoms - such as being overweight or disorganized or procrastinating - rather than the underlying causes. |5
2. WE ALL HAVE TWO MINDS
The experience of people from all walks of life suggests that it is not simple at all to make a positive change and then maintain the desirable new behavior. Why is this the case? Not surprisingly, it all comes back to the way our brain works.
The history of the human mind Humankind supposedly dates back some 4 to 5 million years. We may not be particularly proud of our distant ancestors’ brain power, but the biological development of humans is critical to understanding why it is difficult to change your behavior in significant ways. Our distant ancestors did not have frontal lobes that allowed them to analyze, plan, interpret and accumulate tacit knowledge (the kind of knowledge that every normal human being accumulates over their lifetime but is difficult to communicate through words.) Rather than being able to analyze, these early humans were driven entirely by their nonconscious Doing Mind that used intuition and learned from experience alone. In 6|
other words, they learned to repeat actions that led to positive results and not to repeat others that resulted in undesirable outcomes. It was simple stimulus-response that shaped their behavior. Keep in mind that these distant ancestors lived in a hostile environment. In such an environment you have to focus on immediate threats and opportunities and react quickly. There was every chance of becoming the breakfast of a saber-toothed tiger or being trampled by a woolly mammoth while contemplating what you might do after dinner tonight. Mind you, our ancestors couldn’t have done that anyway, as they did not have frontal lobes and thus had no cognitive thinking ability. But an important outcome of this historic legacy is that today we – all of us - are still primarily reactive when it comes to immediate opportunities and threats. Over time, changes in the living environment together with natural selection led to changes in the human body, the most obvious being the ability to walk upright and the associated changes to the musculoskeletal system.
So it may seem reasonable to assume that the brain would adapt too, accommodating the new demands posed by an increasingly more complex living environment. However, this was not the case.
The brain is the only part of the human body that did not change its physiology or function in response to environmental changes, but simply grew new parts on top of the old ones – with the old brain continuing to operate as it was originally designed to, while the new brain complemented existing capabilities to allow humans to deal with new challenges.
At first glance this makes good sense: humans did not lose their highly useful ways of behaving in intuitive ways, allowing them to react with lightning speed. Nor did they abandon the builtin reward system that encouraged them to repeat any action that proved useful by releasing a bit of dopamine (the ‘feelgood’ neurotransmitter – more about this later!). They also kept their focus on immediacy and relevance. Yet at the same time, they were now equipped with a new brain that allowed them to think consciously about the world they lived in, their own place in that world and what the future might bring.
behavior, intuition, non-verbal communication and more. The Doing Mind tends to take over whenever we are: √ automatically repeating a behavior √ stressed √ tired or exhausted √ under time pressure √ suffering from information overload √ not particularly interested in the matter √ unsure how to decide.
This looks like a marriage made in heaven. But there is a critically important barrier to making this collaboration between the old and the new brain smooth and seamless: these two brains work in parallel. They are not integrated. The old part of the brain is what I call the Doing Mind. Here we find memories of past sensory stimulations, emotions, rules of thumb, stereotypes, archetypes, associations, images, spontaneous |7
Your Doing Mind carries out a vast range of activities without you being aware of it, including: √ Your Doing Mind manages your body – all the organs that are so necessary to your well-being and even survival. √ Your Doing Mind manages your moods. You can’t decide to be in a good or a bad mood - it just happens. Your Doing Mind decides what your mood will be. √ Your Doing Mind activates a number of automatic responses. As an example, think about when you feel stressed. You don’t decide to feel stressed, it happens when your Doing Mind generates a stress response to something that is happening. And you can’t decide to not be stressed when that happens either. Only your Doing Mind can stop the stress response. √ There are many things you do that you are not consciously aware of. For example, you can brush your teeth without thinking “First I need to wet my toothbrush and then I take the cap off the toothpaste and squeeze some onto the brush…”. Rather, the required actions come automatically, in the sequence that you normally do them. Your Doing Mind is managing these behaviors, which are known as habitual behaviors - the actions you do regularly, always following the same routine, without having to consciously think about what you are doing or what you need to do next. The new part of the brain is the Thinking Mind. It allows us to think by providing working memory to process verbal messages, to evaluate options, and to plan for the future. Even when the Thinking Mind gets involved in a decision, this decision will be strongly influenced by the Doing Mind because it has decided which memories to store and, therefore, what information the Thinking Mind has to work with. The Doing Mind happily makes intuitive judgments that drive behavior, while the Thinking Mind is in the dark as to what the Doing Mind is up to. At the same time we find the Thinking Mind making all sorts of decisions about the future without the Doing Mind being impacted by it. In short, whatever is going on in your Doing Mind is like a black box: you don’t know what’s happening. You can look at the outcomes – such as your behavior – and try to reconstruct what might have happened in your Doing Mind to lead to such an outcome. But when you do this you are most likely inferring some rational thought process that your Doing Mind is not capable of.
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At the same time you might decide to do something but end up not carrying through, simply because your Doing Mind – that drives your behavior - was not even aware of your decision. One of the questions that immediately arise is which mind is going to win if there is a conflict. Let’s say you are doing something out of habit (Doing Mind) and decide one day to change your behavior (Thinking Mind). For example, you may live a sedentary lifestyle and collapse onto the couch when you get home from work but, encouraged by reports that exercise prolongs and adds to the quality of people’s lives, you decide to become more active rather than spend your evenings lounging around. Unfortunately, the cards are stacked against you! We know that the vast majority of people who want to make positive changes to their lives don’t succeed. They often can make a change to start with, but most people are unable to maintain their desired new behavior.
The reason is that their behavior is driven by their Doing Mind. They make a decision with their Thinking Mind to make a change, but their Doing Mind is not affected by this decision. (Remember, these are parallel brain circuits, operating in isolation from each other. Your Thinking Mind literally doesn’t know what your Doing Mind is up to). When such a conflict arises it is almost always the Doing Mind that wins. In fact, I could have said ‘always’ without qualifying it, because whenever we do succeed in making a change it’s really only because we managed to get our Doing Mind on board. The reason so many programs that are designed to help people change unwanted behaviors fail is that they generally assume that change can be driven by the Thinking Mind. So they encourage you to set goals, make detailed plans, monitor progress carefully – all activities that do not impact on the Doing Mind that is really driving your behavior.
conflict between the Thinking and the Doing Mind, the Doing Mind is likely to win because it is the one driving your behavior. There is, however, another factor that almost guarantees the victory of the Doing Mind - it is much faster and more powerful. Here are the facts: the Thinking Mind can process 40 bits of information per second, while the Doing Mind manages 11 million bits. No contest, really! This is not surprising when you consider that nature has had some 4 to 5 million years to refine and develop the Doing Mind, but only a small fraction of that time to advance the Thinking Mind. Perhaps in a few million years – should humankind still be around – we will have a much more powerful Thinking Mind. But today, the reality is that the Doing Mind drives what we all do. Given that the Doing Mind is so fast and powerful and drives our behaviour, we need to understand more about it so that we can develop ways of influencing it.
But let’s go back to the fundamentals: I have suggested that when there is a
Summary of key points √ The old brain or Doing Mind, which is some 4 to 5 million years old, comprises of the emotional part of the brain, including hard-wired responses and instincts. It is largely reactive. It is also responsible for habits. This old brain is what allowed humans to survive in a hostile environment and to slowly build a leadership position in the natural environment we shared with other species. Importantly, we are not aware of what’s going on in our old brain nor can we instruct it to do something. √ What we usually think of as making us special – our ability to plan, to look ahead, to analyse and to develop a rational argument – are relatively new capabilities. These new capabilities come from an area of your brain located in your frontal lobes, and these have only developed over the last 80,000 to 100,000 years. This is our Thinking Mind and we are aware of what our thought processes when we use it. √ The Doing Mind is the fastest and most powerful of the two when it comes to shaping our behavior. This is why we find it so hard to make a change and stick with it – we may decide to change with our Thinking Mind, but unless we get our Doing Mind on board we are extremely unlikely to succeed.
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3. SIX INSIGHTS INTO HOW YOUR MINDS WORK It should be clear by now that you have to deal with the way your mind works if you want to change your behavior, regardless of what sort of change that might be. The more you understand about how your mind works, the more likely you are
to develop effective ways to make the changes you want to make. The following 6 insights provide you with a solid foundation for making a change and then making it stick!
INSIGHT 1: Your memories influence how you see the world and what you do Our memories are a very important influence on what we do, because we are designed to repeat behaviors that turned out to be rewarding in the past. So let’s take a closer look at memories, how they are formed and how they impact on your behavior.
What is a ‘memory’? You have almost certainly experienced a situation where you tried to recall something, like the name of a person you have met or the title of a movie you have seen, but simply couldn’t retrieve it. Sometime later, without even trying, the name you were searching for suddenly came to you. What does this tell you? Essentially this means that there are memories in your mind that you are unable to access at a certain point in time. It follows that there is a difference between the memories stored in your brain and the memories you are able to retrieve by actively calling them into your Thinking Mind. In other words, if you can’t recall a memory it does not mean that this memory does not exist. It should also be 10 |
clear that all your memories reside in your Doing Mind until you happen to call them up. Importantly, the memories that reside in your Doing Mind impact on how you feel, think and act, regardless of being able to retrieve them or not. So when I use the term ‘memory’ I am including all memories that have been stored by your Doing Mind – regardless of whether you are able to call them into your Thinking Mind (i.e., consciously remember them) or not.
Memory formation Memories are a funny thing: they define us to a great degree. Without memories we would not recognize anyone or anything we have seen before. We could not learn anything. We could not compare something new to what we have experienced before. We simply could not make sense of the world. Given how important they are, it makes sense to give some thought to how memories are formed. Undertake the following thought experiment to experience for yourself.
EXPERIMENT 1 Ideally, undertake this exercise when there are other people in the same place with you such as at your workplace, on the bus or train, a public space like a waiting room, station or airport, a café, or any other place with people around. Here is what you should do: Get comfortable, and then: Close your eyes (without first trying to remember what you see). Then, with your eyes closed, try to remember the details of the place you are in and the details of the other people in that place. What is the room like – the colour of the walls, seats, tables; the pictures or posters on the walls; where the windows and doors are; what is playing on the video screens? What are the people wearing – the colours, fabrics, and style of their clothing and accessories? What do these people look like - their hairstyle and colour, facial features, body size and shape? What are they doing? What expressions do they have on their faces? Try to recall as many details as you can. When you have finished open your eyes, look around and check what you have missed.
Most likely, you were not able to recall much detail, and certainly not everything that you had seen. Does this mean that your senses didn’t pick up and transmit these details to your brain? You needn’t worry; your senses are automatically transmitting everything they pick up. However, your mind selects only a small range of what is transmitted to your brain to place into your memory. The important issue is not how much you could remember when you undertook this experiment, but the fact that you had no influence over what your mind did – or didn’t – place into memory. The whole process took place in your nonconscious Doing Mind, with your Thinking Mind having no role to play. You didn’t get involved in making any decisions about which memories to form, you didn’t set priorities with respect to what should be stored in your memory and what should be abandoned. In fact, you were not consciously involved at all.
Whatever you see, hear, taste, smell or touch – that is, everything your senses pick up - gets sent to your brain, and your Doing Mind has to work out what to place into your memory and what to discard. Despite the enormity of this task you are not consciously aware of it happening. In fact this process, gigantic as it may be, does not impact on your ability to do other things, to think about what you will have for dinner, to recall a movie you have seen or discuss the latest news with your partner or a colleague. While you are doing these things your Doing Mind deals with the constant deluge of sensory inputs, deciding for each one if it should be placed into your memory or not.
Your brain creates stronger memories for negative experiences
What does this mean?
Your brain is designed to create stronger memories of negative experiences than for positive ones.
Your Doing Mind processes all the sensory inputs it receives, which is a complex activity – imagine having to deal with millions of sensory inputs every minute!
This of course made sense when humans lived in a hostile environment, as learning from and remembering threats and tricky situations was essential for survival, | 11
while having enjoyable memories was nice but not essential. In today’s world, however, this means that we all too easily feel guilty, less than confident or unable to cope, simply because our negative experiences are imprinted so much more strongly than our positive ones. Understanding this is key to dealing effectively with failure without becoming overwhelmed or discouraged.
Memory patterns
informing it about what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Your brain – or more specifically, your nonconscious Doing Mind - then decides what to place into memory and what to discard. But how are these memories organized? Is each memory a distinct and separate piece of information? Conduct the following thought experiment to answer this question:
So far, we have established that your senses send messages to your brain,
EXPERIMENT 2 Close your eyes for a minute and think about Coca-Cola (or another brand you know well, perhaps Apple or Nike).
In your mind, you may have seen a Coke can or bottle, the Coca-Cola logo or a Coke advertisement. You may have recalled the taste of Coke or an occasion when you consumed it. Whatever it was that flooded into your Thinking Mind is obviously something you have been exposed to in the past. The totality of all these past memories forms a memory pattern that represents Coke in your mind. Your brain doesn’t store information in discrete bits but rather in chunks, which are then organized into higherlevel chunks. These chunks (or memory patterns) can be extremely complex and typically include masses of qualitative information such as emotions. Because past experiences are stored in chunks, it is possible for your brain to quickly compare new patterns with existing ones. In fact, your brain is so good at
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pattern recognition that there is no supercomputer in existence today that could compete with it. And, given that your brain also allocates meaning and emotions to sensory input, it is doubtful that there will ever be a supercomputer that could compete. It is also worth knowing that your brain is constantly reviewing memory patterns and creating new linkages. This happens even while you are asleep. Your Doing Mind is busy 24/7, cleaning up and making sense of what it has stored away.
Triggering memories We have explored how memories are created. But how are they triggered? Why do certain memories suddenly spring to mind without you actively trying to retrieve them?
You have most likely had experiences similar to the ones outlined below:
EXPERIMENT 3 Did you ever have memories pop into your mind without searching for them? Tick any of the following situations you have experienced: √ A particular smell reminds you of a holiday or of your childhood. As soon as this happens, images related to this particular situation or time in your life start surfacing in your mind and you remember fragments or even large parts of these experiences. √ You taste something that reminds you of another eating experience, leading to memories of where or with whom you had that meal. √ You see a person who looks familiar because they remind you of somebody else and immediately memories of that other person flood your mind. √ You are in a bad mood and suddenly negative memories of past events or experiences pop up in your mind. √ You feel cold (or hot) and memories of occasions in the past when you felt particularly cold (or hot) come to mind.
What this tells you is that a memory can be triggered when other memories it is linked to are activated.
CONCLUSIONS At this stage we can draw some important conclusions. Your Doing Mind determines what to place into your memory and which memories to link together to form memory patterns. When an element of a memory pattern is activated – that is, you become aware of it - this is likely to also activate other, linked memories. Let’s say you always have a cigarette when you step out for a break at work, or you always have a late night snack while watching television. You may decide to change this unwanted behavior. But when you step out for a break or sit on the couch watching television after dinner your brain activates the desire to smoke or eat, simply because these occasions are linked to your – unfortunately pleasurable – memories of smoking or eating. The critical point is that all this happens in your nonconscious Doing Mind. You may not even be aware of this chain reaction and simply become aware that you feel like a cigarette or a late night snack. Given that these events play out in your Doing Mind it stands to reason that you need to find a way to impact on your Doing Mind rather than just make a conscious decision to give up smoke breaks or late night snacks.
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INSIGHT 2: Dopamine is what drives you to act We have explored how the Doing Mind drives us to act in certain ways. But why do we act at all? Why do we continue to do things we have decided to no longer do? Why do we find it so hard to stop unwanted behaviors? Now that we understand so much about how the brain works, the answer to these questions is no great mystery. The basic drivers behind such behavior have been around for millions of years, and it is natural for every one of us to seek out the things that provide us with pleasure and to avoid anything we dislike. Over thousands of generations humans have been quite successful in shaping the world to allow us to have more of the pleasurable and much less of the uncomfortable, largely by controlling and regulating most things that cause us anxiety and discomfort. Thanks to these efforts, many of us today live in an environment where we have reasonably easy access to water, food, energy, health care, education and social welfare. Many more people are on the way to having these things. Unlike our forebears, who faced the constant risk of hunger, extreme weather conditions with little shelter,
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attacks by animals or other humans, illnesses and accidents without any medical care, we live a relatively stable and secure life. (This is obviously not true for the half of the world’s population that lives in poverty and at high risk, but you, the reader, are not likely to be one of them.) It should be obvious that our distant forebears did not develop a masterplan some million years ago in which they set out to build today’s environment over thousands of generations. But what happened was arguably more effective than a masterplan: the brain was designed to entice us to make progress with a feel-good hormone called dopamine, a substance it releases to give us a feeling of happiness when we achieve something that is important to us or when we experience something we enjoy. Dopamine, also known as the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter, is designed to make you seek happiness. However, you will most likely find it difficult to experience happiness over an extended period of time. I have just said that you are designed to seek happiness, so how is this possible?
The problem is that you are not designed to be happy but rather to seek happiness. Dopamine is what gets us to work overtime to get a promotion, to invest untold hours into improving our skills or competence at a sport or in some other field of endeavour, and to seek more material wealth, a better job, more social status, and so on. But dopamine also drives us to repeat behavior we enjoy. There are two things that boost dopamine’s effectiveness: First, a dopamine release doesn’t depend on an actual event but can be triggered by the expectation of a rewarding experience. I am sure you have experienced situations where you expect something positive to
happen – or at least there is a chance that it may happen. Maybe you have applied for a job, bought a lottery ticket, sent a message you might get a reply to, waited for confirmation of a pay rise, or eagerly anticipated a forthcoming holiday. While in all these cases nothing had actually happened you probably experienced a dopamine release that got you excited and feeling great. The second important point is that the more dopamine you experience the more you seek an even bigger – and more frequent – dopamine release. A great example here is social media (if you are not active on social media you can skip this example). Consider the following questions:
EXPERIMENT 4 Are you active on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, or Tumblr? If yes, tick any of the following statements that apply to you: √ Do you regularly check your social media site(s), perhaps even more often than you intend to? √ When you do so, do you feel a sense of anticipation that somebody might have sent you a message or that you received a like, comment or response to one of our posts or a message you sent? √ Do you feel good when you discover that this has in fact happened? √ And do you feel good when you post a message or picture or story, or when you comment on something somebody else has posted? √ Do you feel some tension and almost a need to visit your social media site(s) when you don’t have access for a while? √ Do you spend a lot of time on social media by choice (i.e., not as part of your job), even if you suspect you should probably spend less time doing so? If you have ticked any of these boxes you are experiencing the beneficial impact of a dopamine release when engaging with social media!
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When a person receives (positive) messages from their social media ‘friends’ or network their brain releases dopamine and this makes them feel good, as does reading their own posts, getting lots of likes, or ending up with a large number of ‘friends’ or followers, to mention just some of the many ‘rewards’ the internet has in store for us. Computer games work in a similar way: they invariably offer rewards that are only released once a particular skill level has been reached or when certain challenges have been addressed. However, the key is that they create an expectation of something not just rewarding but also
surprising. A great game will tell you that you will get new weapons or be allowed to enter a new ‘world’ once you reach the next level, but it won’t provide you with details. This way, the game player knows there will be a reward, but the lack of detail lets their imagination run free, naturally creating more excitement and anticipation than if they already knew exactly what the new gaming level offers. Many players will willingly go through long periods of monotonous, repetitive tasks to finally get these new rewards – but while they complete these boring tasks they can dream of the rewards awaiting them!
CONCLUSIONS The fact that we can trigger a dopamine release by simply creating expectations or contemplating something positive in the future is important, because this provides us with a pathway to our Doing Mind. You can use your imagination to get your nonconscious Doing Mind to release dopamine, which in turn will make you feel good. This can be an important element of your change strategy. More about this later.
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INSIGHT 3: You are hard-wired to take shortcuts You already know that your nonconscious Doing Mind can’t analyse options and can’t make rational decisions. It will look for any cues that suggest a particular option is better than another, because it reduces risk or leads to a more pleasurable experience. Remember also that the Doing Mind is very much focused on the here and now, i.e., looking for immediate rewards. Add to this the fact that your Doing Mind is much faster than your Thinking Mind that would be able to
go through an elaborate decision-making process, and you can see that the Doing Mind is much better placed to shape your behaviour by selecting shortcuts to either avoid risks or gain benefits in the shortterm. Think about the many automatic responses you have learned that allow you to avoid making a decision about what to do. Undertake the following experiment:
EXPERIMENT 5 Tick any situations you have experienced yourself: √ Somebody says hello and stretches out his hand. Without thinking, you shake that hand. √ The telephone rings. You automatically answer it. √ You go through a door with a person close behind you. Without thinking you hold the door just for a second to let the other person grab hold of it. √ (If you are a man) A woman approaches a door and you open it. √ Somebody says ‘How are you?’ (or whatever the standard, meaningless greeting is in your culture) and you respond automatically with a positive word such as ‘good’ or even ‘great’. If you have ticked any of the boxes above you have experienced situations where you are using learned behavior as a shortcut, eliminating the need for you to think about what you should do.
Because we are hard-wired to take shortcuts, we tend to save energy by avoiding an exhaustive comparison and selection process for most of the decisions we make, especially the less important ones. Experiments have shown that we are more likely to walk away from an offer that demands extensive consideration rather than make the effort of thinking through all the options. One classic experiment tested two approaches to selling jam in a supermarket. In both
instances the store staged a taste test, but in one case shoppers had the choice between 24 jams, while in the second setup only 6 jams were offered. Not surprisingly, more shoppers stopped and took part in the taste testing when the wider range of jams was on offer. However, when it came to buying, i.e., making a decision about which jam to actually purchase, the second taste testing was much more successful, | 17
generating five times more sales than the taste test with 24 jams that stopped more shoppers in their tracks. It would have required too much processing effort to
make a decision from amongst 24 options and many shoppers simply walked away after tasting rather than deciding which one to buy.
CONCLUSIONS When we are attempting to change our behavior we need to develop shortcuts that eliminate the need to think. A highly effective way of achieving this is to create habits. When we repeat the same behavior again and again we first develop a sense of familiarity, which eventually leads to the creation of a habit. Once we have a habit that determines what we do we don’t need to think about it at all. As you would expect - given that habits don’t require any thinking – they are driven by the nonconscious Doing Mind. This means that they are very powerful and hard to break. Often, undesirable behavior is habitual in nature which is why it is so difficult to make – and maintain – the changes we want to make.
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INSIGHT 4: Your Thinking Mind is quite limited I have talked quite a lot about your Doing Mind but have largely ignored your Thinking Mind. Let me correct this oversight. Here are a few experiments that allow you to experience your Thinking Mind’s performance.
Use your Thinking Mind to instruct your Doing Mind The key question is: Are you able to tell our Doing Mind what to do? Try the following thought experiments to answer this question:
EXPERIMENT 6 Using the power of your (conscious) mind, instruct your Doing Mind to forget that the first day of the week is Monday. Once you are confident that this memory has been erased, ask yourself what the first day of the week is called. If you can’t remember you have succeeded!
Obviously, I did not expect you to succeed with this experiment. You can’t tell your Doing Mind to erase a memory. But can
you at least ask your Doing Mind not to activate a memory, i.e., not make you think about something? Try this experiment:
EXPERIMENT 7 Tell your Doing Mind not to make you think of a dog for the next five minutes.
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There are some ways to achieve this – but they would require rather drastic measures such as rendering yourself unconscious. Just trying not to think of a dog is unlikely to work - in fact, the attempt to not think about something is likely to trigger the memory in your mind. These experiments show that the Thinking Mind can’t ‘instruct’ the Doing Mind to do (or not do) something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Thinking Mind is less powerful than the Doing Mind when the two are in conflict. Undertake the following experiment to gain an appreciation of your Thinking Mind’s capabilities:
EXPERIMENT 8 Do the following concurrently, i.e., at the same time: √ Say every third letter of the alphabet, backwards and then forwards. √ Start with the number 30, then multiply this number by three, then divide it by two and keep doing just that (i.e., multiply the number you get by three, then divide by two, then multiply the new number again by three, then divide by two, and so forth) and write the resulting numbers down on a piece of paper. √ With your spare hand, tap a melody.
I would expect you to fail when you attempt this experiment. Why? Because your Thinking Mind is slow and very limited in its capacity. Many people believe they can multitask, i.e., share their attention between two or more tasks concurrently. Neuroscience research has shown that this is not the case. When ‘multitasking’ the brain simply switches from one activity to the next, and back again, and every time this switch takes
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place time is lost as the mind needs to adjust to the new activity. We typically think of humans as smart because of our Thinking Mind’s ability to analyze, project into the future, rationalize, explore and consider, read maps and understand time. Yet your Thinking Mind is actually quite slow and limited compared to your Doing Mind.
Who wins the battle of the minds? Your Doing Mind has an enormous capacity and is incredibly fast and powerful. As you already know, your Doing Mind reviews all sensory inputs that reach your brain and decides which to put into memory. It adjusts and links memories together. It manages all your organs. It also creates moods and feelings. And it does all that concurrently. At the same time you have seen your Thinking Mind struggle to do just three basic things at the same time. There is clearly no contest here. Your Doing Mind is much more powerful than the Thinking Mind: it has a much greater capacity and is much faster.
It follows that your Doing Mind will process sensory inputs and assign value and meaning to them long before your Thinking Mind gets involved. This is important as it means that your Doing Mind will decide the importance, relevance and meaning of anything you hear, feel, touch, taste, smell or see. And this initial assessment will impact on any deliberations your Thinking Mind might undertake. In other words, your Doing Mind will frame the experiences you have even when your Thinking Mind gets involved. We can therefore safely say that you need to focus primarily on your Doing Mind if you want to successfully make a significant change to your behavior.
CONCLUSIONS When you plan to change your behaviour, your conscious decision is not going to have much impact on what you do if your Doing Mind pushes you to continue with the unwanted behavior you want to change. Further, detailed planning that involves setting goals and preparing a plan detailing what you will do every day or week and what you plan to have achieved at the end of each week is not likely to work because this process will not impact on your Doing Mind. In fact, one of the main reasons for many change programs failing to deliver is that they rely on detailed planning, ignoring the fact that your Doing Mind will continue to drive you to repeat your unwanted behaviour.
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INSIGHT 5: You think in images and emotions Here is a brief exercise:
EXPERIMENT 9 Close your eyes and think about what you had for breakfast.
What came to your mind? Words that described the food you ate? Or images that showed what you had? If words came up in your mind, you should see someone about it – that’s not good at all! But most likely you would have seen an image. I could just as well have asked you to think about something really good that happened in your life, or something really bad. You would find that after a few minutes you start feeling good (or, in the latter case, bad).
This happens because your brain, unlike a computer, stores not only information but also feelings. These sensations and emotional reactions are very powerful, and they are recalled just like other memories. This is why you may start to feel angry or tense when you think about a particularly bad experience in your past. You don’t just recall the information, but you recall and therefore feel the emotions associated with that experience.
EXPERIMENT 10 Think back to a novel you have read and greatly enjoyed and a novel you didn’t enjoy at all.
Would it be right to say that, for the novel you enjoyed, you could actually ‘see’ the characters and what was happening in your mind while you were reading the novel, while in the latter case you didn’t? Stories are powerful when they allow the listener or reader to see the story and
feel the emotions of the characters. Even better, when they can see themselves in this story. But stories are not at all effective when they are simply received as a sequence of words that don’t activate any emotional involvement.
CONCLUSIONS You can use images and emotions to reach and influence your Doing Mind. This will work especially well when you imagine a story that shows how much you enjoy life once you have succeeded in changing your behavior. 22 |
INSIGHT 6: Your brain responds to the demands you make on it I don’t know you, but I do know something about you – I know that you are smarter than your grandparents were.
How do I know that? Dr Flynn, a New Zealand University Professor, analyzed IQ scores for up to 80 years back covering some 14 countries. And there was one consistent feature that stood out: his analyses showed that, across all countries and at all times, there was clear evidence that every generation is smarter than the previous one. So there is a very good chance that you are smarter than your parents, who are smarter than your grandparents, who are smarter than your great-grandparents, and so forth. It is also very likely that your children are smarter than you.
But why are we all getting smarter? The reason is that our brain adapts to the demands we make on it. Today’s children play more demanding games, live in an environment that is more complex than the one we grew up in, and are encouraged - if not forced - to learn things we had never heard about when we were
their age. And dealing with this everincreasing complexity and challenge leads to an increase in intelligence scores. Here are more examples showing how the brain adapts to demands: London taxi drivers must pass an extensive training course (known as ‘The Knowledge’), which requires them to memorize not just all the streets in central London but also all the landmarks and businesses on them before they are granted a taxi license. Brain research has shown that London cab drivers have a larger area of the brain allocated to spatial tasks than other people, because they often call up maps of London in their mind as they work out the best route from A to B. More specifically, the parts of these taxi drivers’ brains associated with spatial reasoning are larger than those in other adults. But it’s not just what you do that shapes your brain and, thereby, your abilities, but also what you imagine. Harvard Medical School undertook the following study:
Imagine three identical rooms with a piano in each of them. √ One group of research participants was taken into their room and given intensive piano lessons for five days. √ The second group was instructed to simply stay in their room, but not to touch the piano at all. √ A third group was asked to imagine they were practicing the piano, but again not to touch the piano at all.
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Not surprisingly, the second group – who simply sat in the room - showed no change to their brain at all. When the brains of the participants were scanned after these five days, the researchers found that those in the first group, who were actually given piano lessons, showed structural changes in the area of the brain associated with finger movement. So their brain had adapted to accommodate the new, regular and
intense demands made on it. But what was really surprising was that the third group – who only imagined playing the piano – showed changes in their brain structure just like the first group, although these changes were not as pronounced. Another study showed that imagining physical exercise will strengthen muscles – not as much as actually doing the exercises, but there is still a notable change in muscle strength.
Here are a few more examples: √ jugglers have more neurons allocated to tracking spatial movements √ people who play memory games develop greater connectivity between brain regions dealing with memory and attention √ the brain area responsible for motor control of the right index finger has been found to be significantly larger in blind subjects who are Braille readers than in sighted individuals. √ a Chinese study of expert divers found brain areas associated with skilled motor control enlarged. √ an Australian study of skilled racket-sport players found that brain areas associated with the racket arm were larger than in a matched group of non-athletes. √ a similar study has shown that violin players have a larger area of the brain allocated to managing the movement of their fingers 24 |
The degree of change is proportional to the intensity of their training and the quality of their training.
CONCLUSIONS Our brain supports regular and intense efforts by allocating more neurons to frequently carried out tasks, thus supporting our mental as well as physical ability to learn something. Our brain will also react when we only imagine making these efforts, and it will react just as it does when we actually do something, though not quite as strongly. There is an even more important insight resulting from our understanding of brain plasticity: if we want to develop our brain we have to make demands on it. We have to challenge it. We are unlikely to trigger changes in our brain if we only engage in activities that are effortless and familiar. Your brain will happily go through the motions, but as there are no real demands made on it, it won’t allocate more neurons to that task. Your brain will change itself only when you challenge it with something that is difficult – like learning something new or working on a capability you are really pushing yourself to improve. This is when your brain allocates more neurons to the task, strengthens connections between neurons, or adds new connections – doing whatever it can to help you succeed. You can ‘train your brain’. You can develop new capabilities, get better at what you do, learn different ways of doing things. While you may think that your brain is limiting you, it is actually you who is limiting your brain. This is an important point: you can develop stronger willpower; you can learn to eliminate chronic stress; you can learn to manage your Doing Mind more effectively; and much more.
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4. HOW YOU CAN SHAPE YOUR BEHAVIOR
So far we have looked at how humans came to develop two separate parts to their brain – the older Doing Mind, that operates your autonomic bodily and mental systems without your being aware of it, and the newer Thinking Mind that can think, plan and rationalize. These two minds work in parallel, but independent of each other.
We have also looked at seven key insights into how your mind works: 1. Your memories influence how you see the world and what you do. 2. Dopamine is what drives you to act. 3. You are hard-wired to take shortcuts. 4. Your conscious Thinking Mind is quite limited 5. You think in images and emotions. 6. Your brain responds to the demands you make on it.
We now have a solid foundation for looking at the three aspects that are critical to successfully changing behaviour and maintaining that change: 1. Training your brain 2. Managing your memories, by waking up positive memories or creating new ones 3. Creating or changing the context for your memories and behavior.
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4.1 Train your brain If you couldn’t ‘train your brain’ you couldn’t learn anything. You couldn’t develop new skills, get better at a sport, adapt at work – in fact, you would be lost. You can expand your brain’s competencies by repeatedly demanding more from it, whether that’s pushing an existing capability further or trying something new you haven’t done before. In fact, many research studies have shown that it is not our brain that holds us back, but we hold back our brain. If we don’t push and demand more, our capabilities won’t expand. If we do, we can grow them! We have already looked at some examples of how the brain allocates more neurons to tasks it is frequently asked to perform. It also strengthens the connections between these neurons to allow for faster communication between them. Your brain will also react when you only imagine these efforts, and it will react just as it does when you actually do something, though not as strongly. There is an even more important insight resulting from our understanding of
neural plasticity: if you want to develop your brain you have to make demands on it. You have to challenge it. Your brain will change itself only when you make new demands on it with something that is difficult, such as learning something new or working on a skill you are really pushing yourself to improve. This is when your brain allocates more neurons to the task, strengthens connections between neurons and adds new connections, doing whatever it can to help you succeed. You are not limited by your brain’s capabilities, it is actually you who is limiting your brain. You can ‘train your brain’. You can develop new capabilities, get better at what you do, learn different ways of doing things. This means that not only are you perfectly capable of learning new and complex skills, you can also develop stronger willpower, you can learn to eliminate chronic stress, you can learn to manage your Doing Mind more effectively, and much more.
4.2 Manage your memories Memories are critical drivers of your behaviour, but they are not under your direct (conscious) control. We have seen that: √ Memories comprise of images and emotions, not words. √ Your Doing Mind decides which memories to create – you are not aware of this process and have no conscious influence over it. √ Your Doing Mind links different memories together, which is why one thought may trigger other thoughts (e.g., a particular smell can remind you of another occasion when you experienced the same scent). √ Primes can be used to activate memories (e.g., a warm drink may activate a memory of a cosy time around a fire place with people you like) and this can create a particular mood or feeling and lead to certain actions. √ When you activate a positive, emotional memory you are likely to get a dopamine release that makes you feel good. | 27
The power of visualization We have laid the foundation for understanding visualization, which is essentially about imagining the benefits of what you plan to do in the future. By imagining these positive outcomes you will generate positive images in your mind together with positive emotions – that is, you will feel good about it. As you know, this will impact on your Doing Mind. First, there is a fair chance that positive memories will be created, especially if you visualize the same benefits more often than just once. Second, the positive emotions will trigger a dopamine release, and because your Doing Mind wants to repeat this feeling it will want you to realize your plans so it can experience the dopamine release that will come with success. Now imagine you want to change your behaviour, starting today, but you won’t feel any benefits for some time to come. Or, even more difficult, your benefit is to avoid something bad happening. An example would be to decide to stop smoking to lower the risk of cancer. Your benefit will be to not get cancer rather than to experience something positive. Situations like these are not a problem when it comes to your rational Thinking Mind. But how do you get your Doing Mind on board when there are no immediate benefits? Simple: You have to imagine all the benefits you will gain from stopping smoking, including how you can live a happy life when you are old. Let me summarize: You already know that your Doing Mind doesn’t understand logic and reason. To get it on board you need to allow it to experience emotional benefits and, given that these benefits are not yet real, you have to imagine them. 28 |
This kind of visualization is widely used in sports psychology. In sports psychology, the focus is on imagining the emotional rewards of winning. In your case it is a matter of imagining the emotional rewards of succeeding at making the particular change you want to make, and then sustaining your new behaviour.
Visualization guidelines It is important that you don’t just imagine the actual outcome you want to achieve, but rather the positive emotions you will feel when you achieve that outcome. These are the rewards your Doing Mind is seeking and will experience as a result of the changes you are planning to make. Ideally, these rewards should be embellished as much as possible. You should go into great detail when imagining how you will feel when you tell a friend about your new job, or how they will admire you for having lost weight or given up smoking (or whatever it is that you are working towards), how you will feel when you are finally free of a burden, how you will feel on top of your life when you’ve taken charge of your own destiny, or whatever your particular desired outcome is. If you find all this a bit fanciful, consider that your imagination can trigger the same processes in your brain that take place when you experience the ‘real thing’. And remember also that imagining something really sad makes you feel sad, while imagining something positive and happy lifts your spirits. In these and other cases your brain is tricked into releasing the same dopamine it would normally release in a real world situation. Once dopamine has been released, the impact is much the same, whether the situation is real or imaginary.
4.3 Create or change the context There are typically many aspects of a situation or environment that can’t be changed, but some changes may be enough to have a drastic impact on how successful you are when attempting to change your behaviour. Remember that your Doing Mind reacts to the situation or environment you are in, whether real or imagined. Positive situations such as a beautiful landscape or being with a person whose company you enjoy can lead to a dopamine release because your Doing Mind registers a positive, emotional
experience. Your Doing Mind will then encourage you to seek the same experience again. If you cannot actually engineer a positive environment or stimulus, then visualization can create a positive situation or environment in your Doing Mind. And finally, you can use primes and triggers to create situations that impact on how you feel, think and act. The primes and triggers can trick your Doing Mind into cooperating with your Thinking Mind in changing your behaviour.
4.4 Summary: This is what happens when you are trying to change When you think about your life and decide that you want to change something, you use your Thinking Mind. You might work through the reasons for the planned change and even draw up a detailed plan. In other words, you are ‘thinking it through properly’.
than we should, and when we dislike physical exertion we give a low priority to exercise. This is really quite natural – but it doesn’t help to curtail our growing waistlines.
However, your Doing Mind doesn’t listen to reason and doesn’t much care about what you have decided. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that your Doing Mind doesn’t even know what you’ve decided as it can’t follow your rational argument.
When you decide that you ought to change your behaviour you are essentially working with your Thinking Mind. You are being rational. You are deciding to change because you are convinced that there are good reasons for doing so.
Being intuitive, emotional, and driven by dopamine, your Doing Mind will try to take you in a direction that is enjoyable or at least avoids any negative experiences - regardless of the good (rational) reasons for not pursuing that direction - or it may simply encourage you to stick with your old behaviour because it requires less effort. Unfortunately, in today’s world this drift towards enjoyment, indulgence or habits is often a cause of the very behaviour we now want to change. For example, when we enjoy food we tend to eat a bit more
To summarize the problem:
But ‘good for you’ typically doesn’t beat ‘enjoyable’ as far as your Doing Mind is concerned, and your Doing Mind is the more powerful of the two.
There are two specific issues that make it difficult for you to make a change and then stick with that change: First, the reward for the new behaviour tends to be delayed. For example – if you decide to learn some skills that would lead to new work opportunities, you might start with reading some relevant books or enrolling | 29
to study a course. Unless you happen to enjoy these activities in their own right, you won’t experience any tangible benefits until much later when you finally secure an exciting new job because of your newly acquired skills. Your Doing Mind is not likely to accept that you are giving up something enjoyable, like watching a movie, going out with friends or reading a trashy novel without any immediate benefits – that is, without some immediate feel-good reward. Your Doing Mind doesn’t listen to reason. It simply wants to feel good. And it wants to feel good NOW! Second, the benefits are sometimes intangible. Deciding that something is ‘good for you’ may encourage you to make a change to avoid something bad happening later in life. In other words, your reward will lie solely in making it less likely that something bad will happen. As far as your Doing Mind is concerned, this is a more than unsatisfactory situation because there is no promise of enjoyment. You may succeed at first in changing your behaviour, because you feel good about being able to make a positive change. You feel in charge, competent, maybe even a little righteous, because you are succeeding at making a change you believe is important. But as soon as this initial selfcongratulatory phase is over, your Doing Mind starts to seek the enjoyment it used to get from the old behaviour. It wants to eliminate the frustration your new regime is causing. When you reach that point, your Doing Mind will try to take you back to your old ways of behaving and, given that it is much more powerful than your conscious Thinking Mind, there is every chance that it will succeed! All this means that any intended change resulting from a rational decision to change your behaviour is quite ineffective 30 |
in getting your Doing Mind on board. And your Doing Mind can easily sabotage your best efforts because of its dominant position. I expect that this lines up with your own personal experience: Whenever you have made changes that resulted in immediate pleasure with no down-side, you most likely found it easy to make those changes. For example, you may have found it relatively easy to make time for a television series you want to watch regularly, or to get off the couch to pick up the take-away dinner you enjoy so much. But when sacrifices need to be made without the compensation of immediate rewards that your Doing Mind demands, it is difficult to make and sustain the changes you have decided to put in place. So you can easily find all sorts of excuses when it comes to, say, studying or going to the gym instead of watching TV or surfing the internet. The most difficult changes to make are those that are sensible from a rational point of view, but that require you to change your behaviour without offering strong, immediate emotional rewards. These are the changes most people struggle with. Building on your understanding of how your brain works, let’s now look at how you can increase your chances of success when you plan to change your life! Usually the most important first step is to eliminate the barriers that hold you back. Stress, a lack of willpower and bad habits are often high on the list of these barriers. The next step is to build on positives – that is, to develop your capacity to find innovative, new ways of reaching your goal. Boosting your creativity can help with that. 12MinutesToday programs to address these challenges are available online, and more programs will be added over time.
5. WHERE TO FROM HERE: 12MinutesToday ONLINE
The Know Your Self program provides neuroscience-based insight into how your brain works and how it determines how you think, feel and act. This understanding is fundamental to successfully making positive changes to your life, and is the foundation for all the 12MinutesToday programs. As well as the subscriber-only Know Your Self online program, there is a short introductory Know Your Self ebook available free to download. This program outlines seven key factors in successfully preparing for and managing a significant change in your behavior. It is an invaluable tool for anyone planning to address a difficult behavioral change such weight loss, quitting smoking, improved work and study habits, or any major lifestyle change. Chronic stress can take a lot of the joy out of life. Your health suffers, you feel exhausted, irritable, find it hard to focus, and make poor decisions. It doesn’t have to be like that. Our new learnings about how the brain works mean we can now develop sound approaches to limit the impact of chronic stress, or even eliminate it altogether. If stress holds you back, undertake the 12MinutesToday Stress program! Willpower is often misunderstood: people believe that you’ve either got it or you haven’t. But today we know that everyone can train their willpower to make it stronger. The 12MinutesToday Willpower program teaches you how to train your willpower so you can apply it when it comes to important life challenges. It also helps you to identify and eliminate activities or situations that drain your willpower and make it harder for you to stay on track.
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Habits are managed by your nonconscious Doing Mind, and that makes them extremely hard to change. That’s a good thing when it comes to good habits, but your brain works against you when you want to break bad habits. The 12MinutesToday Habits program helps you understand how habits develop and how they are triggered, so you can successfully change bad habits into more positive behaviors. Creativity is becoming a hugely valuable skill in our highpressured, fast-moving world. Creativity helps us to look at situations differently and find new opportunities or new solutions to problems and changes. The 12MinutesToday Creativity program helps you to strengthen your creative powers, based on an understanding of what happens in your brain to trigger creative solutions and innovative ideas. We all know that most weight loss programs don’t work, especially when it comes to keeping weight off longer term. The 12MinutesToday Happy Weight program takes a different approach to other weight loss programs because it is based on an understanding of how your brain can work against you when you’re trying to lose weight. The 12MinutesToday Happy Weight Program helps you to identify and break down the barriers that hold you back, replacing the rational approach that is typical for most weight loss programs with an approach that focuses on finding your Happy Weight without a diet. New 12MinutesToday programs are constantly in development. You can find the list of current program at www.12MinutesToday.com All our programs are available to subscribers for one all-inclusive, affordable subscription fee.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Peter Steidl has lived in Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia and has carried out assignments in more than 20 countries on five continents. He has an MBA and PhD and worked with Universities in Austria and Australia before taking up a career as a consultant, presenter and writer. Over the years he met with more than 20,000 people face-to-face in small discussion groups and in-depth interviews. He has spent time with home makers, students, unemployed people, professionals, unskilled workers, volunteers, managers, executives, entrepreneurs, farmers and board members; young and old people; people in developed and developing countries; men and women. Always interested in new experiences, he has been a Temporary Advisor to the World Health Organization, represented Australia at the European Center for Social Science Research and Documentation, represented Austria as Honorary Consul for South Australia and the Northern Territory, and served on government boards and committees as well as on the boards of notfor-profit organizations.
majority of people struggle with the very same issues. Importantly, these issues are typically created by what we call progress - progress that has created a world that is very different to the one humans lived in for millions of years. This rapid change in the environment, in the challenges we face, and the goals we set ourselves is creating problems because our brains are not designed to deal with them. Our brains have been fine-tuned over millions of years to help us survive in, and adapt to, a hostile physical environment, and much unhappiness, frustration, resignation and even ill-health stems from the dissonance between the way our brain works and the challenges we face in today’s world. The 12MinutesToday program series represents an attempt to explain why it is so difficult for so many people, who are clearly better off and smarter than their forebears, to experience happiness and satisfaction, and to provide practical steps than can be taken to move towards a more satisfying and happier life by taking charge and making positive changes.
Having been exposed to different cultures, people, situations and experiences, he realized that at the end of the day the vast
Peter can be contacted via email: peter@12MinutesToday.com
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