I'm fed up with a lot of self-help material out there, so here is my take on it. Things don't have to be complicated to be effective. We all want to improve certain things about ourselves. We all try and most of us fail again and again. Those that succeed are deemed lucky and special. Those that fail are normal and acceptable.
Your worst enemy when you are trying to change yourself is ... you. We have to be careful with this common knowledge. On one hand, it's easy to externalize the blame. People are assholes, nobody cares about you, life's unfair. It's also easy to internalize. I'm not good enough, I'm a failure, I'm weak, I'm fat, I'm unealthy. Negative spirals of doom and gloom are common too. Been there, done all that.
What's really stopping you from becoming better is homeostasis. It's your body's property to restore your last stable state and maintain your identity. It's machinery, not a personal flaw. It's still a part of you, though, and it's not other people. Unless you are a dualist, your mind is part of the system and is greatly affected. Your mind has homeostasis on its own. It's why positive and negative feelings go away, you revert back to normal.
The desire to change is not enough. It's just a fleeting thought through your brain. You may feel like you are already different, but it's just an illusion because the moment the thought ceases, you revert back to your old self. This is a very crucial time. You need to record things and make a quick plan. No matter how long you maintain it, it ALWAYS ends. These pockets of inspiration should serve to restart your process of change if you fall off the tracks.
The reason that thoughts don't do much on their own is that our thoughts are fleeting. The structure and mechanics of the brain don't change. Once the fleeting thoughts are gone, you are left with the same old body, same old brain. This is why it's so important to make a physical mark of change, so that you can start from there, for when your thoughts revert back to normal. So, the goal is to change physically.
Once you begin the change, it feels great for some time. You feel different and you are on your way. Its stability is an illusion. In a way, your brain is simulating what it would be like to be a changed brain. You need to maintain and regain this state as much as you can for your brain to actually remodel itself. But at first, you are only successful at temporarily changing your brain chemistry. When you pause, homeostasis is already doing its business to undo you. And oh boy, does your body try hard or what! This is where the real game begins. Your body aches and feel iffy, you feel like staying home and doing nothing, you feel sad, tired and lazy, you feel doubt, and so on. The gimmicks are many, the goal is one - stop you from doing this big overhaul. At this point it's very easy to give in to these desires of your body but you have to remember that it's just trying to bring things back to normal, and it's trying everything it can, but normal is not what you want.
It's part of the game and to some extent you cannot avoid this. I believe the best way to overcome the barrier is to achieve victory by attrition over your body. Don't give a chance for your body to work on getting you back to normal. It's really important to get the ball rolling and gain momentum. If you want to be strong, train every day. If you want to sing well, sing every day. If you want to be a nicer person, do it every day. But what about over-training? Screw over-training. It's over-training that you want. Your body needs a very good reason to change or it won't. Train once, twice, three times a day if you need to, just do it and stick to it. Obviously, there are precautions. Start small.It's better to do 10 minutes a day every day than 70 minutes once a week. But why is this better? Think about it, if you train 3 times a week, for example, you are giving your body 4 days to push back at you. If you are poor and you want to be rich, would you work 3 times a week, or every freaking day? If you are not working on your goals every day, you are fighting an uphill battle. Train every day and you'll exhaust your body's tricks. It'll just give up and play along for the time being. I personally felt amazing during my 9 weeks of intense weight training. It was somewhat scary to see my body recovering every time. As a concrete example, suppose you want to go to the gym every day. Everything that contributes towards your gym session is positive (brings you closer to your goal) and everything else is negative (brings you back). It can take 1/2 hour to plan your session, 1/2 to eat a proper meal that will help with the session. The session, including changing can be 1 or 2 hours, say. The post workout hormones can work their magic for a few hours (say 4?). Well, that's about 5-6 hours out of 24 that bring you closer to your target.
"Doing" is more important that "Doing well" at first. You have time to add the "well". Don't plan much yet. The window of opportunity is short-lived and you might miss the train. That's why in most cases, you should just start doing something every day. Form may be bad, exercises may be dumb, recovery might be bad, diet may be bad. That's ok, because once you start, you'll have plenty of opportunity to improve things as you go. Hit the ground running. Start easy and light and adjust as you go. It's a very organic approach.
So, once you've done this for a month, you are good, right? Wrong. You seriously think that a month is enough to undo years of habituation to another life? One thing is for sure, you need to keep it up for some time. After x number of days all you've achieved it is a working status - you've kept this lifestyle for x number of days and you can keep it up indefinitely, if you want to. But it still takes effort and a constant reminder. And then it takes much more time to physically ingrain it in you and make it a part of you. The moment you stop, your body will work against you, unless you've done it for long enough, so that the thing is part of you. Where's the end though? It's when you notice that you haven't thought about your newly-formed habit for so and so days/weeks/a month. Suddenly, it's a part of you and you cannot not do it.
In the end, people do change as result of life events and habits. It's usually a slow change. If you put on 100 pounds over 20 years, that's only 5 pounds a year. Your body weight probably fluctuates by more than 5 pounds every day. Big change happens slowly. However, it doesn't have to take long, until you perceive change. Getting twice as strong may be far into the future but getting 1.1 times stronger is easy. You only need to effectively only nudge your body and mind a little bit every day in the right direction, and over time the transformation will be significant. This is why people become fit/fat, relationships win/fail, careers become established. The stability of a transformation is proportional to the amount of time it prevails. In other words, getting fit is difficult, but staying fit is not.
Your worst enemy when you are trying to change yourself is ... you. We have to be careful with this common knowledge. On one hand, it's easy to externalize the blame. People are assholes, nobody cares about you, life's unfair. It's also easy to internalize. I'm not good enough, I'm a failure, I'm weak, I'm fat, I'm unealthy. Negative spirals of doom and gloom are common too. Been there, done all that.
What's really stopping you from becoming better is homeostasis. It's your body's property to restore your last stable state and maintain your identity. It's machinery, not a personal flaw. It's still a part of you, though, and it's not other people. Unless you are a dualist, your mind is part of the system and is greatly affected. Your mind has homeostasis on its own. It's why positive and negative feelings go away, you revert back to normal.
The desire to change is not enough. It's just a fleeting thought through your brain. You may feel like you are already different, but it's just an illusion because the moment the thought ceases, you revert back to your old self. This is a very crucial time. You need to record things and make a quick plan. No matter how long you maintain it, it ALWAYS ends. These pockets of inspiration should serve to restart your process of change if you fall off the tracks.
The reason that thoughts don't do much on their own is that our thoughts are fleeting. The structure and mechanics of the brain don't change. Once the fleeting thoughts are gone, you are left with the same old body, same old brain. This is why it's so important to make a physical mark of change, so that you can start from there, for when your thoughts revert back to normal. So, the goal is to change physically.
Once you begin the change, it feels great for some time. You feel different and you are on your way. Its stability is an illusion. In a way, your brain is simulating what it would be like to be a changed brain. You need to maintain and regain this state as much as you can for your brain to actually remodel itself. But at first, you are only successful at temporarily changing your brain chemistry. When you pause, homeostasis is already doing its business to undo you. And oh boy, does your body try hard or what! This is where the real game begins. Your body aches and feel iffy, you feel like staying home and doing nothing, you feel sad, tired and lazy, you feel doubt, and so on. The gimmicks are many, the goal is one - stop you from doing this big overhaul. At this point it's very easy to give in to these desires of your body but you have to remember that it's just trying to bring things back to normal, and it's trying everything it can, but normal is not what you want.
It's part of the game and to some extent you cannot avoid this. I believe the best way to overcome the barrier is to achieve victory by attrition over your body. Don't give a chance for your body to work on getting you back to normal. It's really important to get the ball rolling and gain momentum. If you want to be strong, train every day. If you want to sing well, sing every day. If you want to be a nicer person, do it every day. But what about over-training? Screw over-training. It's over-training that you want. Your body needs a very good reason to change or it won't. Train once, twice, three times a day if you need to, just do it and stick to it. Obviously, there are precautions. Start small.It's better to do 10 minutes a day every day than 70 minutes once a week. But why is this better? Think about it, if you train 3 times a week, for example, you are giving your body 4 days to push back at you. If you are poor and you want to be rich, would you work 3 times a week, or every freaking day? If you are not working on your goals every day, you are fighting an uphill battle. Train every day and you'll exhaust your body's tricks. It'll just give up and play along for the time being. I personally felt amazing during my 9 weeks of intense weight training. It was somewhat scary to see my body recovering every time. As a concrete example, suppose you want to go to the gym every day. Everything that contributes towards your gym session is positive (brings you closer to your goal) and everything else is negative (brings you back). It can take 1/2 hour to plan your session, 1/2 to eat a proper meal that will help with the session. The session, including changing can be 1 or 2 hours, say. The post workout hormones can work their magic for a few hours (say 4?). Well, that's about 5-6 hours out of 24 that bring you closer to your target.
"Doing" is more important that "Doing well" at first. You have time to add the "well". Don't plan much yet. The window of opportunity is short-lived and you might miss the train. That's why in most cases, you should just start doing something every day. Form may be bad, exercises may be dumb, recovery might be bad, diet may be bad. That's ok, because once you start, you'll have plenty of opportunity to improve things as you go. Hit the ground running. Start easy and light and adjust as you go. It's a very organic approach.
So, once you've done this for a month, you are good, right? Wrong. You seriously think that a month is enough to undo years of habituation to another life? One thing is for sure, you need to keep it up for some time. After x number of days all you've achieved it is a working status - you've kept this lifestyle for x number of days and you can keep it up indefinitely, if you want to. But it still takes effort and a constant reminder. And then it takes much more time to physically ingrain it in you and make it a part of you. The moment you stop, your body will work against you, unless you've done it for long enough, so that the thing is part of you. Where's the end though? It's when you notice that you haven't thought about your newly-formed habit for so and so days/weeks/a month. Suddenly, it's a part of you and you cannot not do it.
In the end, people do change as result of life events and habits. It's usually a slow change. If you put on 100 pounds over 20 years, that's only 5 pounds a year. Your body weight probably fluctuates by more than 5 pounds every day. Big change happens slowly. However, it doesn't have to take long, until you perceive change. Getting twice as strong may be far into the future but getting 1.1 times stronger is easy. You only need to effectively only nudge your body and mind a little bit every day in the right direction, and over time the transformation will be significant. This is why people become fit/fat, relationships win/fail, careers become established. The stability of a transformation is proportional to the amount of time it prevails. In other words, getting fit is difficult, but staying fit is not.
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