While motivation and willpower capture most of the headlines it often gets forgotten why you even need motivation in the first place. The reason most people search for motivation is to get them to do the things they are not doing naturally. Your neural connections are those natural behaviour patterns. I spend a good part of my time with clients getting them to focus on changing their habitual programming.
If you were to develop a set of neural pathways that automatically made you eat healthy foods in moderate amounts while exercising regularly you would not need much motivation at all, impossible? You may think and feel that way, but I can assure you that change is absolutely possible. Read on for how you can do it.
You can train your brain to form new connections, such as developing a liking for exercise, or you can break existing pathways that reinforce bad habits, like eating junk food regularly. Both processes require repetition and consistency to take effect.
When your neural pathways support the right behaviours, achieving your health and fitness goals becomes not just possible but far easier than you might expect. If you never smoked, avoiding cigarettes takes zero effort, but for someone trying to give up it is a constant battle
While willpower can of course help to act as a temporary bridge while you rewire your brain there are other ways to achieve the same result.
When you look at transformation stories, you often notice how people reprogrammed their thinking patterns without noticing. Take, for example, a blog I read about five cyclists who each lost over 45kg (100 lbs). Their success wasn’t just due to following a cycling-based training plan—they became deeply passionate about the sport itself. This shift could only happen by rewiring their associations with exercise.
Despite how powerful this approach is, very few people in the health and fitness space focus on it. Most just tell you to “try harder” or “be more disciplined,” but they never explain how to make results feel natural rather than forced.
Understanding “Good” & “Bad” Neural Pathways
Neural pathways themselves aren’t inherently positive or negative. They simply exist, shaping your actions based on past experiences and repetition. However, we tend to categorize behaviours as “good” or “bad” based on the outcomes they produce.
The most effective way to assess any behaviour is by looking at its opposing counterpart. For example, if you often say, “I eat too much chocolate” or “I drink too much when I go out,” then it helps to consider the opposite behaviour—such as “I choose healthy snacks” or “I enjoy social events without drinking.”
From there, you can evaluate how strong your connections are to each behaviour. If your brain has significantly more associations pulling you toward the “bad” habits, those will dominate. To shift the balance, you need to weaken the undesired connections while strengthening the positive ones.
Ultimately, the behaviour that wins out most often is simply the one with the stronger network of neural connections;
In the above example you would expect the “bad” behaviours of Netflix and eating chocolate to fairly regularly win the battle of the two behaviours. This is due to the large amount of connections to these “bad” behaviours and much less to the “good” ones. If you really wanted to go to the gym or eat fruit you would need to use your motivation and willpower to override your inclined desires for the Netflix and chocolate.
Developing Your Connections
This is done by repeating an action over and over again. Right now, any bad habit you have, or any good habit you struggle with, is simply a reflection of how many times you have or have not repeated it. You do not need to judge, hate or look down upon your bad behaviours. There is nothing wrong with you.
To do this, you must first work out what to do and then set about finding the easiest / most frequent way you can get your reps in.
Neural training gives you more freedom than rigid plans because all you need to do is focus on repeating one action over time, rather than juggling multiple tasks at once.
For example, if you’re trying to get into exercise, just do 5-10 minutes of any movement you enjoy each day until you’ve done 25 sessions. This is much easier than following a rigid plan. To reduce your weekend drinking, you could just stop drinking on Friday or Saturday until you have done 5 days of each day alcohol free. To eat more vegetables you could count how many meals you added them in without giving up any foods.
A common critique is, “But you’re still doing XYZ that’s bad for you,” or “You’r not optimising the plan.” While this may be true, that is just referring to the short term. The neural approach is the long game, you are very subtly changing over time. Before you know it, exercise feels natural, you’re drinking less without forcing it, and you’re instinctively adding vegetables to your meals.
What Does This Mean For You?
If you dislike normal approaches to results, e.g. food plans, exercise programmes and making a big effort you may find a neural training based approach to results enlightening. If you do love plans and fitness drives then adding in elements of this will be game changing to your longer term results.
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