The dark side of familiarity

Your brain is amazing.

From your first moments of life, your brain has been making connections and storing away information that helps you make sense of the world.

Once you learn something and practice it enough, you no longer have to put effort into thinking about it.

It becomes a mental shortcut.

You can do the thing automatically.

We do this walking, driving, and a number of other tasks.

These familiar actions become habits, and they allow us to conserve mental energy for newer tasks that require more cognitive thinking.

They are routines that deliver efficiency in your life.

But familiarity has a dark side.

Just because something is familiar and comfortable doesn’t always mean it is serving you.

In fact, often when you want to make a change, the reason you can’t is that the status quo feels so good.

At the core of this is that your nervous system is calibrated to what is familiar in your life.

For some of you, what is familiar can mean ways that you survived childhood or adverse situations.

Familiarity can mean avoidance.

It can mean hypervigilence.

It can mean over-functioning.

Any strategy that you have relied on to keep you safe, particularly in your family of origin, feels familiar.

The way out of this cycle of familiarity and limiting behaviors is expansion.

To expand your sense of safety.

You must signal to your nervous system that you are safe, you are no longer in that stressful situation that caused the unhelpful behavior in the first place.

This starts as a mental exercise, but it becomes somatic as you use your breath, or even the comforting touch or rubbing your hands together.

Whatever the fear is that is causing the unhelpful behavior needs to be validated, and also updated with new information:

That you’ve got this.

And you can begin to embrace new thoughts that will serve you and your goals.

Photo by Brett Sayles on pixels

What is something that feels familiar but is actually keeping you from being the person you want to be?

Love,

Audrey

In any situation, your brain is scanning your environment for threats so you can either fight or flee to safety.

When is the predictable keep you from what’s possible?