Changing behavior is a ruthless journey. Your brain will fight you at every corner, and most of this battle will unfortunately reside in the space of your subconscious. If you feel like you’re white-knuckling it during your attempts at change, you are missing this one crucial step that we will go over in depth. Today learn what the actual phases of behavior change look like, and how you can conquer change once and for all.

Welcome to Your Living Health, the podcast where we talk about real life strategies to reduce chronic inflammation. Each episode will uncover tools for you to lose weight and achieve optimal health. I’m your host, Carly Lucchesi, I’m a UC Davis trained registered dietitian and I’m also a life coach. Together let’s coach through the science of inflammation, but in a way that is simple, purposeful and fun.

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Hey there! Today, I want to know how each of you are doing. Let me know in the comments section or show notes. What has been your response as you’ve applied these new concepts to your life? Are you beginning to notice symptom reduction? Maybe even more awareness and control over why you’re having symptoms? We are 15 weeks in, and that is enough time for anyone of you to make jaw dropping changes to your life. Where are you at?

Today we are going to focus on understanding TFA cycles and become a little more clear what sneaky tricks your brain uses to keep you falling back into old behaviors. For many of you, change isn’t the hard part. You are more than capable of losing the weight, feeling better, exercising more, whatever is needed. But the problem that you keep coming up against is life getting in the way. You lose the weight, then it just creeps back on. You have an exercise routine, then one day you notice it’s been over a week since you’ve gone. Changing behaviors for the long haul is not the easiest thing, so today my goal is to help you understand what’s going on so that you can focus your energy where it matters.

Let’s start with going over the four stages of behavior change. But this is a much different approach than your classic pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance model. I personally think that explanation of change seems far too clean, don’t you think? It really doesn’t seem to capture the challenge that occurs as you intentionally change your behavior. This model more explains what “should” happen, without divulging what’s it’s actually going to be like. But you and I both know, change is anything but clean and easy. It’s freaking hard! Why is it so hard? Because you’re intentionally rewiring your brain to think different, perform different, perceive different, and live a different life.  Of course it’s not easy, and of course your brain is going to pull you back into old behavior patterns. So let’s talk about what the actual stages of change will feel like, and what’s going on under the surface to pull you back into your old ways.

Behavior change starts with the light bulb moment. This is the moment where you know what’s wrong, you know you WANT to change, and you’ve finally made the decision for when. You don’t know the how, but you probably have some ideas for what your first steps might be. From here, you’re already onto step two. This is the step many of you never make it past. Step two is complete disconnection. This is the phase where nothing makes sense and everything feels intensely cumbersome. Complete disconnection doesn’t happen right away, there is a sort of honeymoon where motivation and excitement are running the show. But we know that doesn’t last, motivation and excitement only last for days, weeks or months for a lucky few of you. But inevitably, along comes the phase of complete disconnection. And this phase feels freaking awful. You don’t have processes nailed down, you don’t have the belief that you can do it, you don’t have full awareness of the tricks of your primal brain, and you’re just seeming to white knuckle it most days. This is the phase where your brain is literally fighting change. You have a hardwired neural network for your current behaviors, and your brain LOVES to conserve energy whenever possible. Change takes effort, your brain will not want to change. This is why it feels so awful! This is where TFA cycle awareness will be very important. I will go over this more later, but I want to finish with the other two phases of change first. Once you get through complete disconnection, you will finally feel the momentum and payoff phase take hold. You have been holding on through the misery of disconnection, and now you have slipped into the sweet relief of new neural connections. Finally, paths have been wired where this new behavior feels normal. When your brain tries to pull you back into old patterns of thinking, you recognize what it’s doing and kindly redirect to the new path. Your journey into this change feels good, even though you’re not yet at your goal. This is where you finally have confidence that getting the end result is inevitable if you just keep going. And the final step in this behavior change model is auto pilot. This is the phase where even your brain is on board with the new you. There has been so much dedication to hardwiring these new neural paths that going back to old ways of thinking feels foreign. You doesn’t feel weird, cumbersome, or tiring to think and act in this new way that has you living into this new person you desired to be. You just are, and it’s wonderful to have arrived. But this is where your brain will trick you into thinking that you’ve done something wrong because there aren’t rainbows and daisies when you’ve reached your goal. But it’s ok, because even with new neural networks and new behavior patterns, life will still remain in a 50/50 balance, and that’s ok. It doesn’t mean something has gone terribly wrong, it means everything is going perfectly right.

So in summary, the actual phases of change are the lightbulb moment, complete disconnection, momentum with payoff, and the final phase is auto pilot.  (LCMA)

Let’s spend a little more time in complete disconnection, because this is where 95% of you lose hope. This phase is brutal because everything is so new, it doesn’t feel right, and your brain will be fighting you at every corner. I want to spend some time talking about what tricks your brain will be using in the background. If you’ve listened to episode 12, you remember that it’s through your thoughts that you create feelings, and from your feelings you have the energy to drive action. These are called your brain’s TFA cycles, and you have about 70,000 of them consciously and subconsciously every single day. During the phase of complete disconnection, your brain will be offering up to you many TFA cycles that no longer serve you. Thoughts in the past that might have served you, but are now more errors than anything. Thoughts like “that sounds good” or “one bite won’t hurt” “I deserve this” create an intense feeling of desire that is easy to fall into the action of indulging in the thing you don’t actually want. When you’re trying to lose weight, you’ve decided ahead of time that you don’t want the cinnamon roll, not even the perfect bite in the middle. But your brain doesn’t know that yet, it just knows that the bite in the center of a cinnamon roll tastes amazing, gives a hit of dopamine, and just sounds delicious. This is the heart of disconnection because you are believing two TFA cycles at the same time that conflict one another. One TFA cycle has you believing the thought “that sounds so good” leading to desire, and another TFA cycle with the thought “I don’t want the cinnamon roll” and the feeling of willpower. When your TFA cycles are in conflict with one another, and your actions don’t match your desire, that is when you will be tapping into willpower. This is exactly what you don’t want to do, because this is what leads to feeling like you’re white knuckling it, or treading water with no hope of rescue. The secret to conquering complete disconnection will be to learn the skill of holding space for both TFA cycles to peacefully co-exist while you gently redirect to the TFA cycle that best serves you. This will first require awareness of the thoughts your brain is offering up that is creating the desire, then a gentle redirect that might sound like “of course a bite of cinnamon roll sounds good, but today we are not going to have any and that’s ok.” A bridge TFA cycle is very valuable to hold space for the truth that the cinnamon roll does sound good, and hold space for the truth that you don’t want one. You will have to sit with an urge driven by your brain as it tries to get it’s fix of brain chemicals. That’s ok, they usually only last 5-10 minutes, and if you keep the bridge TFA cycle consciously on repeat, that urge will quickly dissipate. Complete disconnection will be filled with countless subconscious TFA cycles trying to get you back into your old behaviors. And for those unconscious to these thoughts, permanent change will be impossible. You will remain in an energy of willpower and white-knuckling it. You will likely get results, but these results are built on a foundation of resistance to your true desires instead of building pathways supporting new desires. Creating bridge TFA cycles is how you will change your behavior from the level of desire upward. If we focus on changing what you desire, any result is possible and sustainable.

If you’re ready to change, I encourage you to head over to yourlivinghealth.com today and book your free consult. If you want 1:1 support, an in in-depth dive into your body’s microbiology, and coaching though behavior change, you’re not going to want to miss out. Space is limited. But as always, thanks for listening today, and learning how you can reduce your own inflammation through intentional top-down and bottom-up changes. I’ll talk to you next week, bye!