Change for good
If you think that being healthy is synonymous with stability, then you are going to have to think again. “Allostasis” is the medical term used to describe your body’s adaptation process. It comes from the root words “stasis”, meaning “stability”, but it combines it with the prefix “allo” meaning “variability”. The idea here is that through change and mutability, stability is achieved. Even that stability though is not permanently fixed, it is just a functional state that exists for a given moment in time. Your body might seem solid enough to you, but that appearance is an illusion of your focus because your physical body is built on change. Right now, as you read this, you are exhaling atoms of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that a moment before were locked inside solid matter.
Every part of your body is in a constant state of turnover and regeneration. What, for example, might be the most solid, unchanging and stable part of your body? Your bones? At this very moment, your bones are in a process of turnover. Cells called osteoclasts are digging up old bone and cells called osteoblasts are laying down new bone. Even your bones are in a state of constant change. Your skeleton is replaced every three months. Every other organ is also in a state of simultaneous renewal and destruction. In one month, your entire skin is renewed, and every five days the lining of your stomach is renewed.
Change is inevitable, it is a deep part of you. And, yet, we fear it. In many ways, we are educated to be constant, and change is often seen as a negative thing. How many times have people said to you in a critical way, “You’ve changed!” Similarly, “changing your mind” is seen as a sign of weakness, although it could more properly be seen as evidence of strength. In fact, the ability to change your mind is essential if you want to live a life of vitality and health. Your brain likes change, and it values newness.
In one study on how the mind operates, people were given drops of water and fruit juice sometimes in a predictable sequence and at other times in a varied pattern. The researchers measured brain stimulation and found that preference for water or juice had no effect. However, at times of unpredictable drop delivery, there was a stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centres for most subjects. It was concluded that the brain is primed to note unpredictable events. Maybe at a deep level, your primitive brain knows that change is the only constant and it actually enjoys it. It’s just the darned newcomer (in evolutionary terms), the conscious cortex, that gets in the way and demands stability.
Yet, even as we fear change, the absolute necessity of it has been recognised by philosophers for centuries.
New dogs
The Roman Seneca, who worked for some time as a tutor of the notorious Emperor Nero and lived from 4BCE to around 65CE, said, “What will surprise you is not that you must learn how to live but that you must learn how to die.” Seneca is not talking about the end of life here, instead he is saying that to live well, you must be able to allow parts of yourself to die. Attitudes, prejudices and ways of thinking must be surrendered. You must allow them, a part of you, to die. If you allow this death, a birth of something else can occur. Life itself is change. Stasis is true death.
So, paradoxically, death must be part of your life. The good news is that you can change, and you are never too old to change. While the rest of your body stops growing long beforehand, your brain keeps developing into middle age. Your brain’s white matter continues to increase in volume until your late 40s. The parts of the brain that keep growing are the temporal and frontal lobes — the parts that make you human. Not only that, but the connections between neurons that result from learning can continue to be created anew as long as you live and as long as you keep doing things that will use and challenge your brain. Old dogs absolutely can learn new tricks.
It is one thing to intellectually accept that you need to change, but that is not necessarily enough to bring change into your life.
Change your frame
Dr Edward Miller, when he was dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University said, “If you look at people after coronary- artery bypass grafting two years later, 90 per cent of them have not changed their lifestyle. Even though they know they have a very bad disease, and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can’t.”
What is going on here? Surely people will embrace change when not making change has death as a consequence, won’t they? The theory goes that for a few weeks after a heart attack, most patients are scared enough to do whatever their doctors say but after a while death becomes too frightening to think about, so denial comes into play and they go back to their old ways.
After all, these people lived the way they did as a day-to-day strategy for coping with their emotional troubles. The question then becomes how do you motivate yourself to embrace change if just knowing that you have to change is not enough?
Research tells us that the long-term concepts that structure how you think are encoded physically in the synapses of your brain. It is like a rail network: trains of thought in your mind tend to run along the same tracks on a regular basis. Although there are millions of tracks available, your thoughts will tend to run along the same few lines because that is where the neural pathways are set up.
Since your mental framework is hardwired, you need deliberate strategies to help reframe your thoughts.
Emotion sickness
To really foster change, you have to access emotions. For instance, instead of trying to motivate heart patients with the fear of death, those people could be inspired with the “joy of living”. This tactic has been tried successfully by Dr Dean Ornish, clinical professor of medicine at the University of California and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute. Ornish focuses on convincing people they can feel better, not just live longer, by making lifestyle changes. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. Ornish says, “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.” His programs bear the proof of this philosophy as 77 per cent of people involved maintain their lifestyle changes and prevent the need for further heart surgery.
Create yourself a mindset for change: forget the fear of letting go of your old habits and focus on the joy that making change will bring.
