So there was a man called Maxwell Maltz, an American cosmetic surgeon and an author of an unusual book called “Psycho-Cybernetics”. The title is tantalizing because as a root it carries the Greek word kybernḗt(ēs) – helmsman, steersman, the one who steers the ship aka makes it go where he wants it to go, not where the current just carries the vessel, while the modern term cybernetics was explained in 1948 by Norbert Wiener as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”. Maltz’s book came to be due to his experience as a surgeon once he had noticed that some of his patients just don’t see the change he’s made to their body no matter how severe it is, although it is visible to everybody else. This baffled him and he began investigating what was happening.

It turns out we all have an idea/belief about every aspect of our life, including the idea of how we look which might have nothing to do with how we really look. Any deviation from this idea in reality is just not accepted into the self. The patients were literally blind to it as their mind just deleted or distorted the very visible change. This shed light on how much of our reality is self-constructed. It reverberated further into the future and made people aware of the true power a belief holds. Belief is by no means synonymous with the truth. You believing it just means that it is true for you. Our beliefs are mostly learnt and instilled in us in early childhood and we continue to build on them further as we mature rarely dissecting the initial assumption everything else is built upon. We come empty to this life and are gradually filled by scraps of half-truths and lies of which we then try to make sense. So a belief is just a group of neurons that got bunched together and then reinforced by each repetition – this is why most religious practices have rituals in place. They might have not known what they were doing from a neurological viewpoint yet but they knew what the effect of strengthening a belief is. As beliefs above and below the conscious level shape our behaviors we believe and behave our lives away, enacting the beliefs, fitting our perceived life margins within them. We behave in order to confirm the premade scenario of our beliefs – this is why you’re right no matter if you think you can or can’t do something. Enforced enough a belief becomes a part of the default network of the brain and you’re no longer able to operate without it.

You cannot fight what you cannot see but once you are aware of the beliefs governing your behavior you can reassess them. There will be largely useful ones as well as those harming you and your development and closing you in a box. You might have been living with some of them your whole life, but now you see them you can reprogram what no longer serves you, you can literally rewire those bunches of neurons although you’ll face a severe push back force that will try to keep the homeostasis. But now that you no longer operate as an automaton, but are awake to the causes of actions, homeostasis becomes impossible with this new knowledge, because if you ignore it you’ll only feel guilt and anxiety for not trying. The key is to be clear on the benefits because in order to really change a core belief you need to find something which is worth so much that it outweighs and overrides the switch cost (the natural resistance of the brain to change). If it is hard and if you need to watch every step of the way as a vigilant guard dog to not slip back into the old – that’s good! It means you’re facing the real resistance. It will weaken. It feels like this now only because the old belief is dying and, as it does, it needs to clear all of its subprograms it has seeded along your psyche. Keep at it. Depending on the complexity of the habit, it takes 66 days to a year to instill new behavioral patterns for good in a grown up,. Just don’t give up and push through, It will become easier. We promise and neuroscience promises too. You can steer your ship as you wish, the seas are opened.