Excerpt from Healing Relationships is an Inside Job:

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The Chemistry of Change

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All change takes place in the brain, a soft four-pound organ that is the control center for how you live. It is the most complex machine in the universe with an incredibly linked network of 20 billion neurons connected to an average of 10,000 other neurons. If you could take it apart, you’d see an amazingly intricate network of trillions of synapses, or neuronal connections, that looks not unlike some vast multi-level spider web. It is estimated that the possible number of on/off firing patterns, as chemicals are passed through synapses between one neuron and another, is ten times ten one million times, or ten to the millionth power!

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We only use a small fraction of those potential connections, of course. In fact, we tend to use the same groups of neurons over and over, routing old thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, emotional reactions, and beliefs back and forth within the same pathways.

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This coordinated pattern allows us to make sense of the thousands of experiences we’ve had over the years. If every single thing that happened, every word we heard, every picture we saw, every body sensation had to be analyzed and processed from scratch in order to understand it, that would take a very long time, even given the speed with which neurons fire. It’s much more efficient for the brain to assign meaning to an experience and create a belief or filter through which the next experience can be accepted or rejected as true and valid.

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Soon our beliefs (the thoughts we experience when certain neurons are “turned on”) cause us to act (the body’s response in word and behavior caused by the firing of other neurons connected to our “belief neurons”) in ways that give us consequences we have come to expect (and which we then interpret in ways that reinforce our beliefs!).

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However, what happens if the “consequences” resulting from our actions are not consistent with our beliefs? Unfortunately, most of us, in order to maintain our internal status quo, tend to interpret what we experience in ways that correspond most closely to our beliefs. Since we all wear colored glasses (some darker than others), it is not surprising that the world appears tinged with the same hue.

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Unfortunately, the cyclical reasoning of “belief-actions-consequences-belief” leaves little room for maneuvering or being open to new beliefs, which results in the creation of a “comfort zone” in which we operate on autopilot. This allows the brain to do what it’s always done, sending the same, or similar, thoughts down the same pathways. True, the cycle keeps us on a merry-go-round, but it’s the merry-go-round with which we are most familiar. As long as things are sailing along smoothly, we don’t see reason to get off.

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However, when we’re in pain, or when we’ve been pushed or pulled in such a way that we feel we must change our lives, the brain will need to switch off some of the connections it’s been using to keep old pathways functioning and build new ones. When we can turn off enough of the old connections tied to old beliefs, we allow new neurons to fire, which allows the brain to switch on its “genetic machinery” (the ability of the body to create proteins for building new neurons), which causes the brain to change internal connections. Through this turn-off-old and build-new process, our brain’s biochemical environment builds new interconnected pathways.

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The willingness to see things in a different way (to try on a new, clearer set of glasses, if you will) “turns-on” neurons that can allow us to interpret our experiences in new ways (i.e., create a new belief about life), which then allows us to act in a way in which we expect to get different results and, not surprisingly, discover they are different. Over time, we change our lives by changing the chemical functioning in our brains.

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Fortunately, one way you can influence the formation of new pathways is to ask yourself questions. As I noted in the introduction, questions require you to shift from a passive mode to an active mode of thinking. If your brain needs to answer a question that lies outside its normal reasoning path, it can’t continue using synaptic connections along the old paths, as it does when we operate on autopilot and the road to new ideas is blocked. By asking yourself the questions in this book, you are giving your brain new experiences. True, the questions themselves may not be earth-shattering, but in attempting to answer them, you are giving your brain permission to switch off autopilot thinking and lay down new neuronal connections that will, step-by-step, lead to the change you want in your life.

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This gradual building of new pathways, leading to new beliefs, leading to new behavior, leading to new results is the consequence of what some people call “Kaizen” steps. Kaizen is a Japanese word that comes from two ideographs, the first of which represents change and the second goodness or virtue. The word is based on the observation that, with few exceptions, great inventions and great change don’t arise suddenly out of thin air. Rather, they are the consequence of many quite minor steps that, added together, achieve an impressive goal. You can think of these Kaizen steps as small “first-order changes” that incrementally move you toward a significant goal.

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