Unmasking limiting beliefs: how your brain holds you back

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. James Allen.

The neuroscience of limiting beliefs

Neural pathways are how your brain processes information, and they form through experience. The structure of a pathway is its connectivity to past similar experience through memory. Your brain chooses the well-worn path of past conclusions for ease in decision making now. This is by design.

A well-worn path in nature is created by repeated travel toward a destination. The resulting path directs you which way to go. Your brain operates the same way. Repeated negative thoughts create pathways that become structures of limiting belief, and resistant, avoidant behavior that leads you toward an undesired destination.

What is a belief but a thought you think over and over? The thought becomes belief, strengthened by evidence found in your experience to confirm it. These pathways become webs of complex emotional structure connected to a myriad of past experiences, and they determine which actions you take now.

The unconscious does not care what you want

The unconscious brain responds through the well-worn path of belief almost seven seconds faster than the conscious brain. Its main job is survival, and that includes hiding stressors such as painful emotional experiences from significant emotional events during early brain development. They are now safely out of your current awareness.

The unconscious does not care what you want. It has to keep you alive, and stop the painful feelings of those events from being felt again.

Past pain equals present limits

Significant emotional events create powerful, lasting memories that act as chain and anchor to your boundaries. They create protector and controller programs designed to avoid feeling the old feelings.

The unconscious brain does not know the difference between past and present. Think of the word PRESENT as PRE-SENT information from the past.

Painful memories of childhood criticism can become a fear of punishment or reprisal, and result in a failure to launch. Your program will not let you go anywhere near an experience that could trigger those emotions again. The amygdala scans for danger, and when a past memory links to a present resemblance, fight, flight, or freeze activates, fast.

Fight looks like anger, hostility, defensiveness, excuses, criticism. Flight looks like ignoring current reality, isolating, endlessly distracting yourself. Freeze looks like confusion, stalling, hiding, feeling stuck, repressed, depressed, anxious, cynical.

Confirmation bias: the echo chamber in your mind

Confirmation bias reinforces existing beliefs, positive and negative. The brain seeks out evidence and compiles a dossier that confirms what it already believes, strengthening the pathway that holds it.

See, I didn't make the catch, I'm not good enough for the team. I burnt the toast, I'm a screw up. He didn't call, I always get rejected. I'm always broke. I have to be perfect or I'll get in trouble. On and on, like being on a leash.

If you have gathered enough evidence to believe you can, or enough to believe you can't, either way you are right. What you focus on expands.

Identity and limiting beliefs, the I am

Limiting beliefs become ingrained in self-perception and connect to identity through I am statements. Believing I am not worthy of money, love, or success leads to decisions that avoid the very activities that would produce them, and blindness to the opportunities in front of you.

Your current identity equals your current reality. The protector program keeps the familiar comfort zone intact, which is exactly why reach and return, strive and collapse, keeps repeating.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Carl Jung.

Neuroplasticity: rewiring your brain

Neuroplasticity is the brain's proven ability to change and rewire pathways, creating a new identity by clearing the old I am beliefs. Radical responsibility is required to take back your trajectory.

What can be rewired: self sabotage and procrastination, anxiety and depression, fear of failure or success, fear of rejection and playing small, triggered emotion.

What follows brain change: more of your desired results, more high energy, more love and deeper relationship, more money and more to give.

In each alchemy session you become more liberated, and freer to experience your life as the predominant creative force that you actually are.