Word count:6258
hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about the concept called homeostasis which is the reason why you keep backsliding in your life there's a thorny little problem that sticks in our side when we try to self actualize and that's the problem of backsliding which is you know when you try to make that change in your life that you really get excited about making and then you make that change and it looks like it's working for a while and then what happens you slide back to your old ways and then you make that change again again excited this time redoubling your efforts and then a couple months later you're back in your old ways and this just keeps going on and on and on and not only is it extremely frustrating but it also makes you very pessimistic about the possibility of creating change in your life and this is why sometimes people like to rag on self-help or personal development is because they've been trying to make changes but then really they haven't been able to make any changes stick and they're just fed up with this whole backsliding process so it's a very real problem it's a very big problem you're going to encounter a lot of backsliding on your way towards getting somewhere far and high with your self-actualization work so to help you along though and maybe ease of that frustration make the path a little bit smoother for you I've got some ideas for solutions to this problem backsliding and also I think it's important understand why this backsliding happens which is actually part of the solution is just understanding what is really going on here because most of us are usually blind to this stuff unless we've kind of studied this in depth and I'm going to lean on the work of George Leonard here who wrote a beautiful little book called mastery which if you know me is one of my top books of all time little book but you could read it a dozen times and not suck out all the wisdom that's in it it's brilliant for advice or how to put your life together basically it's like a philosophy of putting your life together but you know he has the main concept of mastery and he has a lot of little concepts kind of sub concepts I call him in that book and one of them is homeostasis he has a really great discussion about homeostasis and he offers some solutions I'm gonna present some of his solutions here along with some of my additions to what he said so homeostasis what is this this is a word this is used in the field of cybernetics and also in biology cybernetics is a very interesting field and it's the field of studying how systems work systems it turns out are very interesting things and you know we have biological systems we have mechanical systems all sorts of kind of systems these days we build a lot of complex systems but one of the interesting aspects of a system is that a system is a collection of items that are interlinked together into a complex web of feedback loops and when you have something like that which creates some sort of cohesive whole like a individual human cell or human body or a tree or a computer system or whatever then what you get is you get that the system has a center of gravity to it you might say and this center of gravity is it's homeostasis this is the place that it likes to gravitate towards and stay at because this is the safest place for it to be and because here there's been a track record of proven safety one of the biggest challenges that systems face in our reality is that they're not really natural to come about and to exist and there's a lot of elements that run against the system a lot of threats to the system's survival you might say so the system has to get very good if it comes into existence at all of maintaining itself in a place where he can keep surviving and reproducing and so that's where homeostasis comes in specifically in your own body there's a lot of homeostatic processes that are going on all the time you're not even aware of them so your blood pressure is being regulated too low it's a problem too high too problem has to be somewhere in the middle there's a perfect kind of Goldilocks zone there likewise with your body temperature too low it's a problem too high it's a problem in the middle somewhere Goldilocks zone it's just right and so on it goes with a lot of other systems that you probably haven't even been aware of or read of or heard of or even thought of or maybe that science has even discovered yet but the body has thousands of these going on at the same time it's very very complex it's really fascinating just how much balance the body has to maintain it's like you're it's almost like you're walking on a on a high wire in the circus right a hundred stories above the ground and you're at the danger of tipping over to one side or the other side or forward or backward at all times and then you're dead and so you always have to be watching out for this except you're not doing it it's like your body and your unconscious mind your brain stem is doing it all for you and see this whole process all it really cares about is your survival and it cares about keeping you going at what's always worked before in your life now these are like very low-level processes that I'm talking about but then there's higher-level processes these are the ones that you care about changing so for example when do you wake up when do you go to sleep or how do you behave in a relationship or what's your work ethic like what kind of food you put in your body all right all these things potentially you might want to change what are your study habits like how much do you exercise how do you perform at your job these are all things we try to improve but interestingly enough our subconscious mind tends to pull us back to where we were and the reason it does this is not because it's you know it's not terribly smart it just does what's always worked and in kind of the evolutionary context what's worked before is nice to want to work again so it's kind of like your brain is biased towards keeping you in the same place simply because it's been proven already because if you're alive now it's at least been proven that the thing that is working right now has worked in the past right because if it didn't you'd be dead so just by that very simple logic it's like okay well what we've got works the problem though is that your unconscious mind doesn't really distinguish between what works kind of well and what works really well and what's actually dysfunctional but still keeps you alive and there's a big difference between those right so we don't just want to be alive and breathing we also want to be like thriving and self actualizing so if we're trying to get to those kind results well then we have to sort to understand how those unconscious mechanisms work and really your mind is like a thermostat thermostat a thermostat tries to keep a certain baseline temperature wherever you set it and if it goes too high the AC kicks in and if it goes too low the heater kicks in and so you've got these feedback loops that keep you stuck that's exactly what happens in most of your life with almost every habit or behavior that you have so for example let's say you want to leave a relationship a relationship that you know isn't good for you maybe you're in a toxic relationship with some guy and you're a girl and you don't like how this guy's treating you and you think you can do better but you're just stuck and your conscious mind knows that this guy's for you but yet somehow every time you plan on leaving you have an argument to fight with him in the end you just kind of come back anyways and maybe you even leave but then the next week you come back anyways cuz he you want that love and that affection and after all he wasn't that bad I mean there's a lot of even bigger dick holes out there than him so how bad could it be maybe we can make this work or maybe you have a career and you're working on some career but then you have some business idea and you're really excited bout this new business idea and you're thinking maybe about changing career here like well I don't really like this career anymore so let me go start my own business but I got to work on this you know I got to do the research I got to lay the groundwork for starting my own business before I can drop this career so you're doing that and you're excited because you have this new business project and you're working on it and let's say you're working on it on the weekends and you're working working for a couple weeks maybe a month goes by and then after a month what happens the homeostasis kicks in and your emotions pull you back and you start saying stuff like like this to yourself you're like well you know I have been working real hard for the last month and you know it is kind of like I'm working two jobs now it's like I have my old career now I've got this thing I mean I'm really stressing myself I should give myself a little break right let me go play some video games let me go relax with my girlfriend or whatever and then that business project just kind of gets forgotten gets left on the sidelines and you never pick it up again and it just collects dust or what about when you try to wake up earlier let's say you got this habit of waking up at noon I've had a problem with that and then you want to be waking up at 6:00 a.m. how do you make that change you tell yourself all right from now on I'm really serious about this I'm changing my life I'm gonna be waking up at 6 a.m. every morning Eva the weekends and then you go in it and you do it for a couple of weeks and then what happens you start the backslide and you start to say yourself well but I'm working so hard I should get a little extra time to sleep in and it's like I really I really worked extra hard last week so that that allows me to get a bit later and then later and later and then later and then later and then before you know you're waking up at 3:00 p.m. how about eating cleaner ever try that cleaning up your diet man do I even need to go into the details of how that works I mean it's all the same thing right yeah get excited about eating clean and you do it you do it you do it do it and then you start creeping back back back to your nasty old habits because your friends pull you back in your mind starts telling you well I've been real good the last month you know with my diet I should allow myself that cookie right there cookie looks good I mean what's one cookie out of a whole month of clean eating one cookies nothing right so eat that one cookie and then what happens a couple months later we look at you you're back eating all the [ __ ] junk you've always been eating in your life and nothing's really change so you see where all these examples are going right and I mean you can fill in the details there you've got hundreds of these examples in your own life whatever you try to change why ever you do personal development but what's going on here basically is that your emotions keep pulling you back to the center that's kind of what they're designed to do is they're designed to keep you stable but stable isn't necessarily always in your favor a lot of times it is and it's a really amazing and beneficial mechanism but then it can also buy this in the ass because these emotions they sabotage us and also not just emotions the thoughts we have thoughts that sabotage us too and this creates problems and this is interestingly why why you will never find a real magic pill for creating a fulfilling rewarding life never not unless we rewire the the neurons in your brain like in a surgically rewire them because you have to emotional labour to make change happen in your life that's the bottom line of it you have to exert that emotional labor emotional labor happens when you resist the homeostasis so homeostasis pulls you back to center you have to now exert willpower to move off center and reset the center point which is possible to do you can reset the center point I mean big change is possible it's not like you can't clean up your diet I mean come on you definitely can and it's not like you can't be waking up early in the morning sure you can you've probably done it in your life or any of the other stuff you can do it it's just that it takes a little extra work and it takes a little extra craftiness then most people apply to the problem so we're gonna get into some solutions here but before we do just a final reminder also notice that not only does this apply to the individual you who is obeying homeostasis but also there's homeostasis in groups within your family there's homeostasis there's a center of gravity there within your social circle of friends there's a homeostasis their center of gravity same thing with your colleagues at work with your corporation as a whole with maybe your church group or your spiritual group and even with your you know local community or your entire city that you live in there's a homeostasis point and even with your country that you live in there's a homeostasis point there within the political climate and all that and organizations you know if you talk about government organizations or nonprofit organization they all have their own homeostasis points so it's very important to recognize that these um this problem it does just apply to you but applies to a lot of different systems out there in the world that we want might want to probably change at some point to improve them so that our world functions better so it's good to learn about this right there's a lot of ramifications from knowing how to deal with homeostasis but here's some solutions I want to give you a list and most of these are from George Leonard also with a couple of twists that I put on so basically here the first one is be aware that homeo exists and be aware that it's both the positive system and a negative system really it's a lot to your benefit that there is homeostasis because it keeps you alive so just appreciate that and when you go into new situations that you try to change understand that homeostasis will be kicking in it's like a law it's like gravity it's going to kick in so the question is then how do you navigate around that force which is there just awareness of homeostasis already will increase your odds of successfully changing and shifting your center of gravity substantially because most people when they try to lose weight or they try to start a business or whatever they're not even thinking about homeostasis they're completely oblivious and because of that they have a very high failure rate they're not even able to ship their first product or do their first in a milestone meet their first milestone because the homeostasis already has and by the balls so the next point is set very proper expectations for your self realistic pragmatic expectations I'm really big on this because I discovered in my own life when I didn't set pragmatic expectations for how my business was going to go or how some creative project was going to go or whatever change I was trying to make then that change would never happen I would be so far off the mark and it seems like a very simple thing you know an expectation and expectations like this just this very nebulous flawed in your mind it's not even something tangible and yet it has a very big impact on whether you're going to succeed or not in making this change so how do you set a proper expectation well remember always remind yourself that the mind will resist when you try to make a change the body will also resist when you try to make a change and people around you will resist when you try to make a change especially if we're talking about an organizational change that you're trying to make but even if you're just making a personal change it's very weird how that works you know sometimes people leave me it's insane stuff like leo I'm learning all this stuff and I'm trying to share with my family and they're telling me to stop meditating because it's stupid and to stop doing this person about my stuff because it's a scam and all this nonsense they don't care about this the way that I do I know it's good information but they don't care right because they're in homeostasis and they don't even know that they're homeostasis so that's why you have to expect that expect that your mind will resist by coming up with all sorts of crazy thoughts and stories and millions of rationalizations and excuses for why you should go back to where you were so the mind will play tricks on you and very interestingly the body will even play tricks on you how does it do that well you get psychosomatic stuff what's called psychosomatic that means that it's like it's almost like a hallucination you kind of make it up but then your body actually starts to feel it so like maybe you start going to the gym right let's say you start a new gym routine and you start going you're very excited and you know going great for a couple of weeks and then two weeks into it you BAM all of a sudden it feels like you're catching a cold and you're like oh man I just started now I have to stop for a week to get rid of this cold but really it's not like a real proper cold it's like a [ __ ] cold it's some psychosomatic little sniffle you got a little sore throat you know some [ __ ] like that which your mind is actually kind of creating very freaky that your mind can do this that your mind is creating these physical like symptoms that seem real to get you doubting yourself and falling back into your comfort zone it's amazing how deceptive and tricky your mind and your body as a combination are and then when the people in your environment come into play and pin you down into your center of gravity within that social circle man it's like you know it's like you're destined to stay in the same place no wonder it's hard to make change no wonder you've not gotten results from self-help so what do we do about this well one of the things that George Leonard suggests I think is great advice is be prepared for serious negotiation and he says be prepared for serious negotiation what this mean well this means that you can't just bowl your way through the problem sometimes we try to do that it's like okay I'm going to the gym no matter what every single day for an hour I'm going to go and I'm going to do it for the next six months and you're kind of approaching it that way but then we starts to happen like I said is that you know two weeks in you start feeling that cold and you start second-guessing yourself and doubting yourself you start feeling tired and your body feels achy and it's like oh man and you know you don't know how this is going to fit with the rest of your schedule in your life like now you can't go to work on time and all this stuff so everything starts going to hell and at this point if you're not able to negotiate with yourself then what happens is that you're going to break down and quit and fall back into your center of gravity negotiation means that you know when to ease off the gas pedal a bit so that your body doesn't just violently overreact or your mind isn't just violently overreact and then you also know how to press on the gas pedal when you know that there's a little bit more room to grow and you can push yourself a little bit more so it's kind of knowing when to push yourself and when not to and being smart about it and so maybe when you start to feel that sniffle coming on feeling that cold you could say to yourself instead of saying no you know what I have this cold I still have to go to the gym and you go to the gym and you go to the gym you go to gym and basically then you actually do catch a cold because you're so exhausted and you overwork yourself well the smart person has to kind of say okay what's going on here let me negotiate so part of my brain is telling me that I'm going too hard part of me is telling me that I'm not going enough let me find that sweet spot in between so maybe tomorrow I'll go but then I'll take the weekend off so I can recuperate and not get sick for real something like that right so that negotiation and this is I found like one of the most challenging aspects of personal development is the emotional labor that goes into the serious negotiation because as you're negotiating you're not sure you're uncertain you're kind of doubting yourself and your mind is having this tug-of-war going on inside of it and you have to stay with that and persevere through that get some resolution of it and come out the other end and not quit and that's what I mean by emotional labor and this is why most people don't have powerful self actualize lies is because they're not able to cope with this emotional labor so that's that point a couple other points develop a support system so the people around you are important some of the things that are really difficult to do have classic support systems already established in society so if you want to lose weight there's like Weight Watchers and other programs if you want to get off of alcohol there's a Alcoholics Anonymous there's rehab programs this programs and communities that will help you to get better at dating plan your wedding start a new business whatever other aspects of your life you might have right there's communities for it and these communities can be very very helpful because they're like a support system they support you emotionally that's the most important thing emotional support camaraderie powerful another thing I recommend is have a meditation habit in place what I found is that putting a meditation happen in place is like the ultimate number one habit which then allows you to draw energy from that to build new habits why is it so powerful because meditation gets you more awareness of all the emotional [ __ ] that's going on in your brain so basically you're able to see and be more aware of the homeostasis as it's happening and you're able to see and negotiate better because you're more aware of the backlash that your mind creates I recommend you meditate daily I think it's the most important habit if you're into personal development and I have videos on that that can teach you how to meditate I think also another very important habit is the visualization habit I have a video on visualization that will teach you how to set up a habit there and how to do visualization properly but basically you want to do a little bit of visualization on a daily basis like 5 10 20 minutes of visualization towards your goals and specifically the thing that you want to try to change so whatever you're trying to create in your life you know this this move away from homeostasis because if you can visualize it in your mind that helps your mind buy into it and be on board with it in a way that it wouldn't otherwise just very simply if we have you some you know do some tasks tomorrow let's say tomorrow and you go do the laundry you're much more likely to go do it if we just have you close your eyes right now and for five minutes visualize doing the laundry tomorrow but do it right now visualize yourself doing the laundry right now in your mind if you do that for five minutes you're going to have at least double the chances of doing your laundry successfully tomorrow than you normally would so think about the ramifications of that throughout your whole life pretty powerful worth implementing another point is make sure that thing you're trying to really change is the right thing a lot of times we try to change superficial or stupid stuff in our lives I mean you have a lot of choices you could probably change a hundred different things about your life and really only effectively you can change one or two at a time so big mistake that people make is they trying to change more than one or two things at a time really focus just on one at a time because even two will get you much worse results than just one so pick the right thing the thing that's really going to make a meaningful difference for you what I found is that if I pick the wrong thing kind like a yeah that'll be nice but I can kind of take it or leave it then it'll never be changed there's just not enough willingness on my part to overcome the emotional labor and resistance that will be involved so it's not even worth starting make sure you're really doing the right things this goes to having a life purpose to knowing what your purpose is in life to knowing and understanding your top ten values when you understand your own values understand yourself on a very deep and authentic level then you know how to choose the right things and that's a magical thing and in fact I'm working on a life purpose course right now I want to release in the coming month which will help you to figure all that out there's so much material there that we need to cover but anyways that's off topic the other thing I recommend is that I recommend that when you do find the right things to change very strategically picking the right thing and then what you got to do is you got to make 100% commitment super-important 100% commitment no excuses no wiggle room I found this really works well for me because if you make like a ninety five percent commitment that five percent wriggle room wiggle room will kill you in the end too many excuses will come into play your mind will just rationalize it away and bring you back to homeostasis so you know one of the areas in my life where I used the hundred percent commitment which was worked really well for me is with my meditation habit which I've been doing now for about one and a half years and in that time I haven't missed a single day of meditation at all ever and I've meditated for one hour every day for that whole time so that's like over 400 days I believe I haven't counted them lately 400 or so days straight how was I able to do that I'm kind of surprised that I was able to do that because you know I like to slack off on stuff but um the reason I did that is because I just at one point in my life I just said oh I see that this is so [ __ ] important to my life into my results this is really the right thing for me I saw very clearly that this was the right piece of the puzzle for me so that I'm like okay if it's that right then 100 percent commitment because I know that if I skip even one day of meditation I'm going to be skipping days here and there and everywhere pretty soon so I just said you know what no matter what even if it kills me even if I'm in the hospital no matter what no matter where I am who I'm with holidays breaks Christmas this that whatever I'm doing my meditation and I've really stuck to that and it's worked really beautiful I'm surprised how well it's worked so I'm going to keep going because that one's working for me I recommend that you apply that with whatever habits you want to build a couple of remaining points just reminders for you this is stuff you got to remind yourself of over and over again remember that failure this time does make it easier next time so if you're trying to lose weight and you failed once well the second time will be easier if only a little it will be easier and the third time will be a little easier again and so will the fourth because you're you're learning stuff even as you're failing so this can be a little consolation prize even if fail right and most people very interestingly enough here's why this is important is that most people grossly underestimate no sorry they grossly overestimate how much they've attempted something specifically making a change so most people if you ask them let's say you ask a fat person oh how many times have you tried to diet and lose your weight and they'll think about they'll say yeah you know throughout the last ten years I've probably tried it like 15 times and every time is failed but then if you actually sit down with that person and actually forced them to tell you the dates of when they tried their different diets and you look and you see the facts of the situation you'll you'll realize oh actually it wasn't fifteen times it was more like three times three fifteen versus three big [ __ ] difference right your mind grossly overestimate s' these things you try it three times it's like oh yeah it's like I've seen it I know fifteen times kind of like with movies sometimes you have that effect with movies have you have you noticed that it's like how many times have you seen Star Wars and you might say okay I've seen it 20 times in reality though if you think about it like how many times have I seen Star Wars single-digits really single digits even though I like to think of myself as like I've seen it so many times I know it front-to-back know you've only seen it a handful of times at most unless you're like some real [ __ ] nerd so your mind tends to do that right so why is this important well because your mind tends to make the obstacle bigger than it is it's like well I've tried 15 [ __ ] times to lose this way it has never worked so it's never going to work but really you've only tried three times right how about a little more effort if you tried it 15 times for real I bet you'd figure out how to make it work and also the last reminder I want to give you is um don't discount how powerful just one change can be just one change sometimes we look at all this and we get very overwhelmed with personal developer can we tell ourselves well like I need a meditation habit I need a visualization habit I need to get my business habits I need to get my health habits and my diet habits and all this all these habits I need 25 habits look you're thinking way too far ahead you're overwhelming yourself just one change can be a very transformational change to your life it can significantly make a big dent and have the whole trajectory of your life right the key is to choose those powerful changes so for example one of those might be a meditation habit if you could just see into the future 10 or 20 years from now what even 20 minutes of meditation a day could snowball into you would be baffled it would also and what's possible with 20 minutes of meditation for 20 years straight your life would just completely revolutionize the problem is though that me telling you this doesn't actually get you to believe it it's like you have a little inkling of an idea but you don't really understand what I'm talking about and so because of this you don't give proper weight and value to putting this one little change into your life if you saw what this meditation habit could do for you 20 years down the road you would be doing meditation religiously like your life depended on it every single morning but you don't do you probably not why well because you discount the power of just one little change so it really takes vision on your part you have to be a visionary of your own life you have to see how the little changes can snowball into massive qualitative explosions of change in the future so reminders of that so when you're feeling overwhelmed just tell you some okay what's the one thing I got to put into place right now that's really going to make a huge difference 20 years from now if I just do it every single day find the answer to that question is usually pretty simple it's not rocket science and then you give it the value that it deserves and you say [ __ ] this is really [ __ ] important I better do this 100% commitment this is really important and that will help you a lot so take all that to heart incorporate all those ideas and go make some big changes in your life don't succumb to the gravity of homeostasis all right that's it I'm signing off post me your comments down below click the like button please share this video with a friend and come sign up to the newsletter at actualized org right here is a free newsletter I release new videos every week on how to develop the proper mindsets to live to your fullest potential in life how do you actualize yourself how do you get to the highest levels of human fulfillment and consciousness that are possible and they are possible for you it's just that there's a lot of different counterintuitive things that you've never thought about your entire life that are preventing you keeping you stuck so what I'm interested in is helping you to get unstuck and starting to taste really taste the sweet taste of getting to those higher levels of human evolution it's amazing what your life can feel like it feels to me like man most the people alive today are going to die and never even reach 10% of their full potential and it's like they're missing the best parts of life they're leaving those off the table and they're dying without ever having savored them which is something we want to correct so sign up for that right now and I'll see you soon you