Is Your Brain Failing You?
The science behind why you talk yourself out of everything, and how to take your power back.
Your brain is already predicting the future.
Right now, as you read this, your brain is doing what it always does, predicting the future. Or at least attempting to.
Research has found that 70% of our thoughts are attempts at predicting the future. Not simmering in the past, but building assumptions about what’s to come.
You know what they say about assumptions…
But the truth is, we’re all doing it. Even when it's not accurate, even when it's not true, even when it doesn't have to be that way. We do it for safety. It’s part of our biological hardwiring to survive.
Your brain is constantly on the lookout, scanning the horizon to make predictions about what’s coming. And if we let it, these predictions become our path. Because it’s the predictions that lead us to take action (or talk ourselves out of it entirely).
We had this conversation inside the Walking Club this week, and I thought it was worth sharing. Because I think a lot of people end up here, wanting to do something but quietly talking themselves out of it, without realizing how easy it is to actually talk yourself into it instead.
There’s still time to join the Summer Walking Club.
Doors close Sunday! It’s more than your average step challenge. It’s a place to create health. Join here!
Take movement, for instance.
Because 10,000 steps feels great in theory.
I’ve gotten a few questions about how to actually get 10,000 steps. Because sounding great and doing it are two separate things. When you have a 9-hour desk job, kids’ activities stacked after that, chores that never end, and you’re cooking what feels like a thousand meals a week, getting even a few hundred steps can feel impossible.
Heck, just breathing feels ambitious. Which is why steps can feel impossible.
I get it. Life is genuinely busy, and I'm not here to diminish everything you're carrying. I see it and feel it too.
And in some seasons of life, getting any extra steps might actually be impossible. That’s okay. But I don’t want you to write off the possibility that most of the time, you probably do have the time. Your brain has just predicted that you don’t, and that prediction has become your reality.
A Walking Club member had this exact epiphany recently and I thought it was worth sharing:
Here’s the thing about predictions.
Your mind can only predict based on the evidence of your life. If you haven’t been walking, moving, or eating the way you want to, that’s okay. But that’s also all it has to work with.
The evidence says: keep doing what you’ve been doing, because that’s what it knows. Familiar isn’t always healthy, but it is always safe.
Yet, it doesn’t have to stay this way.
The same way your brain predicts you don’t have time, it can predict that you do. Because it’s all working from assumptions anyway, which means you can just assume differently.
Take a minute to look at your reasons for “not.”
I don’t have time in the morning.
I’m too tired after work.
By the time dinner is done and the kids are in bed, it’s too late.
What is the opposite of these? What if you flipped them?
I have 20 minutes before the house wakes up.
I actually move better when I’m tired than I think I will.
After the kids go down, it is actually the quietest, most uninterrupted window of the day.
What if you started using these to predict your future instead?
If you look at your day and assume there’s no time, there won’t be. But if you look at your day and decide where you’re going to make it happen, you show up differently in that day.
Like our Walking Club member found, you might discover you had more than enough time all along.
Time is kind of irrelevant. But that’s a conversation for another day.
Right now I just want you to hear this: the changes you’re looking for often live inside the assumptions you’re making. The predictions you’re running on repeat.
The best news? You can assume differently. You can predict differently. And what you predict, you act out, and that action becomes the evidence that leads to it becoming your new normal.
If you want a place to start creating that evidence, the Walking Club is it.
Every step you take inside this community becomes proof. Proof that you can. Proof that you do. Proof that you’re someone who moves. And once your brain has that evidence, it stops predicting failure and starts predicting the next walk.
That’s how the shift happens. Not all at once, but just one assumption, one step, one day at a time until the evidence is undeniable.
Doors close on Sunday. Come create your evidence with us!
