Do you sometimes feel like you're in a battle with yourself?

Like there's a part of your brain that decides it wants to do something and there's another part that decides it wants to do something else, for example getting up early or going to the gym. The brain is VERY complex, so much so we're only starting to understand how it manages everything it does so I'm going to oversimplify the crap out of it in a way that gets more to our experience of our brain in two parts - something I'll call the child brain and the adult brain.

What I call the child brain is your survival brain. Because of this it has a motivation or bias for conserving energy (so we had energy reserves in an emergency), avoiding pain (since injury could lead to death) and seeking pleasure (food, water, shelter, sex, etc.) These biases were critical to our survival both individually and as a species. However, most of us no longer have a daily imminent threat of death. Because biases can never be satisfied most of us live in a world where we're constantly trying to improve conveniences, avoiding physical and emotional pain and every pleasure we want is available in ever more concentrated forms and in unbelievable varieties. Our addictions and most of our dysfunctional behaviors result from being led by these biases of the child brain. My belief is we've maxed out what humans can accomplish idling in this gear. I want to be clear, the child brain isn't going away but there IS another gear.

What I call the adult brain is your power center. It also has motivations or biases and those biases are for change, challenge and growth - basically expansion. For example, let's say you create a list of things you would want to have the perfect life as you define it (excluding not dying) then let's say you could have every single one of those things within a year. It would take a while for you to adjust to the new you but if you then stopped changing, being challenged or growing you would eventually get bored of your now "perfect" life. Why? The child's brain believes if you can win the national championship THEN you will be happy but the adult brain understands that what was important in winning the championship was how much your concept of self grew in the process. Turns out it actually IS about the journey but maybe not for the reason you thought.

You have and will always experience life through both these lenses, meaning the child and adult brains. Because the brain needs to conserve energy both lenses distort reality and always will. The difference between living with our brains the way we currently do and what's possible is like going from living in black and white to color. The people are the same, the places are the same but the experience is completely different. And that's just the beginning.

For now, what's opening up for you in this conversation? What are you hearing or noticing as it relates to your life? Or, what do you see that's available to you that maybe wasn't before?