Your brain treats familiar patterns as safe, so it keeps steering you back to the same choices even when they hurt you. Connor Beaton uses a Doom metaphor: like a video game that only reveals the map when you explore new territory, your brain resists new mental paths and replays old ones instead.
Your brain is a pattern recognition machine, and it wants to move you towards decisions, actions, choices that are known to it, that are familiar to it. And so the reason why you continually feel stuck is that usually your brain is moving you towards sabotaging behaviors, behaviors to keep you stuck, because that's what it knows. That's what it feels familiar with. And your brain equates familiarity with safety, with ease, with comfort. It's almost like one of those games, I don't know if you ever played Doom, as you explore the territory, the map becomes revealed. And so you have to walk around and explore as much of the map as possible in order for the map to reveal itself. Well, your brain doesn't like that. Your brain, if left to its own devices, would just continually explore the territory that you have already been in. And this is what keeps you stuck. It just wants to keep going back into the exact same decisions, choices, actions that it already knows.
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