Why You Keep Falling Off Your Goals (5 Neuroscience Backed Reasons)

If you have big dreams and you feel like you just struggle to stay consistent, you start a new goal and then 2 weeks later you fall off, or you procrastinate, or you're just lacking motivation, you just don't know why that is. In this video, I'm going to give you 5 neuroscience-backed reasons why you stay stuck, why you fall off, and exactly how to fix it. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly what you need to change and exactly how to shift your brain so that you can actually manifest or achieve whatever it is that you want. And if you're new here, hi, I am Emily McDonald, also known as Em on the Brain. I've got 2 degrees in neuroscience, multiple years of research in the lab, and I now coach people in over 55 countries all over the world, helping them rewire their brains, level up, and maximize their potential. Now, without further ado, let's just get straight into it because number 1 is an identity mismatch. And you might be like, what is that, Em? What is an identity mismatch? This one is extremely important. If your identity does not match the identity of the version of you who achieves the goal or manifest the thing that you want, you are going to be fighting against your brain. And this happens because your brain holds a model of who you are. It holds this story, this self-concept, especially in the default mode network of the brain. So the default mode network in the brain is really important for this internal model or narrative of who you are. Now, the default mode network is very appropriately named because it's also really important for your default way of thinking, being, feeling, acting, and deciding. The default mode network of your brain is active when you are not consciously doing things. It's sort of your autopilot brain network, or NPC brain network as I like to call it. But really it is just active whenever you are not consciously trying to make new decisions and new choices. This is really important to understand because when you understand that the same network that holds the model of who you are is also predicting your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and choices, you will understand that your identity is always going to be used to predict your future. Your default mode network is also responsible for imagination and imagining different versions of your reality, new, new versions of your reality. And so your brain is always using the model of who you are to predict your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and choices. I get people who ask me, you know, I'm trying to make it a habit to go to the gym, I'm trying to become a really fit person, And I really wanna go to the gym, but how come I'll go to the gym for 2 weeks and then all of a sudden I fall off? And why do I keep falling off after 2 weeks? And I could tell you right now, the answer is because your identity doesn't match the identity of the version of you who goes to the gym every day. You still view yourself as somebody who would rather stay at home and lay on the couch. Well, when I first started writing my book, I would sit down to write my book and I would all of a sudden be like, oh, that laundry needs to get done. Those dishes need to be washed, or The— that video you need to create needs to be filmed. Everything else all of a sudden felt more important. Why? Because writing a book was not a part of who I was. So many actually of my clients, this helps them get sober, helps them quit whatever drug they are addicted to, shifting their identity. Now, the first time this came up in my life, when I was having a conversation with someone that I know, someone that I'm actually very close to, and this person said to me, I'm 2 weeks clean from from the nicotine pouches, but I'm always just gonna be a nicotine user. I'm always going to be like a nic guy. That's just who I am. And I said, well, don't say that, because as long as you view yourself that way, your brain is going to ensure that you act that way. Your brain works 100% of the time to keep you consistent with who you believe you are, with the stories you tell about yourself. I said, so don't say that about yourself. And actually One of my clients, he said that that advice alone helped him stop vaping because he finally stopped identifying as that version of himself. This is so powerful. And just to really paint the picture of how broadly this can help you, another one of my students, he just let me know that he was able to manifest $35,000 in one week by shifting into the version of himself who has it all. Become the version of you who has it all. And you have it all. Now, there are levels to the identity shifting game, okay? The first way you can do it, and the absolute simplest, is how I shifted into the identity of an author to write my book. I simply stated that I am an author. I am an author. That's who I am now. If you are an extremely logical and analytical person, you might be like, that feels like lying to myself. Well, when you go to fall asleep at night, You close your eyes and you pretend you're asleep and your brain makes it so. This is just how our biology works. You have to embody it before it happens. You have to. Now I am in the final stretch of making the final edits on this book. Okay? It's due the end of next week. And I simply just was like, you know what? I'm tired. I've been staying up till 3:00 AM writing, but I am an animal. Now here I am filming at high energy. Why? Because I just decided to to identify as that version of myself. So shift the labels that you use to describe yourself. That alone is so powerful. Level 2 to this is to actually get really clear on who the version of you is that has it all. Just sticking with the author example, who is the bestselling author version of me? When you think of the version of yourself that has the thing, right? If it's, if it's exercising, if it's having your dream body, who is that version of you? What are their beliefs? What's their mindset like? What's their energy like? What are their habits like? And then make a commitment to think, breathe, move, and act as that version of you moving forward. And you'll be astonished by the way that things can shift for you when you do this. Now let's move on to number 2, and it is subconscious blocks. We couldn't talk about achieving or manifesting your goals if we didn't talk about subconscious programming. Now, your programming determines your entire experience. Of reality. When you were born as a little baby, your brain was a dense forest, like a web with the most connections that you will ever have in your entire life. That might seem counterintuitive, but it's true. And then what happened as you grew up, as you developed, as you, you know, learned the rules of life, and as you learned beliefs and the way that life works, quote unquote, what happened was that your brain actually pruned away certain connections, and what you are left with are the beliefs and the, the kind of mindsets and the behaviors, all of the things that make you you, and all the things that make your personality sort of what it is, and all of the beliefs you hold, all the memories you hold, etc., right? So this is why when you're a little kid, it's so easy to learn new languages. Like, if you grew up around a family that spoke 10 different languages, you would be able to speak 10 different languages because your brain was a sponge when you were young, and it's not as much of a sponge, but obviously neuroplasticity is real. You can generate new connections, you can strengthen connections in your brain, you can weaken old ones. So you very much still have the ability to reprogram your brain. You are not stuck the way that you are at all. But your subconscious programming really, really can keep you from achieving or receiving the thing that you want. The study that I love to tell about subconscious programming, 'cause it really smacked me in the face the first time I learned about it, was the study that happened in the 1970s with kittens. What they did was they took newborn kittens and they raised them in complete darkness just for the critical period while their visual system developed. They raised them in complete darkness except for a couple of hours each day where they put them in cylinders either only painted with horizontal black and white stripes or only painted with vertical black and white stripes. What they found was at the end of this, when they took these kittens and they put them into a normal everyday environment, the kittens that were raised to only ever see horizontal stripes, they did not react normally to vertical objects. They would bump into table legs and chair legs. The, the researchers would wave a vertical rod in front of their faces and they didn't perceive it normally. And on top of that, when they actually looked at the neural activity in their brain, the kittens that grew up only ever seeing those horizontal lines, neurons that represented vertical lines had rearranged. And it was exactly the vice versa for the kittens that grew up seeing vertical lines. The kittens that grew up seeing vertical lines, they did not respond normally to horizontal objects. When they looked at their brains, they didn't have neurons that responded to the horizontal orientation. Now, I remember when I learned this, this completely just blew my mind. And smacked me in the face because I got to thinking, if kittens can miss half of their reality because the way that they grew up, because of their conditioning, because of the environment that they grew up in, what am I missing out on because of the way that I grew up? What am I missing out on because of the environment that I grew up in? When we talk about this programming, it really, really is important to realize that our brains work the exact same way. Let's say you grew up, you know, hearing money doesn't grow on trees, or, you know, you got to really work really hard for money, or you grew up with a family that had a severe scarcity mindset and now you're trying to manifest abundance. Well, you probably don't have a belief system that calls in and a brain that filters for abundance without you having to work really hard for it. You probably don't have a brain that is filtering for random money that you find on the street. I have another friend who's super analytical, doesn't believe in manifestation or any of that. He actually sent me this hypnosis track that goes, large sums of money come to me easily and quickly from multiple sources on a continuous basis for the highest good of all, that I get to keep, use, Gift and spend joyously. Notice I have that memorized, probably because I've listened to it a bunch of times now. He sent that to me and he said, Em, I listened to this last night and I woke up and my stocks are way up. And so anyway, I thought it was so funny because he's not the type of person to be doing that that you would expect, but it was so cool and I love it because it just shows that really it can benefit you at whatever level that you're at, however much you believe in this sort of stuff. But that's, I guess, one example of how you can begin to reprogram your mind. Now, if you are kind of new to, oh, my brain has been programmed, you know, the I grew up is absolutely determining the reality that I experience now. And you are new to this journey, I highly recommend shadow work. It's something that completely changed my life, and I think it's honestly kind of necessary if you want to reprogram your subconscious. But what I will say is it's a lot easier nowadays with AI. You don't have to do it alone. You don't have to be journaling to figure out what are my subconscious blocks. Like, you can literally just go into AI and be like, hey, can you act as my neuroscience and manifestation coach and ask me questions one by one to help me get to the root of my limiting beliefs around blank. You can also prompt it to help you get to whatever subconscious blocks and have it ask you questions about your past, the way that you grew up, events of the past. Another way to do it is to, you know, think about different areas that you get triggered, etc. And now what I found very interesting and what I've come to realize is that when you think about the highest version of you, when you get really clear on the version of you who has it all, and you write down maybe a few of the beliefs or the traits, the energy, etc. A lot of my clients that I coach, they say, you know, confidence is a big thing that comes up. So now, an interesting thing that you can do when you think about this highest version of you and maybe a trait or a belief that's coming up for you because you aren't that, right? So for me, that came up like, she's unfiltered. That comes up because I'm slightly filtering myself, which I don't know if I let myself fully acknowledge that until maybe a little more recently, past few months. But yeah, I'm like, okay, yeah, that comes up because I'm not fully that. Now what you can do is you can dive into your past, into your upbringing, into the events of your past, and ask yourself, you know, what happened in my past that maybe led me to, for example, filter myself? What events from my past led me to not feeling super confident in myself? Those are just a couple of examples, but dive into your past and ask like, like what happened in my past, in my upbringing, that is keeping me from feeling the way that I want to feel, keeping me from achieving the things that I want to achieve? And we could talk about this for hours, but let's dive into number 3: fear. Now, this one is really important because most people do not realize that they subconsciously fear the success that they desire. They fear receiving the things that they want to receive. It's so interesting, and you probably are sitting here right now thinking like, no, I don't fear it. I just want it. But, but if you're honest with yourself and you sit and you imagine taking it all the way to the end and you think about, you know, the thing that you want and you take it all the way to the end, is there any sort of discomfort or fear that comes up? I'll give you a personal example because when I, when I actually start, started filming these very videos, this long-form content, before I started doing it, it was the same thing every single time I would, you know, sit down to film long-form content or, you know, even before that I would distract myself. I would procrastinate. I was being a perfectionist. I was like, no, I need to figure out the perfect name for this and I need to, blah, blah, blah. I was all these excuses, all this perfectionism, et cetera. So I, I sat down and I was like, why am I procrastinating? Why am I blocking myself from doing, like having a podcast, creating long-form content? Like this is a huge goal of mine, so why am I blocking myself from doing it? And what I realized was, was that I actually had this deep, subconsciously rooted fear of being seen in this long-form content format. But long-form content is a lot more vulnerable. If you guys haven't noticed, like, I am sharing a lot from my personal experiences. I'm sharing just a lot more than I do on Instagram, on TikTok. And so It like subconsciously, I wasn't aware of it yet, but I, it, it was, it's scary. It's scary. I'm a lot more vulnerable and I'm, and when, when you share more of yourself and let people in in a deeper way, you're more open to hate. You're more open to judgment and criticism. And I hadn't realized that that was some, something that was subconsciously blocking me from moving forward and doing the thing. That I wanted to do. And I have a client that I coach, she just did this exercise within my coaching program, and she understood and figured out that she had this subconscious sort of fear around success and making a lot of money because she was afraid that her family would judge her because she has a very traditional family. And she thought that if she started making a lot of money, started getting very successful, that they would judge her. And when she realized that, now she can make peace with that. There's a quote from the book You Are a Badass Every Day, and it says, you know, you can run from your fears and they'll chase you, or you can run straight at them and they'll run away from you because fears hate it when you do that. And there's actually neuroscience behind this because when you can identify and label your fears, you actually physically take their power away because the fear lives in the limbic system of your brain. Now, your prefrontal cortex, which is the area that's gonna be activated activated when you actually identify and label these fears, turns on when you label them, and that actually turns down activity in your limbic system. So you quite literally take the power away from your fears when you clearly identify them. Now let's move on to number 4. It's cheap dopamine. Now let's say you know exactly what you should be doing. You don't really have any fears behind it. You're like, yeah, I could do it. There's nothing that stop me, and yet you're just not feeling motivated. I'm gonna tell you how dopamine works, and I'm gonna make the analogy of eating snacks. Because if you were to snack all day long, would you ever be motivated to eat a whole meal? Me personally, if I were to snack all day long, I wouldn't ever have the appetite to eat a giant full course meal. Dopamine works the same way. When you give yourself these cheap dopamine hits all day long, Your brain has no reason to motivate you to go and do something more difficult. So what happens when you constantly scroll, when you're around constant stimulation, when you're always on your phone, when you're always either like watching something or listening to something? What happens when you're always giving yourself the stimulation? Your brain learns that dopamine costs nothing, that dopamine is worth Nothing. Your brain learns, oh, I don't need to try hard, I don't need to put in any effort to get any reward, so why would I go put in effort to get this other reward? Why would I do that when I could go basically give no effort and get a cheap dopamine snack hit? Now there's also more science to this. It gets— goes deeper, right? So let me tell you what actually feels good. It's not necessarily dope— a dopamine hit. That feels good. It's the distance between baseline and peak. You have a dopamine baseline that is constantly going. It's called tonic dopamine. Okay? You have a dopamine baseline that's constantly firing. All right? And then you have phasic dopamine, which are these dopamine spikes. It is the difference between baseline and peak that gives us the rewarding feeling, the positive feeling, the something that feels good. When you are constantly giving yourself this cheap dopamine, you lose this contrast between baseline and peak, and things stop feeling so rewarding. And that's not just true for, you know, feeling motivated to go and do a task and actually go and do the thing you want to do. Like, that's true for just literally feeling positive and feeling grateful and excited about life. So if you've been feeling just like lackluster and you've been feeling just like nothing excites me, nothing really motivates me, you probably need to do a little dopamine detox. And if you're like, what the hell is dopamine detox? There are no rules to it, and you can go online and there are so many— like, true, truthfully speaking and scientifically speaking, the length that you need to do it depends on the severity to which you're at in your dopamine system. Um, and they've shown, you know, like, it's really like more prolonged, like weeks to months. However, subjectively speaking and anecdotally speaking, you can feel a difference after just one day. 1 to 2 days, just go without your phone, reduce the stimulation, eat healthy foods, go for walks, exercise. Only natural, only dopamine that you actually got to put in the work for. Okay, no more dopamine from like— don't like skip desserts for a couple days, Skip social media for a couple days and skip scrolling. Release the stimulation. Go outside, go out into nature, like 1 to 2 days. And I like— you will feel a difference. Now, this is extremely important, just to make a super special note of this: at night before you go to sleep is so important. Please don't scroll on your phone at night. Don't do it. Don't do it. Because as you sleep at night, your dopamine system actually resets and resensitizes. Quality sleep does that for our dopamine system. But when you give yourself cheap dopamine at night, when you're scrolling or binging Netflix, this doesn't happen. So you wake up in the morning with low motivation and low energy. Literally just skip it at night. Number 5: your environment and the people in it. Your brain and nervous system adapts to the people around you. People are portals. If you want to level up in life, if you feel like you're stuck, create a new connection with a new person or break off one that you currently have. And I promise you, something in your reality will shift. New relationships or breaking off relationships you've had for a while— game changer. Works the same way with your environment. Now, personally speaking, I've moved, I think, 5 times in the past 3 or 4 years. Every single time I've leveled up, because when you move into a new environment, your brain has no prior associations of who you are. Just to kind of full circle moment this back to number 1, which is an identity mismatch. When I first graduated from grad school with my second degree in neuroscience, I actually moved across the country to Miami Beach because it was a dream of mine to always live on the beach. I grew up in upstate New York and then Texas, and then I was in grad school in Arizona, and I, I just always wanted to live on the beach. So I moved to Miami Beach and I didn't know a single person there, and it was just creating a brand new life and a brand new identity. Because environment— this is actually according to Identity-Based Motivation Theory— environment triggers specific identities. Your brain activates different identities depending on what environments you are in and different people you are around. So when you're in a brand new environment that you've never been in before, you have the power to dictate what identity is going to be created in this space. So powerful. Same thing with new people. So powerful. But, but people's nervous systems are contagious. People's mindsets are contagious. People's energy are contagious. Okay, there are multiple reasons for this, like chemo signals, which is the fact that your nervous system, your body, actually leaks chemical signals into the air and other people subconsciously feel them. So we subconsciously pick up on people's chemical signals and they do impact our performance, our motivation, our energy, our joy. Now, this is true for, for not just, you know, chemo signals. This is, you know, mirror neurons, the fact that your brain activates in ways similar to the people that you observe. There's also the chameleon effect in psychology, which is that we subconsciously pick up on behaviors and mannerisms of the people around us. There's also brainwave synchronization, where your brainwaves sync up with the brainwaves of other people that you are communicating with. All of these have been shown in research to be a real thing. So we do not exist independently of our environment. We are a node that is interconnected in the web that is our environment, okay? So to think that we exist independently from the environment, independently from the people around us, is just not true. And the more that you can use that to your advantage, the better. I am telling you right now I mean, I'll give you a personal example because last year I, I had this relationship that I just had kind of had this feeling for a while that it wasn't really aligned anymore, and I felt like we were maybe just kind of going on two different paths. And nothing negative to say about that person, but— and this is just what makes this example even better— there was no like horrible thing that happened. It was just I had felt that we were kind of going on different paths. We weren't really super aligned anymore. We had different trajectories, different priorities, different values that I kind of saw that happening. And when something like small happened, and then I was kind of just like, you know what, I'm going to take that as my sign that I shouldn't really be as close with this person anymore. And so I kind of just distanced myself, created a new boundary. I always say you don't have to like completely cut people off, although I am swift with the scissors. That's a personality trait that I have. I'm like very okay with it. But there's another thing that I like to say, which is love— you can love people from afar. You can love people from afar. You don't have to completely cut them out of their— your life, um, to create distance and set boundaries. So anyway, I sort of just distanced myself, set some boundaries, and right after that I had manifested a huge goal. I think it was actually hitting a million on Instagram. That happened right after I moved on from this relationship. And this has happened to me multiple times. I mean, every single time I've moved environments and when I create new relationships. Because again, people are portals. They pull you into their world. So make sure that the people you are spending the most time with are living in worlds that you want to be in, or at least they're trying to, you know, level up or move into worlds that you want to go, right? So whichever one of these resonated with you, maybe one, maybe all of them, you know what to do now. So I'm so excited for you to get to work and level up and manifest whatever it is that you desire. If you're interested in coaching with me or Minecraft, my program, anything like that, all the information that you need is going to be in the description. Sending you so much love, and I'll see you next time. Bye!