Neuroscience of change

By Jason Lim

Change is hard. It’s so hard that people die rather than change. Studies have shown only one in nine people who have undergone coronary bypass surgery adopts a healthier lifestyle.

It’s not that others don’t see the value of changing their lifestyle, but they just don’t follow through on the change. And it’s not just individuals. What about organizational change? According to a recent McKinsey study, only 30 percent of organizational change management effort succeeds. Personally, I think even 30 percent is probably wishful thinking.

Why? Because our brain hates change.

Let’s examine how our brain evolved. It evolved and was fine-tuned to the utmost degree to keep us alive when every encounter was literally a matter of life or death. To put it another way, to eat or be eaten.

See that yellow greyish, lumbering animal slithering through the Savannah grassland? Will that thing eat me or do I have a chance to kill and eat it? That was the primary survival question that we ask our brain to answer. If our brain came up with the wrong answer, we die. And probably so do members of our family and tribe.

This means that the basic organizing principle of your brain is simple because it only asks one fundamental question. Is this good or bad for us?

In this simple duality, good means something that feeds, clothes, nurtures, comforts, and connects us with others ― in a word, something that reward us by helping us survive and thrive as an individual, family, community, tribe, and species. Bad means something that will threaten our surviving by wounding, killing, stealing food, reducing our social status, and isolating us.

Although human beings have moved far away from the hunter & gatherer survival framework, our brain still lives in the Savannah, always scanning everything ― every encounter, gathering, people, and situations ― for their potential reward or threat.

Especially something that changes the current, familiar environment. You see, familiarity is good because it allowed us to survive and even thrive. So, anything that introduces change to the familiar environment is a threat.

Intellectually and rationally, the proposed change could actually be good for you. However, your brain instinctively perceives any change as a threat and automatically triggers the ``fight or flight” response that our body uses to counter threats.

And what happens when this "fight or flight” response is triggered? It releases adrenalin and cortisol which help prime you for immediate action. Unfortunately, our brain’s threat circuit also shuts down our brain’s executive functional (prefrontal cortex) region, resulting in inhibition of creative thinking, induced mental fatigue, and overall decrease in advanced thought processes.

What does this mean? It means that the brain confronts any types of change as a threat and triggers a neurochemical response that compromises our high executive function.

Why is this bad for change? Because higher executive function is what is exactly needed to effect a successful change. Change means something different from what you are used to, correct? Different roles, positions, connections, reporting lines, and ways of doing business. Different also means that it takes your executive brain to process all the things that are new and unfamiliar until you can internalize them. In a word, change requires your executive brain to work hard.

A typical example is learning how to drive. When you first learned how to drive (new and unfamiliar), wasn’t it difficult and exhausting? You had to be focused on every single movement and action, constantly scanning the road and aligning your next steps with your environment. Since driving was something new, you had to use your prefrontal cortex to learn this new behavior. And using the prefrontal cortex is very energy intensive.

However, once you got used to it, what happened? You hardly ever think about change, right? It’s now been internalized and made into a habit. Now, driving is familiar.

But now someone comes in and says that you have to learn to drive a stick because they are not making automatic cars anymore. What’s your reaction? Probably, ``hell no!”Your brain automatically defines this change as a threat, so engages your body in a "fight or flight” response that dampens your executive brain function.

This means that your prefrontal cortex, precisely the brain region that you need to learn how to manually shift and coordinate the clutch, is out of commission. It’s the neurological Catch-22.

No wonder change is hard.

So, now that we know how our brain is wired, how do we run an end-around (American football term)? Two things.

When faced with change, we first have to be aware that our brain will automatically hijack our rational thought process and push us to either fight or run away. Once you know what your brain is doing, it’s easier to control it. Then the second thing is to do everything you can to lessen the threat response so that your brain works with you, not against you, in trying to learn the new behaviors required by the change and internalize them.

The key question now becomes, "How do you lessen the threat response that brain perceives?” That’s for my next column. Stay tuned.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C., based expert on innovation, engagement and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook/jasonlim2000 and @jasonlim2012.