What if some of the beliefs you have about yourself aren’t actually true, no matter how “real” they may feel?
Maybe you believe:
- I should be farther along in life by now.
- I’m an imposter.
- Why can’t I ever get ahead?
- I’m terrible under pressure.
- Everyone else seems to have it figured out better than I do.
- This is too much for me to handle.
- I’m just bad with money.
The tricky thing about beliefs is that they rarely feel like beliefs. They often feel like basic facts about who we are, what we’re capable of, or how the world works. And because beliefs feel deeper and more permanent than passing thoughts, we tend to give them tremendous weight and authority. They don’t feel like something we simply think; they feel like something we know to be true.
But your brain doesn’t have an inherent truth detector; instead, it is constantly learning through repetition. What you repeatedly think, feel, experience, and do can help shape the patterns your brain learns and reinforces.
When certain thoughts are reinforced again and again, they can become increasingly familiar, automatic, and deeply ingrained. Eventually, something your brain has practiced thousands of times starts to feel like an unquestionable truth simply because it is familiar.
Understanding how this happens can also help us understand something incredibly powerful: The beliefs you’ve learned about yourself aren’t necessarily permanent. Your brain remains capable of learning new patterns and updating old ones.
Want to know how? Keep reading…
Your Brain Is Constantly Learning Through Repetition
Your brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons that constantly communicate with one another through incredibly complex networks.
Every thought, action, memory, and behavior involves patterns of activity across these networks. When similar patterns are activated repeatedly, the connections involved can strengthen and become increasingly ingrained and efficient.
You may have heard this concept summarized as: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” This doesn’t mean that thinking a thought once permanently rewires your brain. It simply means that when certain patterns of neural activity repeatedly occur together, the brain can become increasingly efficient at accessing and producing those patterns again in the future.
Think about learning to drive. When you first get behind the wheel, everything requires conscious effort and attention; check the mirror, put your foot on the brake, shift into drive, check your surroundings… At first, your brain has to devote significant energy and focus on every step.
But after years of driving, you no longer consciously walk yourself through each action. Instead, the pattern has become so familiar and well-practiced that much of it happens automatically.
Think of the times you have driven to work, only to pull into your parking spot and not even remember entire portions of your drive? Because this activity was so familiar and practiced, the brain practically performs it on autopilot.
Your brain does something similar with patterns of thought.
If you repeatedly think:
I can’t do this.
I’m going to fail.
Something bad is going to happen.
…your brain gets a lot of practice activating those patterns. With repetition, those thoughts can become increasingly familiar, accessible, and automatic.
Eventually, you may not consciously choose them at all; they simply show up on autopilot.
Your Brain Loves Familiarity
Here’s an important key: your brain is constantly processing an enormous amount of information. This demands a significant amount of energy, but energy is a finite resource. In order to function efficiently and conserve energy, your brain relies heavily on learned patterns, predictions, habits, and shortcuts.
Imagine having to consciously relearn how to brush your teeth every morning or cook your favorite meal. That would require enormous attention and quickly drain your brain’s energy.
Instead, your brain automates well-learned patterns so that they require less deliberate attention and cognitive effort, and therefore, less energy.
This ability is incredibly useful, but it also means the brain can automate patterns that aren’t necessarily in your best interest, like negative self-talk or beliefs.
The more familiar a particular negative thought becomes, the more readily your brain may return to it.
Something goes wrong at work?
- Everyone thinks I’m a failure.
Someone doesn’t text you back?
- They must be upset with me.
You make a mistake?
- I always mess things up.
The thought may arrive so quickly and automatically that you don’t even recognize it as an interpretation; it simply feels like “truth”. This is where familiarity can become incredibly misleading.
Familiarity Is Not the Same Thing as Truth
One of the most important things to understand about deeply ingrained beliefs is this:
A thought can feel true without being objectively true.
Your brain isn’t evaluating every automatic thought from scratch and asking:
“Is this an accurate and unbiased assessment of reality?”
Instead, your brain often relies on what is simply familiar and practiced. When a thought or belief has been repeated and reinforced over time, its familiarity can contribute to how convincing and “real” it feels.
That means a repeated negative or unhealthy belief can feel very “real” to us, even when it is exaggerated, outdated, or simply wrong, simply because it is familiar.
Imagine someone who repeatedly struggled in school as a child and eventually developed the belief, “I’m not smart enough.”
Years later, that person may have built a successful career, learned advanced skills, and demonstrated intelligence countless times, but when something challenging or stressful happens, the old negative belief still appears: “See? You’re not smart enough… why do you even try?”
Why does this happen? It’s not because the belief is true; it’s because the belief is familiar, and the familiar often becomes the brain’s default when it is stressed or challenged.
The more familiar a thought becomes, the easier it can be to mistake the feeling of familiarity for evidence that the thought must be true.
Emotion Makes Learning Even More Powerful
Repetition isn’t the only thing that shapes what the brain learns. Emotion matters, too.
In fact, emotion has a significant influence on what the brain pays attention to, remembers, and records.
But why?
From a survival perspective, emotionally significant experiences often contain important information. If something frightened or hurt you in the past, your brain benefits from prioritizing that experience and remembering what happened so it can recognize and respond to similar situations in the future. This same process can also contribute to deeply ingrained negative beliefs.
Imagine repeatedly thinking, “I’m not good enough.”
Now pair that negative thought with past emotional experiences of rejection, embarrassment, criticism, fear, or shame. The negative thought is now being reinforced by an emotionally meaningful experience.
A simple way to think about it is:
Repetition reinforces the pattern in the brain, while emotion tells the brain, “Pay attention! This is important!”
Together, repeated thoughts and emotionally meaningful experiences can have a powerful impact on the beliefs and expectations we develop about ourselves and the world around us.
Why Positive Affirmations Sometimes Fall Short
Once people understand that repetition can strengthen beliefs, the obvious solution to overcoming negative beliefs often seems simple: Just repeat positive thoughts instead.
While repetition can certainly be useful, it’s not the whole story.
Imagine you’ve spent 20 years believing, “I’m not good enough.”
Then one morning, you look in the mirror and say: “I’m amazing. I’m confident. I’m worthy. I can do anything,” but internally, you’re still feeling ashamed, depressed, anxious, or frustrated. This means that new positive belief has very little emotional support behind it. You may be practicing new words, but your emotional experience is still reinforcing the old belief.
This is one reason reframing isn’t about replacing every negative thought with an exaggeratedly positive one. Instead, reframing says that the new thought or belief needs to be believable enough for you to engage with it.
A new thought is often more useful when it is both healthier AND believable.
Instead of, “I never fail.”
- Try: “Failure doesn’t mean I’m incapable. I can learn from what happened and try differently next time.”
Instead of: “Everyone loves me.”
- Try: “Not everyone has to like me for me to have value.”
Instead of: “I’m fully confident.”
- Try: “I can feel nervous and still do something difficult.”
The goal isn’t to lie to your brain; it’s to give your brain a more balanced and accurate belief to practice.
Where Gratitude Can Help
There’s one more important piece to this puzzle, and that is positive emotion.
Ideally, we would pair a new thought or belief with a positive emotion, like confidence, joy, happiness, or peace, to help reinforce the new pattern. But emotions aren’t light switches we can simply turn on and off.
When you are overwhelmed, anxious, angry, depressed, or discouraged, telling yourself to “just feel happy” probably isn’t going to work. At the same time, pairing a new, more adaptive belief with a genuine positive emotional experience may help reinforce the new pattern and give the brain a richer experience to learn from.
So what can we do if we feel awful, but want to establish a new thought or belief?
We can start with the positive emotion of gratitude. Even when you can’t feel joy, happiness, peace, or confidence, we can usually find something to be grateful for.
This does not mean forcing yourself to be grateful for painful experiences or pretending that things are going better than they are. Instead, you are intentionally focusing your attention on something positive that exists alongside the difficulty or pain.
Life can be incredibly painful, and yet there can still be things worth appreciating and feeling grateful for – both can be true at the same time.
Gratitude could be drawing your attention to:
- A person who supports you.
- Something your body allowed you to do today.
- A challenge you’ve already survived.
- A small accomplishment.
- A safe place to sleep.
- A good conversation.
- Your morning coffee.
- A beautiful sunset.
Gratitude doesn’t need to be profound; it just needs to be genuine.
By practicing a reframed thought or belief while intentionally connecting with a positive experience through gratitude, you’re giving your brain a richer new experience to learn from.
A Simple Practice for Rewriting an Old Belief
So how can you apply this knowledge to begin reshaping an old negative belief or thought pattern?
Step 1: Identify the automatic belief or thought
The first step is to simply pay attention to the automatic thought or belief that pops up when something goes wrong.
For example: “I always fail no matter how hard I try.”
Don’t immediately argue with it; instead, simply recognize it and acknowledge: “That is a belief my brain has practiced a lot.”
Step 2: Question the “truth” of the thought
Next, ask yourself: “Is this really true, or is it simply familiar?”
Look for evidence that challenges the validity of the belief:
- Have you always failed?
- Have there been difficult situations you survived?
- Times you adapted?
- Times when people congratulated you on a job well done?
- Times you learned something and did better the next time?
You are not trying to prove that everything is wonderful; you’re simply trying to make the thought more balanced and accurate.
Step 3: Create a believable reframe
Instead of: “I always fail when things get difficult.”
- Try: “Some things have been really difficult for me, but I’ve made it through difficult things before. I can learn, adapt, and keep moving forward.”
Notice that the reframe isn’t forced positivity or unrealistic enthusiasm; it is simply balanced perspective. The most important thing is that the reframe is balanced and believable; otherwise, your brain will push back.
Step 4: Find something to be genuinely grateful for
After creating your new belief or thought, identify something you can genuinely appreciate in this moment. It can even be something completely unrelated to the belief you are working on.
Take a moment to really feel the gratitude rather than simply identifying it, and allow yourself to experience that positive feeling, even if just briefly.
Step 5: Practice the new thought or belief
While you’re still connected to that more positive emotional state of gratitude, return to your reframed thought or belief and repeat: “I’ve made it through difficult things before. I can learn, adapt, and keep moving forward.”
Repeat this practice regularly and consistently to make it familiar.
You’re Not Trying to Erase the Old Pathway
There’s an important distinction here: changing a belief doesn’t necessarily mean deleting the old thought from your brain. Echoes of the old belief or thought may return, especially when you’re feeling stressed, tired, or emotionally upset.
The difference is that you will no longer treat the recurrence of the old thought or belief as fact and let it run on autopilot.
Here’s a helpful way of thinking about this distinction: Imagine you are walking through a field on the same dirt path you’ve traveled every day for many years. That trail will be well worn and very established, which naturally makes it the easiest route to follow.
Creating a new path takes effort at first.
You start by intentionally choosing a new direction. Even then, the old trail doesn’t immediately disappear just because you have changed directions. However, if you repeatedly travel the new path, it becomes more worn and established over time. The key is that you now have more than one trail available to you.
That is a useful way to think about changing deeply ingrained thought patterns and beliefs; our goal is not to erase everything your brain learned in the past. Instead, our goal is to give your brain new opportunities.
Familiarity is Powerful, but it isn’t Truth
The beliefs you carry can have a profound influence on how you see yourself, what opportunities you pursue, how you interpret setbacks, and what you believe you’re capable of.
But just because a belief may feel true does not automatically make it objectively true. Sometimes, it just means your brain has had a tremendous amount of practice thinking that way, and familiarity can easily be mistaken for “truth.”
Remember, the old belief didn’t become powerful because you thought it once. It became powerful through repetition, paired with strong emotional reinforcement. This means that changing an old belief will take practice, too.
So the next time your brain tells you:
- I’m not capable.
- I’m going to fail.
- I’m not good enough.
Instead of immediately accepting the thought as truth, ask yourself, “Is this really true, or is this simply familiar?”
Then give your brain something new to practice.
Because the thoughts that feel the most familiar aren’t necessarily the thoughts that are the most true, and with practice, you can give your brain new opportunities.
by Sonya Crittenden,
Director of Client Services & Education
Cereset Corporate Headquarters
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*Cereset is a wellness technology and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, disorder, or mental health condition.