Rewiring—Why Willpower is Never Enough

There’s a lot of talk about your money mindset. But, far more important, is understanding how your mind and brain work together.  

In a recent experiment, at the University of South Wales, students were told: “Whatever you do, don’t think about a red apple.”

As you’d expect, most couldn’t get that image out of their mind. Which is quite normal. 

But what about those who swore they’d successfully obliterated the image from their mind?

Well, according to brain scans, “even those people who are good at suppressing certain thoughts still harbor traces of the thought in [ their brain’s] cortex.”  

And any deeply embedded thought—say of scarcity or inadequacy—exerts an irrepressible force to behave accordingly, regardless of your efforts to change.  

Will power—trying not to think about buying those to-die-for designer shoes, which are way out of your budget—is a fruitless task. A far better (and easier) solution—thought substitution rather than thought control. 

So instead of NOT thinking of the red apple or NOT buying the designer shoes, you’d be far more successful substituting a dramatically different thought, like imagining a white cloud or a surplus of cash in your savings account.  

“Using brute force to not think about something simply won’t work,” noted the study, “Because the thought is actually there in our brains.”

From now on, stop struggling to exert willpower and focus on rewiring your brain by calmly and continually repeating positive affirmations, such as:  I love watching my bank balance grow; It’s so fun to save; I am smart with money and my Future Self thanks me.

What deeply embedded thoughts do you live with and what could you substitute to improve your relationship with money? Leave me a comment below.

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