How do you view yourself? What identity have you created for yourself? When you tell yourself the story of you, what do you say? What experiences have shaped you? What beliefs do you hold? What values guide you? Your answers to all of these questions make up your identity. They are what psychological researchers would call your “Self-concept.”

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Your identity plays a massive role in your life, but it does so in the background. We don’t explicitly say “I’m a kind person, so I’m going to help this person.” Yet that’s exactly what happens. Our behavior is shaped by the identity that we hold for ourselves. We take actions whenever there’s a nice fit between who we are and what we need to do, but we procrastinate, ignore, or even attack ideas that don’t fit our world view.

In your brain, there’s a very special type of neuron called a “Defense Neuron.” There are all types of specialized neurons in the brain. Some focus on facial recognition, some are responsible for counting numbers, and some are so highly specialized that they only light up when you see a particular person or celebrity. Defense neurons are the same, except they special in something incredibly awesome. Their job is to protect your ego. They only light up when you are exposed to ideas that don’t fit how you see yourself. They light up when a democrat is exposed to republican views, or when a republic is exposed to a liberal one. They light up when a kind person witnesses an act of cruelty. They light up when a miser or penny-pincher is asked for money. Their only job is to protect your identity… to protect your ego.

This is why it’s so incredibly hard to change ourselves. Protecting your identity is literally in your DNA. It doesn’t matter what that change actually is. It could be positive or negative, big or small. To the defense neurons in your brain, the only thing that matters is whether it fits how you currently view yourself as a person. The more radical a change is, the more likely these neurons will fire. In a future episode, we’ll go even deeper into this topic and discuss an amazing area of your brain called the “Right-Brain Interpreter.” It’s an area of your brain that specializes in storytelling. It plays a huge role here because our identity is made of the stories we tell ourselves. 

Knowing this about our brain, it’s no surprise that creativity research suggests that people who view themselves as being creative are actually more creative than those who don’t. The mere fact that you think you’re a creative person means that the defense neurons stay quiet when you engage in creative activity. This also means that there’s less of an obstacle when it comes to procrastination. 

All procrastination can be traced by to defense neurons in your brain. Why didn’t you start your college term paper sooner? Because defense neurons in your brain were afraid of failing. They were afraid that doing a bad job on the paper would result in the loss of your ego. They chose to protect your identity, even when it wasn’t actually in your best interest to do so. So why did you eventually sit yourself down and write the paper? Once again, defense neurons. They were confronted with the growing reality that NOT turning in a paper would result in a loss of ego. Earlier on, the defense neurons tried to protect you by keeping you away from what needed to be done. Now they’re trying to protect you by pushing you towards its completion. It used the same system to arrive at two wildly different conclusions. 

How you see yourself has a huge impact one what you do and don’t do. If you don’t hesitate to sit down and start creating, it’s because your identity doesn’t see a threat. You see yourself as the type of person who would sit down and create something new. The same is true for what you actually create and how you choose to create it. Does perfectionism get in your way? You have defense neurons that are overly sensitive to taking risks, and they won’t stop firing until they think every single possible future problem is already solved. When you create, do you explore wildly unique ideas or do you typically focus on lower-level problem solving? Do you try to maximize uniqueness or effectiveness when you create? The creative person who embraced the unknown is constantly trying unique and interesting ideas. It’s only natural because they see themselves as the type of person who would do that. 

As you’re creating today, think about your identity. Think about the story you’ve told yourself about who you are and what you’re able to do or achieve. Recognize that it’s just a story. Stories can be rewritten. If you look back at who you were 10 years ago, you’ll see that it already has. Your identity was originally created based on your past experiences and beliefs. They are rewritten by adding new experiences and new beliefs. Remember that the thing you’re so afraid of probably isn’t what you think it is. They’re little more than the result of overactive defense neurons in your brain. That doesn’t mean they don’t feel real. Recognizing that is is happening is the first step to changing how you view yourself. Any time you accept a new belief, your ego must synthesize it into the whole. When I say accept, I don’t mean purely on a cognitive level where you think through everything logically and agree. The defense neurons in your brain don’t take orders from your conscious brain. In fact, it’s your conscious brain that takes order from them. The only way for the subconscious to change is when the orders also come from the subconscious. That means understanding this idea on a purely emotional level. Whether you can logically explain to yourself why your changing doesn’t matter. That’s the conscious brain trying to take control, but its powerless here. Your defense neurons can reject your conscious brain all day long. That’s its job. Your job, as the one sitting in the driver’s seat of your conscious brain, is to expose yourself to knew experiences and new beliefs. The more beliefs you add and the more emotional those beliefs are to you, the more your ego has to change to make room for them. You don’t have direct control over those beliefs, but you can influence them by putting yourself in situations where change can occur.

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