How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self

by Nicole LePera

We are, of course, given a set of genes, but, like a deck of cards, to some degree we can choose which hands we want to play. We can make choices about our sleep, nutrition, relationships, and the ways we move our body that all alter gene expression.

We do have a genetic code at birth. But gene expression and repression are influenced by our environment. In other words: our life experiences alter us at the cellular level.

How we think, speak, and respond—all of this comes from the subconscious part of ourselves that has been conditioned by thoughts, patterns, and beliefs that became ingrained in our childhoods through a process called conditioning.

The safest place, it turns out, is one you’ve been before because you can predict the familiar outcome. Habits, or behaviors that we repeatedly return to, become the subconscious’s default mode.

Our brain actually prefers to spend most of its time coasting on autopilot—it is best able to conserve its energy by knowing what to expect. This is why our habits and routines feel so comforting and why it’s so unsettling and even exhausting when our routines are disrupted. The trouble is, following

Every time we make a choice that is outside of our default programming, our subconscious mind will attempt to pull us back to the familiar by creating mental resistance. Mental resistance can manifest as both mental and physical discomfort. It can take the form of cyclical thoughts, such as I can just do this later or I don’t need to do this at all, or physical symptoms, such as agitation, anxiety, or simply not feeling like “yourself.” This is your subconscious communicating to you that it is uncomfortable with the new territory of these proposed changes.