By Rodger Morrow, Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business
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Every January
Every January, Beaver Countians engage in a familiar civic ritual. We resolve. We vow. We swear—often solemnly, occasionally while holding a gym membership contract—that this year will be different.
And by February, we are back to negotiating with a bag of pretzels like diplomats at Geneva.
According to Chase Hughes, a 20-year Navy veteran who made a career out of persuading unwilling people to talk, the problem isn’t willpower. It’s that we keep trying to reason with the wrong part of our brains.
In a recent interview with Dr. Annette Bosworth, aka Dr. Boz, Hughes laid out a method for “brainwashing yourself”—his word, cheerfully used—for positive behavior change. The trick, he says, is to stop appealing to your articulate, spreadsheet-loving prefrontal cortex and start communicating with the older, furrier parts of the mind that actually run the show.
Think less TED Talk. More Labrador retriever.
Step One: Target Acquisition
Your brain has something called the Reticular Activating System, a sort of internal bouncer that decides what information gets in. Tell it “I want to be healthier,” and it shrugs. Tell it “I weigh 185 pounds, wear a blue jacket, and jog every morning at 7,” and suddenly the brain perks up like it’s heard the dinner bell.
The lower brain doesn’t speak English. It speaks pictures. If a dog couldn’t understand your goal, neither can your nervous system.
Step Two: Threat Modeling
Here Hughes reveals something mildly unsettling but deeply familiar: the human brain is not wired for happiness. It is wired to avoid catastrophe.
So instead of merely visualizing your triumphant future self, you must also imagine the alternative. The version of you who keeps doing exactly what you’re doing now. The joints stiffen. The energy fades. The stairs become negotiable.
The goal is to make staying the same feel unsafe.
Step Three: Identity Engineering
Habits, Hughes argues, do not change until identity changes. If you see yourself as “the kind of person who always falls off the wagon,” the wagon will obligingly keep rolling away.
His advice is both clever and faintly alarming: look at an aged photo of yourself and start prioritizing that person’s needs. Define three beliefs, three daily behaviors, and three nonnegotiable standards that this future you simply lives by.
Not because they’re virtuous. Because that’s who they are.
Step Four: Environmental Sabotage
This may be the most merciful step of all. You are not lazy; you are predictable. Context, Hughes says, beats discipline every time.
Change the room. Rearrange the furniture. Wear different clothes to work on different tasks. Move your laptop. Create novelty. When the brain can’t predict what’s next, it becomes plastic again—ready to learn instead of coasting.
It turns out monotony is the enemy of change, and your couch knows it.
Step Five: Reprogram the Mammal
Here Hughes introduces the acronym F.A.T.E.—a word chosen, one suspects, to get our attention.
Focus means keeping your goals constantly visible.
Authority means listening to people your nervous system respects (lab coats help).
Tribe means surrounding yourself with people who expect the new you to show up.
Emotion means making the future relationship with yourself feel personal and real.
Self-help works best, apparently, when it feels slightly tribal.
Step Six: The F.E.A.R. Formula
Yes, more acronyms. Neuroscience, like the military, loves them.
Focus.
Emotion.
Agitation.
Repetition.
Neurons that fire together wire together—but only if the signal matters and repeats. Track the habit. Disrupt the environment. Tie success to pride and safety. Repeat until discipline quietly slips out the back door and habit takes over.
Step Seven: The Identity Shift
Hughes ends with a thought experiment worthy of a Mike Tomlin locker room speech. If you woke up tomorrow in the body of an Olympic athlete, you wouldn’t need a planner to work out. You’d be repulsed by the idea of not training.
The goal isn’t self-improvement, he says. It’s self-returning. Going back to where you belong.
Hughes is also the author of The Six-Minute X-Ray, a guide to reading people quickly, and Tongue, an experiment in how language shapes reality—both of which sound like books best read when your sense of self is already reasonably secure.
Still, there’s something refreshing in his bluntness. New Year’s resolutions fail not because we are weak, but because we keep talking politely to a brain that evolved to survive saber-toothed cats.
The trick, it turns out, is not motivation.
It’s better messaging.
And possibly moving the couch.
