I Lied to My Nervous System Until It Believed Me

No, I didn't have evidence. I had a hunch and I stopped accepting my reality as my reality.

Have you ever caught yourself saying, “I’ll change [insert habit] when...”?

Not to sound bratty but these are the words no coach wants to hear. Because the honest answer, every time, is: no, you won’t. I know that’s blunt. But you’re describing a hypothetical future that may or may not actually occur, and pinning your transformation to a date on a calendar that doesn’t exist yet.

So how do you actually break that thinking?

We all have the best of intentions. We assume our future self will simply handle things differently than our current self does today. Maybe that’s true eventually. But your future self is often just an idealized version of you, the person you imagine you’ll become once circumstances finally line up.

Here’s the question I want to ask you: how do you actually think you get to that version of yourself? Do you wake up one day and she’s just there? Of course not. You have to find ways to move differently through your current circumstances, today, before you feel ready, before others understand. At its core, that’s rewiring your subconscious to stop fearing the outcome you want and start believing it’s already possible.

This is basically a literal interpretation of the advice you’ve heard a hundred times: dress for the job you want, not the job you have. When you start dressing differently while still holding your current title, two things happen. Your environment notices you’re operating at a different level. And your own brain starts to register the gap between what you’re saying (”I want to be VP of Sales”) and what you’re doing (showing up like a VP of Sales already). Your subconscious resolves that gap by deciding it must have already happened. Over time, the new clothes stop feeling foreign. They just feel like you.

This shows up just as clearly with something like sleep. You know the phrase: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Setting aside the fact that wishing death on yourself for the sake of a productivity flex is a little unhinged, you’ll probably get there faster if your body never gets a real chance to repair overnight. So instead, you get consistent with sleep and wake times, and you start with your wake time, because that’s the lever that actually reshapes your evening. You decide you’re a 6am person. And then you just are one. Every change you make and actually keep is proof to your brain that the action isn’t dangerous. Eventually your body starts getting tired earlier at night on its own, because it’s been wired to expect 6am. (And like I said in my last piece: you have to trust your own choices more than you trust other people’s opinions about them.)

Now here’s where it gets personal.

When I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, I didn’t wait to feel ready. I made sweeping changes overnight, before my body or my mind had caught up: cutting out alcohol, prioritizing sleep, paying attention to the food, media, and words I let into my life. I started moving like someone who actually prioritized her health, long before I had any proof that it would work.

I want to be honest about that part, because it wasn’t easy. I didn’t have evidence yet that any of it would help. With a disease like UC, the standard advice is medication, indefinitely, with vague shrugs about what caused it in the first place. Maybe stress. Maybe food. Maybe genetics. If you’ve ever been through a real flare, you know it’s actual hell, and “maybe” doesn’t feel like much to go on.

So when I decided to make lifestyle changes alongside my medication, I was working off a hunch. If I could teach my body to feel safe around food again, I’d also need to teach my brain to turn off fight or flight. I was living in a constant state of elevated cortisol, a constant low hum of fear. Not fear of dying. Fear that my brain could no longer tell apart from an annoying email and an actual emergency. Everything got managed at the same level of urgency, all the time.

So I became someone who meal prepped, even when it was annoying and I didn’t have the time. Someone who chose sleep over one more hour catching up with friends. Someone who ordered a ginger ale instead of wine, even when everyone else at the table had a glass in hand. None of it happened overnight, and none of it was graceful. It took practice, it took failing and starting again, and it took a kind of discipline I didn’t know I had until I needed it.

Two years in, I’m not pretending anymore. I just am the person who does these things. My body and mind finally caught up to the actions I started taking on faith.

This is exactly the kind of pattern I dig into with clients inside the Whole Life Health Audit — the gap between the life you’re performing and the one your nervous system actually believes is true. If you’ve never looked at where that gap shows up for you specifically, it’s worth the ten minutes.

How to Actually Catch Yourself

So how do you interrupt “I’ll change when...” in real time, before it becomes the story you tell yourself for another six months?

Here’s the script I use with clients, and with myself.

The next time you hear yourself say “I’ll change ___ when ___,” stop and ask three questions, out loud if you have to:

1. What would the version of me who already made this change actually do right now, in this exact moment? Not someday. Right now, today, in these clothes, in this kitchen, at this dinner table. How would she move differently.

2. Is there a smaller version of that action I could take today instead of waiting for the “right” moment? You don’t need the full, complete version. You need a version.

3. What is waiting actually costing me? Be specific. Another flare? Another year complaining? Another month feeling foreign in your own ambition?

That third question is the one that actually breaks the spell, because “I’ll change when...” always quietly assumes that waiting is free. It isn’t. It never has been.

Here’s the reality, though. You'll forget to ask these questions more often than you remember. You won't get this right the first time you try it and maybe not even the tenth time. You'll still catch yourself three sentences into "I'll change when..." before you remember to stop. That's fine. The point isn't to never say it again. The point is to catch it faster each time, because every time you interrupt the thought and choose the smaller action instead, you're sending your subconscious the same signal as the new clothes, the new bedtime, the ginger ale instead of the wine. You're telling it this isn't dangerous, that change is not uncertain. Do that enough times and the catching stops feeling like effort. It just becomes how your brain works now.

This is part of the lifestyle and identity design work that I do inside The Radiant Reset. It’s the step you’ll want to avoid, because it’s not as black and white as a meal plan or a new supplement, that you swear will work this time. It’s about deciding who you are before your circumstances agree with you, and then practicing being her until your nervous system stops arguing.

If reading this stirred something up, that’s usually a sign there’s a gap worth looking at. The Whole Life Health Audit is built for exactly that: fifty questions designed to show you where you’re still waiting on permission you’ve already given yourself everywhere else. It takes less time than a coffee order.