Teach Yourself to Rest Read Free

The Story Your Brain Tells About Rest

Belief · 3 min read

We have biological default states, the brain having one that has a pretty boring name but is extremely powerful and connected to things like identity, your sense of self, and your story.¹

It's called the Default Mode Network (boring name, big job) and it gets that "default" label because it's what switches on when nothing external is demanding your attention.² So it's less your default way of thinking and more your default state when thinking isn't being directed at anything.

That state is also where the brain keeps a running model of you, one it uses to guess what you'll do and feel next.

This is what's called predictive processing, the idea that the brain isn't just taking in the world, it's constantly guessing what's about to happen and checking reality against the guess.³ A mismatch between prediction and input is prediction error, and this framework treats minimizing that error as the brain's central job.

There are two ways to minimize prediction error. Update the model to match the world. Or act on the world to make it match the model.

Belief

Your self model, largely maintained by DMN activity, functions as what's known as a "prior," what you already believe going into a new piece of evidence, before you've looked at it. It's essentially a strong standing prediction about who you are and what you're capable of.

Where this gets interesting is how all of this, DMN, identity, and predictive processing, connects to your beliefs.

You are constantly getting new information, and even when that information is ambiguous, your brain doesn't read it neutrally. It reads it in whatever way agrees with what it already expected.

Some of these priors sit so deep in your subconscious that they feel more like fact, and they don't come from nowhere. If you grew up watching money be scarce, or experienced love being tied to sacrifice and exertion, rest can register in your brain as danger instead of comfort.

That's where identity turns into something closer to a self fulfilling prophecy. The prior doesn't just wait to be proven true or false by what happens next, it reaches into behavior and makes itself true.

If the standing belief is "rest isn't safe" or "I don't rest," you won't.

Rest, in all definitions of it, which we'll get into in this program, is never fully unavailable to you. The brain just works to keep your outcomes aligned with your identity.

It would rather be right about who you are than let you have something that contradicts it.

Identity ends up matching outcome, and your reality, in that narrow but real sense, depends on who you already believe yourself to be.

The good news is your brain is really malleable, and can change due to something called neuroplasticity.⁴ So priors can update, but only when the evidence against them is strong enough, or repeated enough, to outweigh what's already there.

Our program is here to give your brain enough evidence that the identity itself has a reason to change.

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Sources

Sources

Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1–38.

Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676–682.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.

Kolb, B., & Whishaw, I. Q. (1998). Brain plasticity and behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 49(1), 43–64.

A note on the money and love/sacrifice lines: those are offered as illustrative examples of how a prior could form, not a cited research finding. There isn't a specific study behind "growing up watching money be scarce makes rest feel like danger." It's a plausible application of the prior mechanism above, not an established result on its own.