When growing up you are constantly reinforced and punished. It’s a time when you’re dependent of your peers and you unconsciously create a system in your brain to stay out of trouble. This system protected you by mirroring and pleasing your authority figures and by learning how to do well. The brain wants to be efficient and thus creates a system to make our actions more effortless — this is why we form habits. But unfortunately, as we grow up, this system doesn’t. The system is outdated and wants to judge and criticise to ‘keep you safe’.

Another way a belief is formed is by a reoccurring thought, the meaning you give things, fear (of not being enough), through the words of others, assumptions or a past (traumatic) event or experience. I know, it’s a lot. When we run the same thoughts over and over again, combined with the experience of a certain emotion we ‘install’ these thoughts (language of the brain) and the emotion or feeling (language of the body) into our belief-system. The more often we run the same thoughts and emotions, the more we hard-wire it into our system.

Example: you’re a child and your parents always pick you up as they get home and give you loads of loving attention. But today is different. Today your parents arrive home and they don’t pick you up. Instead they send you to your room and from there you can hear a lot of fighting going on. As a child (and some never grow up) you are very egocentric. You start to reason what just happened and it all revolves around you. You start giving the event a meaning: “what have I done wrong? Do they don’t love me anymore? Why are they upset with me?” etc. 

Your mind is really good at making something small turn into something really big if you feed it. But the real problem is that your mind and body don’t know the difference between the outer-world experience (the actual event) and the inner-world experience (the memory and meaning you give it). By experiencing this thought and emotion time after time your mind and body become so familiar with it that it becomes automatic and habitual. Which means that these thoughts and emotions become easier and easier to switch on, until they’re a loop of habitual thinking. 

Your belief-system is a habitual way of seeing your outer- and inner-world — your perspective. Which means that if you have the habit of thinking the same thoughts over and over again, it becomes a belief. Your beliefs together form your belief-system. You could see it as a storage with many boxes. This storage also functions as a big filter. Every time you experience something new you take it through that filter, label it (give it meaning) and try to put it in the appropriate box. And what happens if it doesn’t fit into one of the boxes? You’ll start feeling anxious and insecure, because it’s unpredictable. In other words: you’re feeling uncomfortable.

The problem with these boxes? You created them subconsciously and they probably aren’t exactly the way you’d like them to be… Which means there are mistakes, malfunctions, it is outdated and sometimes doesn’t even makes sense with the reality at all.

I can imagine this was a lot.

The good news?

Your current belief-system doesn’t have to define your life. The neuropathways in our brain literally form a system, but thanks to neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to reshape, change and recover) we aren’t defined by this system. which means that the structure of our brain – where our habits are shaped – can be changed.

“man often becomes what he beliefs himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning” – Mahatma Gandhi