Learning to change, NEGATIVE feedback

Change is difficult. But why?

With the new year comes the desire to introduce change and growth into our lives. But if you are like the 80％ of people who fail at their resolutions, you know for a fact that change is not easy. We tend to procrastinate; things are harder than it feels like it should; we fail to sustain the change beyond the first few weeks or months.

This struggle can feel frustrating, and even demoralizing. Some of us might feel that we have committed some moral failure. Don’t feel that way; not being able to hang on to change is not a bug of our psychology – it’s a feature.

Our personalities and routines are systems. Like all systems, they exist only if they’re stable (an unstable set of character traits is not a personality; it’s a disorder), and stability is defined by being resistant to change, i.e. Stasis.

But, in contradiction, static systems live in a world that demands constant change. Systems and people have to thus balance between these two tendencies: to sustain a stability of self, while being adaptable to the demands of change.

This brings us to a concept that (I think) is poorly understood, but essential to balancing between stability and change: feedback.

Too often in colloquial usage, feedback meant ‘sharing one’s thoughts and opinions about some work.’ I hear people say, “I’d like to gather feedback,” or “Thanks for your feedback, I’ll keep it in mind. Feedback is thought of something that happens to you, which is a poor understanding and utilization of its power.

For, you see, feedback is not a passive act of just listening. It’s a mechanism for actively managing change. Take, for example, the biology of a living being. All living beings have a stable characteristics (temperature, hormone levels, blood sugar), which they regulate using feedback. When it’s cold outside, you start to shiver and grow goosebumps, which helps to raise the body temperature back to its regular levels. As your body temperature rises, you start to shiver less and your goosebumps stop.

This mechanism is called negative feedback; you take action based on some change to go against the direction of the change. you might adopt this method to maintain a certain weight, or to avoid pain and other bad outcomes. A key feature of negative feedback is its ability to maintain balance and stability: whether it’s too cold or too hot outside, negative feedback is the system you need to bring your temperature under control.

So what can we learn from observing that most of nature uses negative feedback? I believe that the biggest lesson we can learn is that we must accept that our tendency is to want to go against the direction of the change. Negative feedback is by far the most common form of regulation, and by its principles, we tend to favour behaviours that go against the direction of change. This is why your resolutions and attempts at changing your habits and routines often fall flat: you are not fighting a bug of your personality; but a feature.