Find Your Why Before the Algorithm Finds It For You

The neuroscience of finding meaning in a world that profits from your insecurity.

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Your brain is wired to look for meaning.

This is something we see across psychology and neuroscience. We tend to remember information better when it connects to something meaningful, such as our experiences, our emotions, our values, our sense of who we are. Facts alone are rarely enough, and I believe that this matters a lot in relation to self-improvement.

There seems to be a growing exhaustion with the whole thing. I see everywhere on social media women rejecting anything that has to do with wellness. It feels like it is too much, and I agree. The endless advice about becoming your best self sometimes feels as though we are being told that every part of our lives needs fixing, and if we’re not constantly improving, we’re somehow falling behind.

I completely understand the exhaustion. However, I think the problem is that many of us are trying to improve for reasons that were never really ours to begin with.

Because there is something important to understand. Your brain can absolutely sustain effort through discipline, habit, and repetition. Neuroplasticity is real. With enough repetition, the brain can adapt to almost anything.

But there is a difference between changing a behaviour and finding fulfilment through it.

If the meaning behind your goal was borrowed from somewhere else, for instance a beauty standard, social media, an algorithm, or the promise that achieving a certain thing will finally make you confident, worthy, or happy, you may achieve the goal and still find yourself feeling empty or as if nothing feels like it is good enough.

Because what you were really searching for was never the thing itself.

For example, if we take physical beauty. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with wanting to look your best. I enjoy fashion, fitness, and taking care of myself. But if you unconsciously believe that beauty is what will finally make you confident, then confidence remains outside of you. It becomes something you have to earn rather than something you build.

And that is how people become trapped chasing goals that can never fully satisfy them.

The self-improvement industry is incredibly good at selling borrowed meaning. It often presents confidence, peace, fulfilment, and self-worth as destinations that exist somewhere on the other side of achievement.

But in my experience, those things do not live in the achievement. They live in the meaning underneath the pursuit.

So if meaningful growth is not about becoming someone else, what does it actually look like?

Let me tell you three ideas from neuroscience that have completely changed the way I think about my own development and that have allowed me to view self-improvement through a different lens. Allowing me to not fall into frustration and full rejection of becoming my best self.

1. The first is neuroplasticity.

The most important thing I learned is that the brain changes based on what you repeatedly do, not on what you intend to do. Not the version of yourself you imagine becoming one day.

Neuroplasticity shows that the brain responds to behaviour. What you repeatedly think, practise, tolerate, avoid, and reinforce eventually becomes part of your wiring.

I find that incredibly hopeful because it means the future version of you is not created by a single dramatic transformation. She is built through hundreds of small decisions repeated over time.

Every time you act in alignment with the woman you want to become, you provide your brain with evidence that this identity is real.

This means that I can treat myself with more love and patience throughout the self-improvement journey without falling into the miracle quick transformations that we are constantly sold out there, which can make us feel like failures when that doesn’t occur.

2. The second idea is epigenetics.

This is the study of how our behaviours and environments influence the way our genes are expressed.

One thing that changed the way I think about growth is realising that every family passes down more than genes.

We pass down emotional patterns, beliefs, ways of responding to stress, ways of relating to ourselves and other people.

Some of those patterns may have biological components. Others are learned through experience. But either way, we inherit far more than we realise.

And that means that every time we choose to heal something, understand ourselves more deeply, or respond differently, we are interrupting a chain that may have existed for generations.

3. And finally, co-regulation.

This is probably the one that impacts me the most and is slightly correlated to the previous point, but with the present focus, not the generational legacy.

The older I get, the less interested I become in improving myself purely for myself.

What motivates me now is understanding how much my nervous system affects the people around me.

Human beings regulate one another constantly. The way we speak, the way we respond to stress, the way we carry ourselves in difficult moments all influence the nervous systems of the people closest to us.

When we are chronically stressed, reactive, and overwhelmed, that state doesn’t stay contained within us. These things have real consequences.

And when I think about self-improvement through that lens, it feels very different.

It adds the meaning my brain needed to become someone whose presence makes life better for the people around her.

So if you feel exhausted by self-improvement culture, I think that’s worth listening to.

But before you reject growth altogether, it might be worth asking yourself a different question.

Are you tired of growing?

Or are you tired of pursuing goals that were never connected to anything that genuinely mattered to you?

Because if you don’t find your own meaning, the culture will happily provide one.

And it will probably have something to do with how you look, how much you achieve, or how closely you resemble a version of a woman that was never quite real to begin with.

Until next time,

—Lorena

find your why before the algorithm finds it for you.