Building Better Responses

Ask yourself how you respond in this situation: A car speeds around you and cuts you off, a careless and rude act. Some of us, like me, can react poorly in these situations. But we don't have to react that way. The difficulty is that your reaction is determined by your experience and behaviors learned up to that point. By the time you're being cut off by that driver, it's too late to override your programmed response.

But behaviors can be modified through advance preparation. A different thinking strategy gives the driver the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they are suffering a legitimate emergency and have to go somewhere as quickly as possible. Maybe their child has had a catastrophic accident and their life is uncertain. These simple thoughts already soften the incident's ability to wreck your mood and day.

This is why it's important to develop good neural constraints on future behavior. Because when the moment arrives, it's too late to change your response.

You Are Your Neural Patterns

Neuroscience research suggests your brain is deterministic so your response is preprogrammed by every decision you’ve made up to that point. You shouldn't say "I should be able to decide better" but instead say "I need to build better automatic responses." Failing in the moment is not weakness or moral defect, but recognition that you need more advance preparation.

Your current environment and internal neural feedback provide your brain’s stimuli. These inputs are run through your brain's architecture to generate your response through neural processes governed by physical laws. The key takeaway is that your response is automatic at that point—it's too late to change the outcome. Either the proper response has been programmed into your brain's circuitry or it hasn't.

Your response to a situation will be either untrained or trained, and it's better to avoid untrained reactions to challenging situations. The fact you respond automatically sounds limiting, but it's liberating as you can train those neural patterns.

The Training Imperative

Professional baseball players didn't pick up a bat for the first time and hit a 100-mph fastball. They do this incredible feat only by learning to hit through extensive practice. Successful hitting comes from automatic neural conditioning acquired through training.

In no way does this fact diminish their hard work and sacrifice to acquire their ability to hit. This talent comes about through their choice to dedicate themselves to thousands of hours of practice. All that practice is theirs and indicative of both their character and who they are. After all, we are our brains and the accumulation of training.

The same principle applies to any skill you want to develop in life. The point is if you want to do something well, you have to train for it. Human brains are very changeable from birth and require extensive learning compared to other animals. You need to train yourself to live as the person you want to be. Fortunately, you can reshape your brain through intentional practice.

How to Build Better Responses

People have developed various approaches to train neural responses. I'm hardly an expert in this area, but here are some approaches to shaping neural systems for better future behavior:

• Meditation works on improving the general mind state—increasing clarity of thinking, having less reactive patterns, and developing better baseline mental states.
• Mental rehearsal aims to visualize how to respond to challenging situations or difficult conversations, helping promote desired responses to these stressors.
• Habit formation approaches enact systems to build specific behavioral constraints through incremental changes.
• Environmental design changes the inputs that brains receive.

Each approach works by modifying neural patterns in advance of the response. The specific approach matters less than understanding why advance preparation is necessary. Whether through contemplative practices or behavioral techniques, the goal remains the same: training your neural architecture before you need better responses.

Why This Matters

Training your brain becomes imperative with the recognition that your next response depends only on the constraints you put in place right now. Your brain will respond automatically to the inputs according to the existing neural architecture.

The only question is whether your responses reflect intentional training or simply whatever patterns you've happened to develop. Choosing intentional training is an investment in who you'll become—shaping not just tomorrow's choices but your entire future self.

The Conscious Permanence Project explores whether these choices might have even deeper significance. But the neuroscience alone is compelling: every moment of training today shapes the person you'll be. Make that training count.

If these ideas resonate with you, I invite you to read the overview, join our community, and discover how understanding this project can transform your approach to living.

Questions? Thoughts? Connect with me through the community links or newsletter.

© 2025 Cory Lanker. This work is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).