No time to read?  Click here to listen to this article on Spotify

A couple of weeks ago I woke up at my friend's place in central London. 

We decided to go out and grab a cappuccino. 

As we crossed the street to the cafe.

Around the corner came thousands of people.

We found ourselves in the middle of a massive demonstration.

At first, honestly, it was a little intimidating. The physical hit of thousands of bodies and certainty coming around a corner.

The coffee quest abandoned for now.

I found myself, like others around us, compelled to watch this mass of humanity move past.

I wasn't one of them. But I felt part of what was going on

Not the march. Not the cause. But the moment.

I wasn't intrigued by what they were marching for. It was the certainty they were marching with.

They belonged somewhere, to something. 

Police lined the streets

With more density surrounding ethnic restaurants and shops. 

I don’t agree with this group politically but I recognised something very familiar…

Something very human.

Belonging to something, is safety.

Like being home.

It's programmed into human biology.

But quietly, without anyone noticing, it starts to require something in return — that you stop questioning.

And that's where the trap begins.

Look at what's happening in the world right now.

The division. 

The certainty. 

The lines being drawn. 

Something has hardened. 

People have picked their side and they're not moving. 

There is a pull distinctly across one side of the line or the other. 

You are fully in, fully committed, fully certain.

Or you are out.

No middle ground.

No room for doubt.

This is also part of the human design.

It's exactly how the nervous system works — find the tribe, stay inside it, don't question it.

Because historically, questioning caused ambiguity. 

Ambiguity got you cast out.

And cast out meant alone.

And alone meant danger.

To the nervous system, uncertainty is more threatening than a familiar discomfort. 

We would rather not look at our doubt, than risk finding something to question.

You see, the nervous system mistakes uncertainty for threat.

So the mind grabs the nearest solid thing.

A belief system it can go along with.

A feeling that's familiar.

A tribe that will have them.

And it holds on.

Not out of conviction.

But out of fear of letting go.

This isn't a political problem or a social one.

It's one of the oldest mechanisms we have.

Just playing out on a bigger stage.

The more uncertainty and fear in our own system the more likely we are to cling feverishly to a group's beliefs.  

Usually nothing wrong with this, it's how our system is designed, you gain something, a feeling of certainty and security, 

But you also lose something.

I've watched close friends and clients cross a line. 

Not all at once. 

Bit by bit. 

Until they were in too deep to divide out what they actually believed anymore. 

Being in meant defending the whole thing.

Think about this.

We all have beliefs. Opinions. Things we like and things we don't.

But where did they come from?

You weren't born with them pre-installed.

As our brain develops we are shaped by our environment. 

By the people around us. 

By our circumstances. 

And the brain is constantly categorising everything — at its most basic level — into good and bad.

It's based on how things make you feel.

If a circumstance creates a strong enough emotional reaction — something that is  overwhelming for a child's developing system — it gets filed as danger. 

Put on the watch list.

So get this: 

Our opinions are really just emotional memories, filed as fact.

But we don’t inherit a neutral nervous system.

I had a bilateral hernia surgery within two weeks of being born.

Think about what that does to a brand new nervous system. 

You've just arrived on the planet and someone's already cutting into you. 

My nervous system's first conclusion was pretty reasonable —

WTH!

This world is dangerous, I’d better look out for everything.

So my nervous system categorised things as risky faster than most.

This mechanism — we call it personality. 

For a long time we believed it was fixed after 25. Who you were was who you'd always be.

But now we understand neuroplasticity. 

Your brain has the capacity to develop and rewire — throughout your entire life. 

How it develops is entirely up to you. 

And it doesn't take as long as you'd think — latest research suggests 6-9 weeks to meaningfully shift your brain's patterns.

Bombard it with fear and outrage and it gets very good at being afraid. 

A neuroscientist told me recently that they and all their peers stopped watching the news for exactly this reason.

Because of how it wires your brain into a loop it starts to call reality.

So let's go back to that march.

Something threatened each of them. Something that created enough fear or discomfort to start the search for solid ground.

And when you're afraid, certainty — even false certainty — is magnetic. You don't choose it consciously. You're just drawn to it. It feels good to belong to something solid.

They found others who felt the same. 

And that shared belief felt like safety. Like strength. 

And the whole thing built on itself, got louder, got more certain, got more embedded.

Until you're marching through London.

Or worse — fighting others for it. We've seen it get there before.

This is what unchecked neuroplasticity looks like at scale.

Every belief rehearsed. Every outrage fed. Every story defended.

Wired in deeper. Day by day. March by march.

Identity was never fixed in place.

Your brain has been adapting and rewiring your whole life — with or without your permission.

The question was never whether you can change.

It's whether you're changing consciously. Or by default.

I know this mechanism intimately.

For most of my life there wasn’t really a fixed version of me.

My brain read the room. Figured out what was needed. and became that.

Not consciously. Not as a strategy. It was just what my nervous system did to feel safe. 

To belong. 

To not be cast out.

You won’t see this side of me anymore.

But here's what that costs.

If you're always becoming whoever the room needs, you never get to see the mechanism clearly. 

It stays invisible.

And what stays invisible stays in control.

You see, you have to know this character you are subconsciously being.

You are so glued to it you can't see it.

You think it is you.

It's not you. Maybe it's who you have been being.

That is why you have to develop an awareness of it. You have to see how you have been operating.

Asleep at the wheel.

Being pulled from one belief to the next. 

Standing for one that one opinion.

Knowing with certainty what you like and what you don't. 

What you're good at and what you're not. 

What you can do and what you can't.

Then finding groups that support that, 

That validates it in you.

It's true, it narrows life down that way.

But is a narrow life what we are after, or is it self expression and freedom?

Yes, it's harder to be nuanced.

Or taking a stand for something at the risk of disagreement from others.

But because a fear stopped us yesterday doesn't mean it has to stop us tomorrow.

We are adaptable.

But if you want to change, then something in you has to… well… change.

To know you're living as a default — that you are caught in a mechanism that's just looping — is the first step.

Recently I was watching England play Argentina in the World Cup semi final.

I bonded with strangers in the queue. Hugged people I'd never met. Sang chants together, and felt sad with hundreds of people who felt exactly what I felt.

That's belonging. And it felt good.

I'm not saying don't enjoy the bonding with a group. I'm saying leave a little slack in the line.

Because there's a difference between belonging somewhere and getting lost there. 

Between enjoying being part of the tribe, and slowly, without noticing, giving up things you didn't realise you were giving up.

Keep an ounce of awareness as you enjoy the feeling.

What have you identified with?

Be careful.

It's easy to get trapped there. And have your neurology grow to become it.

Think of it this way.

Imagine you spend your whole life sitting in the same chair. Eventually you start to become the shape of it.

Now think of your brain as a room. It takes its shape from what's inside it — the thoughts, the images, the beliefs, the self-talk.

Eventually you stop noticing them because you've become them. 

They're not the environment anymore. 

They're now your reality.

And then something stranger happens.

You don't just take the shape of the room. 

You petrify into it. How a tree can become stone.

Like a bush that grows around a fence — slowly, over years, until the fence becomes part of the bush. Until you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

That's what happens to a belief you never question. 

That's what happens to an identity you stop examining. 

It doesn't just influence you. 

It becomes you. 

Or at least, it becomes who you have lived as.

The clues to who you have become are all around you.

It is hard to shift. 

Because staying locked in feels good. 

Identified with something. Certain. 

That’s safety.

Even people who want to change, who genuinely want to live differently, struggle here.

Because of how it feels

And if we're really honest — we base most of our lives on how things feel.

Chasing the good. 

Running from the bad.

Which is a little absurd when you think about it. 

Because feelings aren't meant to be fixed in place. 

Emotions are designed to flow, to react, to move through you.

But we try to keep churning up the ones we like. Trying to make them permanent. 

It doesn't really work that way.

Guess what.

You're allowed to change. You always were.

Even if your nervous system is signalling that it's the worst possible idea. Even if the uncertainty of what comes next feels more threatening than staying exactly where you are.

And that's the cruel irony of it.

We'd rather return to the suffering we know. The fears we recognise. The neuroses that are at least familiar.

Better the devil you know than the open door you don't.

Remember — change is not a threat to who you are.

Because you were never your neural patterns. 

How could you be?

Your neurology is not fixed. It's adaptable. Always has been.

So what you've been defending so fiercely — that identity, that certainty, that version of yourself — was never the real thing. It was just the shape the room made.

There has always been an awareness behind the patterns.

Something that watches. Something that notices.

That's the part that was never in any danger.

The most honest you — is behind your psychology.

Try and hear this.

Without the certainty of your psychology you get to meet each moment with freshness, not from the accumulation of everything you dragged from your past.

You wouldn’t know you could fail at that. 

You wouldn’t be stopped by yesterday's fear.

Each moment would be 

Brand new

You here.

Now

Paul