By Pieter Van Dessel
We often know what might help us feel better. We tell ourselves to eat better, drink less, exercise more, be kinder to ourselves, or stop scrolling late at night. Yet, despite our best intentions, we frequently do the opposite. Why is it so hard to act on what we know to be useful?
Predicting Ourselves
A growing body of research suggests that behavior is not just a matter of willpower; it’s the result of prediction. Our mental system constantly generates expectations about what will happen next, including what we ourselves are likely to do, think, or feel. These expectations are often outside of awareness, but they quietly shape our behavior: We tend to act, think, and feel in ways that fit our expectations. As a result, the system becomes self-reinforcing: When our expectations are confirmed, they grow stronger, making the predicted behavior feel even more natural next time.
Imagine someone who has tried to quit smoking several times. At some point, the person might feel stressed, which clashes with the system’s expectation to feel well—with how “things should be.” To restore balance, the system refers to its internal network of beliefs and might predict that reaching for a cigarette will help achieve this. If that is something the person has done many times before, the prediction feels coherent. Doing anything else would disrupt this familiar pattern and create a kind of mental “surprise” that the system naturally wants to avoid. So it triggers the familiar response, even when it goes against important values, like health.
The same principle applies to emotions. Like actions, emotions can be understood as resulting from predictions about what we will do to help us deal with a situation. If you’ve often felt anxious in social settings, your system may come to expect that anxiety is what fits best. Over time, that prediction can become self-fulfilling: The moment you walk into a crowded room, you feel anxious because your system expected that you would. Feeling differently, in that moment, would be surprising, and because the system works to minimize surprise, it sticks with the emotional patterns that are familiar, even when they no longer help us or reflect what we want.
Why Change Can Seem Hard
The theoretical basis of this proposal, known as goal-directed predictive processing (GDPP), describes behavior as the outcome of a network of interconnected beliefs about ourselves and the world, working to stay coherent and reduce unwanted surprise. In other words, we don’t just act on our habits, we act on what our mental system expects us to do, in light of what we have done and strived for in the past. In the framework of GDPP, this set of expectations about ourselves is what can be seen as the self-concept.
That’s why change can feel uncomfortable. When you try to act differently, you’re not just resisting a specific urge, you’re going against your self-concept. For instance, someone who believes they are a strict vegetarian will predict that they’ll stay away from eating meat—not (anymore) because of some abstract, high-minded goal, but because that’s simply what their system expects. Not eating meat is “how things should be,” according to the vegetarian’s mental model. Acting against that belief can feel inconsistent and may therefore create stress. However, in the same way, people who see themselves as meat lovers or couch potatoes may unconsciously predict avoiding healthier food or physical activity, even if they say they value these.
Changing Behavior by Changing Predictions
So how can we actually change resistant, harmful behavior? The answer may be surprisingly simple: Change what you expect yourself to do.
In the GDPP framework, behavior change doesn’t start with motivation or willpower—it starts with new self-predictions. If your system expects you to act in a certain way, that prediction becomes a self-fulfilling road map. But the same principle works in reverse. If you consistently expect something different from yourself, that too can become reality.
For example, instead of thinking “I should eat healthier for dinner,” it may help to consider how you can learn to predict: “I‘ll probably eat healthier for dinner, because that’s part of who I am—it fits my self-concept.” This kind of shift involves reinforcing helpful beliefs that the mental system can act on, without triggering surprise or resistance.
To build new predictions, try strategies that can help internalize helpful beliefs:
- Link new behaviors to your self-concept. For example, eating healthy might clash with the part of you that identifies as a meat lover, but it can fit with the part that wants to grow old enough to see your kids grow up.
- Mentally rehearse how you would respond in important situations if you were to act on your values. Through this kind of mental practice, your system can start to predict these actions. For example, imagine being in a restaurant and ordering a healthy meal.
- Practice acting on helpful beliefs in everyday contexts so that doing so starts to feel expected and natural.
Still, learning to expect something different from yourself isn’t always easy. Many of us grow up hearing we should “just be ourselves,” as if the self is fixed. Or that harmful behavior reflects something broken in our brain. These messages shape beliefs like “I can’t change” or “this is just who I am”—and our mental system, ever trying to stay coherent, acts accordingly.
But here’s the good news: Beliefs are not set in stone. Just like harmful patterns can become self-fulfilling, so can helpful ones. Once your system starts predicting better from you, don’t be surprised if you start living up to it.
Pieter Van Dessel is a professor at Ghent University, where he is a member of the Learning and Implicit Processes lab.
