There are certain qualities we rarely question because we’ve spent our lives believing they’re inherently good.
Patience. Compassion. Understanding. Loyalty. Empathy.
They’re the qualities we’re encouraged to cultivate from the time we’re young. The qualities that make us good friends, thoughtful partners, dependable colleagues and, hopefully, decent human beings.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself wondering whether every virtue has a shadow.
Not because these qualities are flawed, but because anything repeated often enough can stop being a conscious choice and become a reflex. Patience can slowly become waiting. Compassion can become carrying what was never ours to carry. Understanding can become explaining away our own needs. Loyalty can become staying long after something has stopped serving us. The qualities themselves aren’t the problem. The question is whether we’re still choosing them, or whether they’ve quietly become the only way we know how to move through the world.
The thought first surfaced during a conversation with someone who knows me well. We were talking about life, relationships and work when they asked a question I hadn’t considered before.
“Have you ever thought that what you call patience might actually be a pattern?”
I laughed.
Patience had always felt like one of my better qualities. I’ve never been someone who needs immediate answers. I don’t mind uncertainty. I tend to believe people are doing the best they can with what they know, and I’ve always found it easier to lean toward understanding than judgment.
But the question stayed with me.
Not because I suddenly believed patience was a problem, but because I’d never considered that one of my greatest strengths might also be one of my most practiced habits.
I’d spent years examining the parts of myself I wanted to change, yet I’d given very little thought to the qualities that had earned approval. The traits people admire are often the ones we stop examining altogether.
The more I sat with the question, the more I realized that most of us already know our patterns.
We know the conversations we replay in our minds long after they’ve ended.
We know the assumptions we make before anything has actually happened.
We know the emotional terrain we somehow keep returning to, even when we’ve promised ourselves this time will be different.
Most of us can even explain where those patterns came from. We can trace them back to childhood, family dynamics, a defining relationship or a single moment that quietly shaped the way we move through the world.
Awareness, it turns out, is rarely the difficult part.
Changing them is.
That realization became far more interesting to me than the patterns themselves. If we understand our habits so well, why do we continue repeating them? Why does insight so often fail to create change? Why do the stories we know so well continue to shape the way we experience the present?
Those questions led me to someone I’ve known for more than twenty years.
Morgan Yakus and I entered the wellness world around the same time, although from very different directions. While my work explored movement and the relationship between the body and emotion.
She became fascinated with neuro-wellness and developed a neuroscience-based practice called Human Cartography, which helps people rewire automatic patterns, update negative self-talk and create meaningful personal change through hypnosis, NLP, and personalized rewiring techniques. What has always interested me most, though, is not the method. It is the way she thinks.
As a wellness practitioner she begins with the understanding that the brain runs on efficiency, not that people need to be fixed. It learns through repetition, creates shortcuts to conserve energy, and can automatically pull up outdated information that influences how we respond now and how we expect the future to go.
That idea made me pause. If our patterns are learned rather than inherent, then they are not permanent. If familiar beliefs and limiting thoughts shape the way we feel inside and out, perhaps they only need to be interrupted and reframed to create change.
I wanted to understand how that happens.
If I know the pattern, why do I keep repeating it?
Morgan believes one of the biggest misconceptions about change is that next time the issue occurs, the mind will make the change on its own.
The brain prefers the familiar over the unfamiliar, even when the familiar is out of date, it is built to conserve energy, predict what comes next and keep us safe. Over time, repeated thoughts and behaviors become encoded in neural circuits and then hard wired programs.
This becomes like an instructional map of how to feel, act and respond in a situation or when doing a task. It then uses this information to create shortcuts and through repetition it becomes hard wired in aka the truth. This is what makes the familiar feel true even when it no longer is how we want to feel or respond. That is why we carry the same internal script into current and future relationships, jobs, locations and situations. The brain is like a rhizome plant, it just connects to more space and territories not consciously updating, only auto populating.
When I mentioned how often people describe themselves as feeling stuck, Morgan immediately explained it.
“Yes, that’s something I work with all the time,” she said. “What’s really happening is that the mind has auto populated an old response from the past in order to be efficient and save energy. If that program was created when we were younger, it can be the younger version of us that shows up to run the situation and that version doesn’t yet know what the adult knows. It’s old information, and that’s what keeps us stuck. Even when it’s safe to move forward, it can still feel hard.”
That stayed with me.
Efficiency is one of the brain’s greatest strengths. The brain uses about 20% of the body’s energy, so it is designed to conserve effort and rely on shortcuts whenever it can. It is incredibly useful when you are learning to drive or tie your shoes because you do not want to relearn those things every day. The challenge is that the brain does not separate helpful habits from limiting ones. Repetition strengthens both.
That changed the frame of the conversation. We are not only rehearsing behaviors, we are also responding to interpretations. A delayed response becomes rejection, constructive feedback becomes failure, uncertainty becomes danger. The external event may be different, but the internal response is already waiting.
Morgan describes these familiar responses as moments the brain recognizes from before, so it filters them through familiarity and predicts how they will end. I laughed because the metaphor felt painfully accurate. Most of us are not wanting to consciously choosing the same old emotional experiences. We are simply casting new people into an old script.
So if awareness is not enough, what actually interrupts the pattern?
“The brain changes best through interruption, attention, and repetition,” she said.
The moment you notice an automatic thought and pause, even briefly, you create a gap and that is an opportunity to create a new response, no matter how small the change. That gap matters, it gives the prefrontal cortex a chance to reengage before the old circuit takes over. It also reminds the brain that prediction is not the only option.
That simplicity surprised me.
We assume that because we have thought something before, it must be true. The more we talked, the more I realized how rarely we interrupt ourselves. We let these loops and programs run thinking we can not change them, all the while knowing we want to feel or act differently.
“Your thoughts are incredibly powerful,” she said. “But they are not always facts. Many of them are mental rehearsals. Do not believe everything you think!”
That stayed with me long after our conversation ended.
It did not suggest positive thinking or denying difficult emotions. Quite the opposite, it suggested that awareness is not about judging our thoughts. It is about noticing whether they belong to the present moment or are simply repeating what has happened before.
That may be one of the most liberating distinctions I have heard in a long time.
If a thought is familiar, strong or looping, it is not necessarily true. Sometimes it is just simply well rehearsed.
That is where change really begins. Not with force or a dramatic breakthrough. Just bringing your attention to shifting it a bit each time. You can get more excited about the thing you want than what you do not want. Being more of an observer and not automatically believing every thought that passes through.
She helps clients to get the old triggers and intense responses way down, so the old pattern is much easier to override. Once that happens, the new response can begin to feel natural and even exciting. Rewiring is simple, its reminding ourselves to put it into practice.
What people often miss is that the brain changes through choosing a new response and good mental rehearsal not necessarily through information, its how we apply that information. We can read the books, listen to the podcasts, save the quotes and say we are going to make a change, understanding is not the same as practicing. The brain is not transformed by intellectual agreement alone. It changes as we edit ourselves with new thoughts, actions and visuals in repetition.
That is reassuring because it means we are not waiting for one extraordinary breakthrough to change everything overnight. We are participating in something quieter and more cumulative. Each time we interrupt a familiar thought instead of automatically believing it, we are practicing something new.
Perhaps growth is not becoming someone else, it is gently interrupting the version of ourselves we have rehearsed for so long that we mistook it for our identity.
That raised another question for me. If we have been thinking, feeling, and responding in the same ways for decades, who are we without those patterns? Does changing them somehow mean changing ourselves?
Morgan smiled.
“We often confuse outdated labels and ‘I am’ statements with who we are now or who we’re becoming. Over time, they can become identity and block growth. But change can happen at any moment. It can begin with the belief that this time will be different and a new vision for how to move through it.”
That idea reframed everything.
We say things like, “I’ve always been anxious,” or “I’m just a people pleaser,” or “This is simply my personality.” But often those are not permanent truths. They are patterns and statements we have practiced for so long that they have become familiar.
The mind will keep offering us the thoughts, emotions, and responses we have practiced most often because familiarity feels safe. Awareness, however, creates a pause and within that pause is the opportunity to choose.
Not the kind of choice that changes everything overnight, but the quiet, ordinary choice to question a familiar story, pause before reacting, and respond to what is actually happening instead of what we have learned to expect.
None of those moments feel dramatic, perhaps that is how lasting change has always happened.
I am no longer asking myself, What is my pattern?
The question I am interested in now is quieter: Where is my choice in this moment and how do I want to be feeling instead? I have a feeling I will be asking it for a long time…
Some Tips and Tricks Morgan Suggests
Self-Hypnosis — www.morganyakus.com/self-hypnosis
Create a Positive Outcome in Your Mind
If you’re nervous about a future situation, visualize yourself going through that situation in an optimal state and experiencing a positive outcome. If an activity or task feels daunting, imagine completing that task in a positive state, with a positive outcome. This activity gives your brain a visual to follow.
Pattern Interruption
Pattern interruption is the best option in any situation for stopping a negative pattern, loop, or thought. Interrupt yourself right away by creating the opposite positive audio, image, or movie: Take a walk around the block, drink some water, and/or take five deep breaths. While you’re doing that, create the positive version of the image or audio in your mind. Any of the below can be used as a pattern interrupt.
Stay Current
Stay in the present, and respond from where you are in that moment. Don’t visit negative past situations, as that brings up old neural networks and causes stress. Design only positive future scenarios: You haven’t arrived in the future yet, so you might as well design something positive.
Positive Self-Talk
Tell your brain the positive version of what you would like it to do. If you’re feeling negative or stressed, most likely you have been creating negative thoughts. Talk to yourself in the same way in which you would talk to a friend, family member, or a partner.
Continue the Conversation
Thank you to Morgan Yakus for her generosity, insight and time in sharing this conversation. If you’d like to learn more about Morgan’s work or schedule a private session, you can connect with her below.
Morgan Yakus is a bicoastal modern hypnotist, NLP and wellness practitioner who blends artful creativity with neuroscience-based tools for change. Named by VOGUE as one of the top five practitioners to the fashion world and has been featured in many publications, she now works with clients and groups worldwide, teaching quick, practical brain-training techniques to help rewire old patterns. Before focusing on wellness, Morgan spent two decades in fashion as a stylist, (including Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation tour), Gucci PR, and designer and cofounder of the beloved No.6 Store in NYC. Today, through her practice Human Cartography, she helps people map and remap the mind so they can design the present and future experiences they truly desire.
Website: www.morganyakus.com
Instagram: @mind__waves
Email: hello@morganyakus.com
Book a Private Session: www.morganyakus.com/book-an-appointment
As a reader of Still Processing, use code STILLPROCESSING for 15% off your first session.