Have you ever noticed that your healthiest routines are often the first things to disappear when life becomes especially demanding?
You may exercise consistently for weeks until work becomes overwhelming. You may have a good evening routine until family stress rises. You may know exactly what you want to eat or what would help you feel better, yet find yourself reverting to whatever is easiest and most familiar.
It can feel frustrating because your intentions haven’t necessarily changed.
What has changed is the environment in which your brain is being asked to carry them out.
Last week, I introduced the idea that motivation and capacity are not the same thing. You can genuinely want to make a change without having the same resources available to sustain it at every moment.
Stress helps explain why.
Healthy Habits Require More Brainpower Than We Realize
We often talk about habits as though healthy behavior should eventually become effortless. Some behaviors do become more automatic with repetition, but changing and maintaining a behavior still requires cognitive work—especially when circumstances change.
Think about what may be required simply to follow through on an intention to exercise after work. You have to remember the plan, keep it important enough that other demands don’t displace it, stop what you are doing, resist the easier option, and adapt if the original plan no longer works.
That involves several functions associated with the prefrontal cortex, including:
- working memory
- attention
- planning and decision-making
- cognitive flexibility
- inhibitory control
These are some of the very abilities that can become more vulnerable under significant stress.
How Stress Changes the Brain
Neuroscientist Dr. Amy Arnsten has spent decades studying how stress affects the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex supports many of our most sophisticated abilities: holding information in mind, regulating attention, considering consequences, inhibiting responses, adjusting strategies, and organizing behavior around future goals.
But it is also particularly sensitive to stress.
Under psychological stress, chemical signaling in the brain changes. Higher levels of stress-related catecholamines such as norepinephrine and dopamine can weaken the functioning of prefrontal networks while increasing the influence of faster, more reactive brain systems.
That shift can be useful in an immediate threat, when reacting quickly may matter more than carefully weighing several options. But the same shift is less helpful when the challenge is an ordinary demanding day and you are trying to exercise, prepare a healthy dinner, manage family responsibilities, and get to bed on time.
Under greater stress, the brain may become better prepared to react while becoming temporarily less effective at some of the functions required to reflect, plan, inhibit, and adapt.
Why This Matters for Behavior Change
Consider what intentional behavior change asks us to do. We need to hold a goal in mind, focus despite competing demands, make decisions, interrupt automatic responses, adjust when circumstances change, and return to the intention after disruption.
These are not abstract mental skills. They are part of the machinery that allows us to translate intention into action.
So when someone says: “I know what I need to do. Why am I not doing it?”
One possible explanation is that the cognitive functions required to carry out that intention are working under greater load. That does not mean stress eliminates choice or makes healthy behavior impossible, but that the effort required to make an intentional choice may increase.
Research Spotlight
In a major review published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Arnsten examined evidence showing that even relatively mild uncontrollable stress can impair prefrontal cognitive abilities.
The research helps explain why, during stressful periods, we may find it harder to sustain attention, inhibit an automatic response, plan ahead, or flexibly adjust our behavior. It also gives us a different way to understand something many people experience:
When life becomes more demanding, we often stop doing what we intended to do and start doing what is easiest or most familiar.
We may eat whatever is readily available, skip the workout, stay at the computer longer than planned, scroll instead of going to sleep, or return to patterns we thought we had already changed.
From the outside, this can look like a motivation problem.
From the inside, it may simply feel like, I just don’t have it in me today.
A Different Question to Ask
This distinction matters because the solution to a motivation problem and the solution to an overloaded system are not necessarily the same. Sometimes we do need greater commitment, clearer priorities, or more accountability. But sometimes applying more pressure simply adds another demand to a system that is already working hard.
A more useful question may be: “What is this behavior asking of me when I’m under stress?”
Does it require planning? Remembering? Making several decisions? Resisting an automatic response? Adjusting when things do not go as expected?
When we understand the demands behind a behavior, we can begin to see why something that feels relatively easy during a calmer week can suddenly feel much harder when stress rises. That perspective shifts us away from immediately assuming a lack of discipline. Instead, it invites curiosity about the conditions affecting our ability to follow through.
And that may be one of the most useful places to begin.
Reference
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Have you ever known exactly what you wanted to do—exercise regularly, eat better, get to bed earlier, finally start that project—and still found yourself unable to follow through consistently?
When this happens, we tend to question our motivation or discipline. We tell ourselves we need to be more committed, better organized, or simply try harder.
But there is another possibility that deserves more attention:
You may genuinely want to make the change and not have enough available capacity to sustain it right now.
That distinction changes the question from “Why can’t I make myself do this?” to “What is making this so difficult for me to do right now?”
And that can change the entire approach to behavior change.
Motivation Isn’t the Whole Story
Most approaches to behavior change emphasize motivation, knowledge, confidence, goals, and accountability. All of these matter—but they don’t tell us everything.
Imagine someone who genuinely wants to improve her health while also managing a demanding job, caring for family members, sleeping poorly, and navigating significant emotional stress.
She may know exactly what would help. She may feel motivated every Sunday night to start fresh on Monday. Yet meal preparation, exercise, meditation, or an earlier bedtime repeatedly fall away once the week becomes demanding.
We might interpret that as inconsistency. But another explanation is that the demands of the change exceed the resources currently available to carry it out.
Behavior change itself takes resources. Starting something new requires planning, attention, decision-making, impulse control, flexibility when things don’t go as planned, and enough energy to repeat the behavior until it becomes easier.
When much of that capacity is already being used elsewhere, even a relatively simple habit can become surprisingly difficult.
Why Stress Can Pull Us Back Toward Familiar Patterns
Research gives us an interesting window into why this happens.
In a controlled human study, researchers Lars Schwabe and Oliver Wolf examined whether stress changes the way people learn and make choices. Participants first learned actions that produced particular food rewards. Later, one of those rewards was made less desirable.
People in the control condition adjusted their behavior when that reward was no longer as valuable. Participants who had been exposed to acute stress were more likely to continue performing the previously learned behavior despite the change in the outcome.
In other words, stress shifted behavior away from flexible, goal-directed responding and toward habit.
Research Spotlight
Schwabe & Wolf, 2009 — The Journal of Neuroscience
The researchers concluded that stress can promote habitual behavior at the expense of more deliberate, goal-directed action. The stressed participants also showed reduced explicit knowledge of the relationship between their actions and the outcomes those actions produced.
This does not mean that stress automatically causes unhealthy habits, nor that an acute laboratory stressor is identical to the complexity of chronic stress in everyday life.
But it does help explain a pattern many of us recognize.
When demands rise, we may become less flexible and more likely to fall back on whatever is familiar and automatic.
That might mean skipping the workout and staying at the computer. Reaching for the easiest food rather than the meal we intended to prepare. Staying up scrolling even though we planned to go to bed earlier.
Those choices can look like a loss of motivation.
Often, the motivation is still there.
What has changed is the amount of capacity available for deliberate, flexible choice.
Why Good Habits Often Disappear When Life Gets Hard
This is why a habit that feels relatively easy during a calm period may suddenly become difficult during a stressful one.
Behavior change requires us to interrupt familiar patterns, remember our intentions, make decisions in the moment, tolerate some discomfort, adjust when circumstances change, and repeatedly choose a less automatic response.
All of that requires resources.
When demands are already high, those intentional behaviors become harder to sustain. And this is where telling ourselves to “try harder” can become counterproductive.
A stricter meal plan, a more ambitious exercise schedule, another productivity system, and greater self-pressure may simply add more demands to a system that is already stretched.
A Better Question: What Would Make This Easier?
When a healthy behavior isn’t sticking, the answer isn’t always another goal.
Sometimes the more useful approach is to reduce the amount of effort the behavior requires.
Instead of overhauling five things at once, choose one meaningful change. Instead of designing the perfect exercise program, begin with an amount of movement you can realistically sustain. Instead of creating an elaborate meal plan, make one meal easier and more nourishing.
And sometimes the priority may not be adding a new behavior at all. It may be improving sleep, reducing unnecessary demands, creating more recovery, or making enough space to think clearly about what you actually need.
A few questions can help shift the perspective:
- What is consuming most of my capacity right now?
- What would make this change require less effort?
- What could I simplify, reduce, or stop doing?
- What is the smallest meaningful action I could sustain even during a demanding week?
These questions don’t lower the standard.
They help create the conditions in which meaningful change is more likely to succeed.
Small Wins Can Help Rebuild Capacity
Capacity isn’t fixed.
When an action is appropriately matched to the resources you have available, you’re more likely to follow through. That creates an experience of success rather than another experience of falling short.
Success builds confidence and self-efficacy. The behavior becomes more familiar and often requires less conscious effort. That can make the next step more accessible.
Right-sized action → successful follow-through → greater confidence → greater capacity for continued change
This is one of the reasons sustainable change is rarely about finding the perfect plan.
It is about finding the right next step for the person, the circumstances, and the capacity available now.
This Is at the Heart of The Svasta Energy Reset
This idea is also an important part of the book I’m writing, The Svasta Energy Reset.
One of the central themes of the book is that our experience of energy is not simply about how many calories we consume or how much sleep we get.
Our resources are continually being allocated—to adaptation, recovery, cognition, emotional regulation, immune function, relationships, work, caregiving, and the many demands of being human.
When we understand that broader system, the conversation changes.
Instead of continually asking:
“What else should I be doing?”
we can begin asking:
“What is my system already being asked to do—and what would help restore my capacity?”
That is a much more useful starting point for creating sustainable health and vitality.
Learn more about The Svasta Energy Reset:
https://svastawellness.com/page/svasta-energy-reset-book
https://svastawellness.com/page/svasta-energy-reset-book
One Question to Take With You
Think about one change you genuinely want to make but haven’t been able to sustain.
Before assuming you need more discipline, ask:
What might be competing with my capacity to do this right now?
That question may reveal a very different obstacle—and a much more workable path forward.
Next in the Beyond Willpower series: Why stress can make healthy habits harder to sustain—and what happens to planning, decision-making, and self-regulation when our systems are under prolonged demand.
References
Schwabe, L., & Wolf, O. T. (2009). Stress prompts habit behavior in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(22), 7191–7198. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0979-09.2009
We rarely give our brains a chance to finish what they started.
Finish a meeting, check email. Read something meaningful, reach for the phone. Finish one podcast, start another. We move almost instantly from one stream of information to the next.
But learning doesn’t end when the information stops.
Research on wakeful rest has found that periods of quiet, low stimulation after learning can improve how well we remember what we’ve just taken in. The brain is still processing, organizing, and consolidating new information after the input ends.
The space after learning is part of learning.
In this week’s Svasta Wellness Brief, I explore what this research tells us about memory, why constantly filling every quiet moment may work against us, and one remarkably simple way to give your brain the conditions it needs to retain more of what matters.
Read the full article →
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