Deborah Hill Cone: Make a change? Why break a habit?

I used to wear Chanel No 5. Now it is Daphne Guinness' "Daphne", which smells like cheap 1970s patchouli from a health food shop. I used to wear glasses; now I'm considering laser surgery. Yeah I know. Who cares? Because what I want to know is this: why is any big change so hard? Change in jobs, house, relationships - even giving up my Revlon Cherries in the Snow.

And before some savant snarks that red lippy has nothing to do with mutual funds, I feel obliged to point out that "why is change so hard?" could possibly be the most powerful question in the history of human endeavour.

If we could answer it we could help addicts get clean, criminals go straight, companies to adapt and stay profitable - and even me not to be a nutbar as I cope with the prospect of a future on my own. As a bonus, we could put management consultants out of business. As Alcatel said about why it was brought in to transform Telecom: "Put quite simply, there was too much internal vested interest in maintaining the status quo." Of course their creation of the XT network will hardly fill anyone with confidence that they had the answer.

That's change for you. There is no guarantee it will work. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is a nifty slogan, but a fat lot of use when it comes up against the power of a brain chemical called dopamine. Any behaviour that results in a reward causes a dopamine surge in your brain. Orgasms. Hitting the jackpot, winning a race, doing cocaine, drinking, peanut slabs, even that plinkety-plink noise that says you have a new email.

"I bet if I put you in an MRI machine and played that email noise, you'd get the same dopamine surges I see in cocaine addicts when they think someone else is getting high," US research psychiatrist Nora Volkow told email addict Rebecca Sloot from Oprah magazine. "Dopamine is motivation. If you create animals in the lab that don't have dopamine, they have no drive. They can eat food and it tastes good, but they have no motivation to actually do anything, so they won't eat, and they'll die."

But the powerful effect of dopamine makes it very hard to break habits. All the management gurus in the world don't know how to give you a dopamine hit. And after my extensive research I am sorry to report I don't have any answers either. I do have a few tips though. When you are finding change hard, find something even harder to do, in a different way. The pain of running up a hill seems to alleviate the pain of the end of one's marriage.

Another tip: don't think about the future too much. Just live in the moment. Stop. Have a cup of tea. With sugar in it. You could go a bit hippy dippy and try to have a higher purpose. In When Everything Changes, Change Everything Neale Donald Walsch writes that there is no such thing as fear. "There is no such thing as any emotion; only one: love. All other expressions are repackagings." If you did not love yourself you would not fear for yourself, he reasons.

Nope, that didn't really help me ether - blast those smug self-help books. Better to find solace in the great thinkers of the past. Psychology professor Jim Taylor: "A great philosopher once said, 'You do or you do not. There is no try'." No, it wasn't Aristotle or Socrates who spoke those simple, yet profound words; the great thinker was ... Yoda, the Jedi Master of Star Wars."

- dhc@deborahhillcone.com