Why You Keep Failing at the Thing You Know How to Do
I spent decades studying human behavior, wrote books on it, and still couldn't stop. Here's what I finally understood.
***Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
I know how to eat. That is not false modesty or throat-clearing. I have spent the better part of my adult life studying nutrition, metabolism, behavior change, and the biology of habit. I have written books on it. I have coached thousands of people through it.
And for years, I would end almost every day the same way. The morning was clean. Training done, food dialed in, everything on track. Then evening would come. The day would wind down. And something would shift.
Not hunger exactly. Something older than hunger. A pull toward the kitchen, toward comfort food, toward something that tasted like the end of the day was finally mine. Not a salad. Not the optimal macros. Something warm and familiar and distinctly not a performance.
I knew what was happening. I could have written the clinical note on myself in real time. And I kept doing it anyway. I still do it… now as a conscious choice… a lot of the time
That gap, between knowing and doing, between the person who wrote the book and the person standing in the kitchen at 8pm reaching for something that had nothing to do with nutrition.... that gap is what this article is about.
Because if you have ever lived that gap in any area of your life, I want you to understand something: it is not a willpower problem. It is not a discipline problem. It is not a character flaw or a knowledge deficit or a motivation issue.
It is a identity problem (or schema in the research). What researchers call a schema is what I call identity or and identity structure. I use all three terms in this article. Same things, different language.
I know you think of identity as who you are. In reality who you are is a set of identities … deeply encoded compounds of story, emotion, and belief that the nervous system uses to predict and navigate the world. And identities do not respond to information.....
What Was Actually Happening
I grew up Italian American. Dinner was not a meal. It was an event. Every evening, the family gathered around a table that smelled like garlic and tomato sauce and something that had been simmering for hours. Comfort food. Real food. Food that nobody was tracking or optimizing or feeling guilty about.
That table was where the day ended. Where the rules fell away. Where you belonged to each other instead of to your obligations. It was warm and loud and abundant and completely free of the kind of vigilance that the rest of life required. Food at that table did not mean fuel. It meant: you are safe. You are loved. You are home. The day is done and you are allowed to just be.
My nervous system learned all of that before I had words for any of it. Filed it as fact. Encoded it with the full emotional weight of every evening that felt that way.
Decades later, alone at the end of a long day, that same nervous system was still running the same program. Not because I was weak. Because I was doing exactly what I had been taught to do. The table was gone. The family was not there. But the schema doesn’t check for those details. It just knows the day is ending and it wants what it has always known evening to mean.
Food as freedom. Food as connection. Food as the signal that I am finally allowed to stop performing and just exist.
Which meant that every time I tried to impose discipline around food in the evenings, I was not just changing a behavior. I was directly attacking the schema. Every clean, optimized, rule-governed evening meal was the opposite of what that old encoding promised. I was eating in a way that felt like restriction, like vigilance, like the workday hadn’t actually ended.... which is precisely what the comfort food was supposed to dissolve.
The pull was never about food. It was about what food had always meant.
That is MUD. A misguided unconscious decision that was never actually misguided at the time it was made. The nervous system learned something true. It just never got told that the original context no longer applied.
Why Insight Did Not Help
Here is what makes this clinically interesting and personally humbling: I understood all of this. I could trace the origin. I could name the schema, map the trigger, predict the behavior. I had the full cognitive picture.
And the pull came anyway. Every evening. Right on schedule.
This is not unique to me. It is one of the most consistent findings in behavioral and clinical research, and it points to something fundamental about how the brain actually works.
The brain is not primarily a reasoning machine. It is a prediction machine. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the vmPFC, stores identity structures (schemas): generalized belief structures built from accumulated emotional experience. When a relevant cue appears, the vmPFC fires the associated schema before conscious thought arrives. The hippocampus constructs a detailed simulation of what is expected to happen. The amygdala adds emotional charge. And the behavioral pull follows from all of that, faster than any rational override can intercept it (Moscovitch, Moscovitch, & Sheldon, 2023).
Knowing the identity/schema is there does not deactivate it. The vmPFC does not consult your intellectual understanding before firing. It consults its emotional history. And my emotional history said: evening plus end of day plus freedom equals comfort food equals connection equals belonging. That cascade ran in milliseconds. My nutrition knowledge ran considerably slower.
Memory reconsolidation research adds another critical layer. Emotionally encoded memories, the kind that form schemas, can be updated, but only under very specific conditions (Ecker, 2018; Ecker & Bridges, 2022). The memory has to be reactivated first, brought live into the present nervous system. Then, while it is in that labile state, a genuinely mismatching experience has to be introduced. Not a thought. Not a reframe. An experience that the nervous system actually registers as different from what it predicted.
Without that sequence, the identity structure doesn’t update. It just keeps running.
Which means insight, no matter how accurate or detailed, changes almost nothing at the level of identity. You can understand your pattern with clinical precision and still feel the pull every evening, because understanding operates in the cortex and the schema lives somewhere older and faster and considerably less interested in what you know.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s the most important thing I’ve ever had to learn the hard way.
The First Time I Sat in It
The shift did not come from understanding these identity parts better. It came from doing something I had never quite done before: feeling the pull fully, without acting on it, and staying present with what was actually there.
Not white-knuckling it. Not distracting myself. Not substituting a healthier option. Just sitting with the activation. The pull toward the kitchen. The felt sense of something unfinished, something the evening owed me, something that would make the day feel complete.
And staying with it long enough to actually feel what it was.
It was not hunger. It was not even really craving. It was something closer to loneliness. Or more precisely, the absence of the thing the dinner table had always provided. Connection. Belonging. The feeling of being released from the day’s requirements into something warm and communal and free.
The food was never the point. The food was just the most reliable delivery mechanism for a feeling the nervous system had been trying to recreate for thirty years.
When I finally felt that clearly, something shifted. Not immediately. Not dramatically. It did not feel like a breakthrough. It felt more like.... recognition. Like meeting something I had been running from and finding it smaller and sadder and more understandable than I had expected.
That moment of sitting in the activation without acting on it is, in clinical terms, exactly what the research describes as the necessary precondition for schema updating. You have to reactivate the emotional memory, bring it fully live, before the reconsolidation window opens. Before the nervous system becomes capable of receiving new information about what is actually true.
I was not just managing a craving. I was creating the neurological conditions under which the schema could finally be updated.
What Rewrite, Rewire, Retrain Actually Means
Most behavior change frameworks start at the surface and hope to work inward. Change the action, build the habit, trust that identity will follow. This is not wrong exactly. It is just missing the architecture.
Identity is not built from behavior. It is built from the compound of stories, emotions, and beliefs that the nervous system has accumulated over a lifetime. MUD is the story layer: the meaning assigned to experience before the cognitive equipment existed to evaluate it accurately. Emotion is the rebar that sets that story in concrete. Belief is what you get when the concrete dries. And the cluster of stories, emotions, and beliefs fused together is what we call identity.
Behavior is what identity produces. Which means trying to change behavior without touching identity is working at the wrong end of the system.
The Rewrite, Rewire, Retrain model is a sequence that works with the actual architecture. Not three separate interventions. One process operating at three depths simultaneously, with each layer making the next possible.
What Rewrite, Rewire, Retrain Actually Means
Most behavior change frameworks start at the surface and hope to work inward. Change the action, build the habit, trust that identity will follow. This is not wrong exactly. It is just missing the architecture.
Identity is not built from behavior. It is built from the compound of stories, emotions, and beliefs that the nervous system has accumulated over a lifetime. MUD is the story layer: the meaning assigned to experience before the cognitive equipment existed to evaluate it accurately. Emotion is the rebar that sets that story in concrete. Belief is what you get when the concrete dries. And the cluster of stories, emotions, and beliefs fused together is what we call identity.
Behavior is what identity produces. Which means trying to change behavior without touching identity is working at the wrong end of the system.
The Rewrite, Rewire, Retrain model is a sequence that works with the actual architecture. Not three separate interventions. One process operating at three depths simultaneously, with each layer making the next possible.
Rewrite and Rewire: The Story and Emotion Layer
These two layers cannot be cleanly separated and should not be attempted in sequence. Remember the model: MUD is the story, emotion is the rebar, and together they form the compound. They were encoded together. They have to be worked together.
For me, the Rewrite work was surfacing what the evening eating actually meant. Not the surface story of reward or relaxation, but the deeper MUD underneath it: food equals freedom, connection, and safety. Food equals the end of performance and the beginning of belonging.
That story was not wrong when it was formed. It was an accurate description of what the Italian American dinner table provided every evening of my childhood. The problem was not the story itself. The problem was that it had never been updated to reflect a current reality: that I was now an adult, that the table and the family were not required for the evening to mean something, that connection and freedom and belonging were available through means that had nothing to do with what I ate.
Narrative identity research (McAdams & McLean, 2013; Adler et al., 2016) consistently shows that changes in how people narrate the meaning of their experience track with meaningful changes in behavior and wellbeing. Not because positive thinking works. Because the story is genuinely constitutive of the identity. Change the story at the root and the identity it was supporting begins to shift.
But naming the story alone does nothing. The rebar holds the concrete in place regardless of what you decide intellectually. Which is where the Rewire work comes in, not after the Rewrite but simultaneously with it, working the emotional encoding at the same moment the story is being examined.
Schema change research (Moscovitch, Moscovitch, & Sheldon, 2023) is precise about what actually drives updating at the neural level. The vmPFC activates the schema. The hippocampus constructs a detailed simulation of the expected experience. When that simulation contains information that genuinely contradicts the schema’s prediction, a prediction error signal fires. And that prediction error is what drives the vmPFC to update the schema with new information.
The key word is genuinely. The mismatch has to be real and felt, not conceptual. Telling yourself the evening can mean something without comfort food does not generate a prediction error. The nervous system doesn’t update on the basis of what you tell it. It updates on the basis of what it actually experiences while the old schema is live and activated.
Memory reconsolidation research (Ecker, 2018) confirms the same principle from a different angle: emotional learnings can be erased at the source, but only when the old memory is reactivated and labile, and a genuinely mismatching experience is introduced into that window. Not before the activation. Not in the abstract. While the schema is hot.
So the practical question becomes: what does that actually look like? How do you work the story and emotion layers simultaneously while the schema is live?
Here is a simple three-step sequence that tracks the research closely.
First, activate and hold. Let the pull come fully. Feel it in the body without immediately acting on it or talking yourself out of it. For me this meant standing in the kitchen feeling the gravitational pull toward the pantry and staying with it. This opens the reconsolidation window. The schema is now labile and available for updating.
Second, introduce bilateral stimulation and imagery simultaneously. Cross your arms across your chest and slowly stroke your upper arms, left right left right, a self-administered bilateral tactile input. This is the same basic mechanism underlying EMDR: bilateral stimulation appears to hold the activated memory in a labile state while simultaneously delivering a somatic signal of safety.
Your body is receiving the old emotional activation and a direct physical experience of self-soothing at the same time. While doing this, vividly imagine yourself moving through the evening feeling complete, connected, free, and at ease without the old behavior. Not a vague concept of that. A rich, sensory, detailed simulation: what the room looks like, what you are doing, what freedom and connection actually feel like in your body in that moment. The hippocampus needs imagery to generate a strong enough prediction error signal to drive schema updating. The more vivid and embodied the simulation, the more potent the mismatch.
Third, anchor with genuine gratitude. Not performed positivity. Something you actually feel grateful for in that moment, however small. Gratitude generates a real physiological state shift, a genuine change in the body’s emotional signal, which means the nervous system is not just experiencing the absence of the old prediction but the active presence of something different. That positive emotional encoding attached to the new simulation gives the hippocampus something to file as new schema-congruent evidence for the adaptive belief.....
Together these three steps do something sitting alone cannot do. They activate the schema, hold it open, introduce a schema-incongruent somatic and imagery experience simultaneously, and consolidate the new experience with genuine emotional signal. That is a complete updating intervention compressed into something accessible enough to use in real time, in the kitchen, on a Tuesday evening, when the pull is fully alive.
This is not fast. Across the first several repetitions the pull came back just as strong. That is expected. The old schema has decades of evidence behind it. The new one has almost none. Each repetition is filing a small piece of new evidence against a very large accumulated archive. But gradually, across enough repetitions, something shifts. The pull becomes quieter. Less urgent. Less loaded with the weight of everything it used to mean.
Retrain: The Behavioral Layer
This is where most change programs begin. It is where the Architect model ends.
Once the story has been examined and the emotional encoding has been worked, behavioral repetition stops feeling like fighting yourself and starts feeling like practicing being who you actually are. The new behavior is not imposed against the grain of the identity. It consolidates an identity that has already begun to shift at a deeper level.
For me this meant deliberately building new evening rituals that delivered the actual thing the schema had always been after: connection, freedom, the felt sense of the day releasing into something warm and mine. Not food as the vehicle. Other vehicles. A call with someone I love. Something I genuinely enjoy that has nothing to do with performance. The deliberate experience of the evening belonging to me without requiring comfort food to signal that it does.
Each repetition files new evidence. Each evening that feels complete without the old pattern weakens the schema’s claim that the old pattern is necessary. Over time the new behavior stops requiring conscious effort because it is no longer swimming against the current of an unchanged identity. It is the natural expression of one that has been updated at the source.
What This Means if You Work with People
If you are a practitioner reading this, I want to name something directly.
Most of the change work being done in coaching, fitness, nutrition, and even a significant portion of therapy is operating at the Retrain layer while leaving the Rewrite and Rewire layers entirely untouched. The client gets behavior strategies, accountability structures, habit design. They make progress. They relapse. They make progress again. They relapse again. And eventually both the practitioner and the client quietly conclude that the client is someone who struggles with consistency, which is a polite way of saying the problem has been attributed to character rather than architecture.
The architecture is the schema. And the schema does not respond to behavior strategies. It responds to a very specific sequence of emotional experience delivered while it is activated, followed by rehearsal that consolidates the update.
This is not mystical. It is neuroscience. The vmPFC, hippocampus, and amygdala are doing something very specific and very learnable. The Moscovitch SCIL model gives us a brain-based map of exactly what needs to happen for a schema to change. Memory reconsolidation research gives us the mechanism. Narrative identity research gives us the story layer. Behavioral identity theory gives us the consolidation layer.
Put them together and you have something the field has not previously had: a coherent, sequenced, scientifically grounded model for working at the level where change actually originates.
That is what the Next Level Human Certified Architect is trained to do. Not behavior change. Not mindset coaching. Not symptom management. Identity-level intervention, sequenced correctly, grounded in the research, delivered with the skill and care that working at this depth requires.
The gap between knowing and doing is not a character flaw. It is a gap between the cortex and the schema. And that gap has a very specific address in the brain, and a very specific sequence of intervention that closes it.
Which is a strange thing to have to tell someone who has spent thirty years in this field. But there it is.
The Evening Now
I still love comfort food. I still love the feeling of an evening that belongs to me. I still carry the Italian American dinner table somewhere in my nervous system as one of the warmest things I know.
What changed is not that I suppressed any of that. What changed is that the schema finally got updated with information it had been missing for thirty years: that I am an adult, that connection and freedom and belonging are available through means that have nothing to do with what I eat, that the evening can feel complete without the old ritual completing it.
The pull still comes occasionally. But it comes quieter now. And when it does, I can feel what it actually is: a thirty-year-old nervous system reaching for a table that no longer needs to be set the same way to mean what it always meant.
I don’t white-knuckle it. I don’t override it with discipline. I just notice it, feel what it is actually asking for, and find a way to give myself that thing directly.
That is what schema change feels like from the inside. Not a dramatic shift. Not a sudden freedom. Just the gradual quieting of a prediction that has been running on outdated evidence for a very long time.....
And the slow, unremarkable discovery that you were never actually failing. You were just working at the wrong layer of the system.
PS: If you’re ready to break free of the patterns that have never responded to willpower and become the kind of practitioner who creates real, lasting, identity-level change in the people you serve, explore the Next Level Human Certified Architect program today. Spots are limited... don’t wait.
👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coach
References
Adler, J. M., Lodi-Smith, J., Philippe, F. L., & Houle, I. (2016). Variation in narrative identity is associated with trajectories of mental health over several years. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(4), 612-633. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4395856/
Ecker, B. (2018). Clinical translation of memory reconsolidation research: Therapeutic methodology for transformational change by erasing implicit emotional learnings driving symptom production. Coherence Psychology Institute. https://www.coherencetherapy.org/files/Ecker_2018_Clinical_Translation_of_Memory_Reconsolidation_Research.pdf
Ecker, B., & Bridges, S. K. (2022). Memory reconsolidation and the crisis of mechanism in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, 59(4), 393-404. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0732118X22000150
McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity and the life story. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233-238.
Moscovitch, D. A., Moscovitch, M., & Sheldon, S. (2023). Neurocognitive model of schema-congruent and -incongruent learning in clinical disorders: Application to social anxiety and beyond. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 18(6), 1412-1435. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10623626/
Oyserman, D., Fryberg, S., & Yoder, N. (2007). Identity-based motivation and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 1011-1027.
Really enjoyed this! IMO, the most important work as a human is right here in this essay.
Love this! Be aware/feel the pull and sit with it❤️