We don’t have one persona.

We have thousands of subpersonalities. At least, this is what recent neuroscience findings suggest. We can have multiple networks operating, each with a different agenda (much like in a dream where you can create different characters). If you look closely, you'll find that these subpersonalities are active every day.

Take a simple example:

Did you ever want to change something about your diet? Let’s say you decide to give up chips.

You start your day with a healthy breakfast, later have a relatively healthy lunch (already, the demands of the day start creeping up on you), and when it comes to dinner, you find yourself coming up with an excuse to eat a pack of chips again.

Now, what a lot of people do is tell themselves how lazy, stupid, or inconsistent they are, but this usually doesn’t help.

What might be more effective is realizing that the person who made the decision in the first place is not the same person who eats the chips. It’s literally another neural network that is active. For example, in the morning, we tend to have more cognitive resources before engaging with the world. Our prefrontal cortex (PFC) is at its best. However, towards the evening, we experience decision fatigue, which reduces PFC activity and activates another system: the Limbic System, which includes the amygdala and nucleus accumbens—key drivers of emotional and reward-seeking behavior.

We also create different operating presets depending on the context. You might have a workplace self, a home self, a tired self, and an inspired self, each employing different neural pathways.

Yet, most people live under the assumption that their personality is permanent and stays the same, without realizing what influences them. This creates unrealistic expectations for their own behavior.

But understanding this can actually be good news.

Instead of hoping that your evening self will make the right choice, you can have your morning self consider how this other expression of you functions and what motivates it. This could give you insights into things like preparing a healthy snack before hunger strikes, keeping chips out of the house, or not scheduling all your meetings late in the afternoon, but rather making the afternoon a lighter work session.

Another key aspect of uncovering these different personas within yourself is to examine the underlying assumptions each of these "expressions of self" have. For example, your evening version might be committed to relaxation, assuming that to relax, you need to allow yourself to "indulge", and that not eating chips would be a constraint.

As I mentioned in last week's letter, competing commitments can express different parts of yourself functioning against each other.

It actually makes sense if you look at our own body—not as one being but as billions of different organisms working together.

Instead of getting down on yourself for not doing what you know you should, you can inquire into the motivations of these different parts, question their purpose and commitments, and see what they ultimately want.

It might sound a bit schizophrenic, but in my experience, it can really make a difference.