135. The Neuropsychological Change Process and the Art Response

In this episode of The Modern Creative Woman, Dr. Amy Backos continues the conversation on creating more chill holidays by exploring the neuropsychology of choice, habit, and tradition. She weaves personal reflection with brain science to offer listeners both compassion and practical insight into why the holidays can feel so overwhelming—and how meaningful change is actually possible.

Dr. Backos begins by normalizing the gap between intention and reality during the holidays. Drawing from her own experience of scaling back perfectionism, she reminds us that time is not the goal—well-being is. Gifts can arrive late, traditions can shift, and self-kindness matters more than meeting imaginary deadlines.

The heart of the episode focuses on the neuroscience of decision-making. Dr. Backos explains how four key brain areas—the prefrontal cortex, limbic system, anterior cingulate cortex, and striatum—work together to shape our choices. Importantly, she highlights how emotion, habit, and reward often override logic, helping explain why we revert to old patterns (especially around family and holidays), even when we “know better.”

She then unpacks research showing that the brain initiates action before we’re consciously aware of deciding, underscoring why habits are so powerful—and why change requires patience. This insight offers deep empathy for ourselves and others, reframing impulsive or regressive behaviors as efficiency strategies of the brain, not personal failures.

From there, Dr. Bakos turns toward hope and neuroplasticity. Our brains can change, learn new routes, form new traditions, and create new emotional associations. Traditions, while comforting and efficient, are not fixed—and we are free to keep, modify, or release them.

The episode closes with a gentle, experiential art therapy practice: slowing down, noticing the urge to move before acting, and using artmaking as a way to interrupt automatic patterns. This mindful pause becomes a lived experience of neuroplasticity and choice—one that can extend beyond the art table and into how we navigate the holidays.

Key takeaway: When we slow down and understand how our brains truly work, we can meet ourselves with compassion, experiment with small changes, and create holidays—and lives—that feel more intentional, creative, and calm.

Transcript

135. Week 2 Chill Holidays December 9, 2025

“The holidays are a wonderful time. Yet they can quickly become overwhelming if you neglect to plan ahead.” This quote from Daisy Sutherland starts us off today as we dive into some of the neuropsychological research that supports new ways of engaging with the holidays. Let's get into this. Let's get this started. Welcome into the Modern Creative Woman podcast. I'm Dr. Amy Backos, your art therapist and psychologist. I'm here with 30 years of experience helping women live more creative and authentic lives. I've been talking a little bit this month about how to have more chill holidays, and if you have yet to listen to episode 134, I confess how I used to spend my holidays and the sense of wanting to do everything to create a holiday for my friends and family that was actually more similar to what my entire extended family was able to create together. I just took on too much, committed to too many things, and I also was making cookies for gifts. Knitting for gifts. It was too much. And in that episode, you can hear a little bit about how I started to pull back. This week, I want to talk about some neuropsychological aspects of the brain that can really clue you into how you can make some changes, especially in terms of new habits and new traditions. My goal is making my holidays for myself and for my family as chill as possible, and I'm far from perfect. I thought I would have all my holiday gifts to give my family in the November holidays, and that just didn't happen. So I do have one more run to the post office to make, and I refuse to beat myself up over that. It was my goal to have it done by a certain date, and you all know how I feel about time being part of the goals. It's okay if things take longer or we get things done quicker. Time is not the goal, so they'll get their packages eventually. They might be New Year's gifts. If I am a little too late and that is totally okay by me. If you have ever wondered why it's so challenging to change your mind or to change your traditions, I want to shed a little bit of light on that, especially in the area of the brain science. And there's been a lot of basic science kinds of research that's been going on about the brain in the last 25 or 30 years. That has led to the next round of research finding incredible ways of supporting the human body and helping people live more comfortably, and especially to recover from a traumatic brain injury. So if you have tried to make changes over the holidays, or you found yourself going home to visit your family and regressing into old ways of behaving, sometimes even behaving like your adolescent self. Well, this might give you a little bit of empathy towards yourself about how challenging it can be to make changes. Once you know this, however, you can start to apply this information in a way that will liberate you and allow you to change in the way that you'd like to change. And in particular, changing maybe some holiday traditions. Starting new ones, feeling less stressed. So let's jump into the neuroscience of choice. There's four areas of the brain that are involved in choice. And in a moment I'll tell you what that looks like and how each of those are engaged in making a decision. First, it's your prefrontal cortex. And that's here. It's your executive control center. It's the front of your brain right above your eyes. It's about logic, reasoning, planning. It lets you fill out your schedule, make your planner predict what someone might want for a gift or an outing and imagine what you might want to do for the holidays. Change also happens in the limbic system, and your limbic system relates to emotion. Your emotional responses all stem from that part of your brain. Next up is the anterior cingulate cortex, and that is the part of your brain that's really involved in weighing the benefits and the costs of any kind of choice that you're making. Your brain moves very quickly to decide which will be the least expenditure of energy in terms of what you're going to do. And finally, the striatum on your brain is evaluating the potential reward associated with each choice. There can be a reward for doing something. There can also be a reward for not doing something, which gives us a lot of understanding and empathy for when we're struggling to take action and do something. Let me explain what's happening when your brain is engaged with choice. So during choice, there's really three stages. The information is presented to you. So there is an information processing phase and your brain is really involved in dealing with the sensory input. And it's received by all the relevant brain regions. So that happens really quickly. A choice becomes available to you. A friend invites you out. You see a thing that you might want to buy or a ticket you might want to reserve. The second part really is evaluative. So think evaluation and comparison. And that part of the brain again the prefrontal cortex is responsible for that. It's analyzing the pros and the cons of your choice. Now the limbic system at the exact same time is assessing your emotional associations. What that means is this can be logical or illogical. It doesn't relate to planning. It relates to how you feel about it. And if you're feeling some negative or uncomfortable memories about past holidays, this can get activated very, very quickly. The third step then is decision formation, and that's based on your evaluation. Your brain will select the most beneficial option. And here's the downside is that rational and irrational factors are all considered by our brain. When we decide to make a decision, it might not be rational for us to go to a party with certain people, but our brain thinks that's a good idea. You should go. And that can shed a lot of insight into why you or people you love can make some really poor decisions when you think they're a logical person. Decision making involves the lack of logic, right? The emotional component to it as well. When you think about your automatic habits. There are multiple studies that demonstrate the brain activity will indicate what a person will choose before they're consciously aware of making that choice. When you reach out to grab a cup out of your cupboard and you're going to make a glass of lemonade, and you decide that this is what you're going to grab, your brain is already activating in that area before you're consciously aware of which class you're going to choose. So there are so many computations in your brain that are really happening all at once, and it's programming the exact spatiotemporal profile of muscle activation that lead you to reach up and grab that glass. It's a complicated process. It happens very, very quickly. And what this means is we have these subconscious neural behaviors. The brain is knowing, before we have even consciously become aware that we're going to grab this one particular glass out of the cupboard. Think about that for just a moment. The brain is registering your decision to move before any of us are even consciously aware of it. I hope this gives you more empathy for people who are making impulsive decisions, who are engaging in habitual behavior. These subconscious neural behaviors. It's a brain's way of being efficient. They connect our goals, such as. I want to make a glass of lemonade with the movement and action, and it engages with proprioception, your awareness of your body in space. All these things have to happen simultaneously, so you can reach up over the mugs and grab the exact glass you want. And this research, again, is based on the early science. It's called basic science. When people are exploring to simply understand what's happening and why is happening in the body, in nature, it's basic science for understanding. And then the scientists who use that information will figure out how to apply it. And so this is the kind of information that's helping people with brain injury. It can help all of us. But the evidence in the science will be really applicable in the medical field as well. So this one study that I'm giving you the example from about reaching in and grabbing the cup for your tea, it's a follow in the Journal of Current Biology. And that was in 2022. So how does any of this relate to the holidays? So what about our brains? It really does relate quite a bit to the holidays. We can probably all predict how we might react to the holiday season. You can anticipate how you might feel when you show up at a holiday party. You can imagine very easily how you might feel when you are buying a gift or opening a gift, how you might feel when you're stuck in traffic or on New Year's Eve when you're celebrating or not celebrating. Your brains have already decided this. Our brains know because it wants to be efficient. The brain wants to use the least number of calories possible, and so it will kind of fill in the blanks in anticipation. So you can already imagine. And then we imagine it in advance. And we're more likely to feel that way. But maybe you want to feel differently about the holidays, which is why we're having this conversation at all. Systems can really help you, and the understanding of how to move from this place of awareness Around what your brain is doing into a place of how can I do something different? Let's get into that. Decisions, small changes and systems that you create are going to help your brain shift and change. The good news is of course, neuroplasticity. Maybe 50 years ago they just thought the brain was the brain and that was it. And researchers have discovered over the last maybe 40, 40 years or so how our brain can change and grow. You can increase your IQ by studying through conscious learning about things. You can adapt new approaches and you can, you know, shift into new circumstances. You start a new job, or you move or you make a new friend. Your brain figures out how to adapt to those behaviors. You find a new way to drive to the store, and your brain can figure that out in a way that that can become your new route to just go get your groceries. Psychology also has something to say about traditions. And perhaps our grandmothers were correct that traditions do, in fact make things a lot more simple in life. Same food, same music, same decorations. Year after year, I'm going to put up the same little paper angels on my tree that were on my tree when I was a kid. The same music is always on same kind of activities that you do with your family, and then the same emotional experiences. I have a few examples of traditions I love. My mom started buying me a piece of pottery every year for my birthday in December, when I was 18, and over a few years she started adding it. Here's one for Valentine's Day, and this beautiful handmade pottery turned into a set. And I have these dishes. However many decades later, they are beautiful. I loved that simple tradition. My mom would also give me a piece of my grandmother's jewelry, and that was such a special thing to have as a holiday gift. That didn't cost her any money. She was just rummaging through her jewelry door. But I loved what she pulled from her jewelry drawer. You can drive to look at holiday lights. You can go to do a tree lighting if that's what you are engaged with. You can have a family tradition to travel and get away from everybody else. There's so many ways that we just kind of repeat ourselves, and a lot of them are great and some of them are not. Psychology wants to remind you over and over and over again that you can change, that society can change that families and groups can change, and we can do it for the better. We are not stuck like this at all. So to change how you feel about the holidays, you first have to be consciously aware of how you feel for the holidays and it requires a certain amount of self reflexivity. Having a look at yourself kind of objectively, you can talk about it with a friend. You can do some journaling, talk with a therapist, anything that kind of gets you out of your own perspective. Making art, of course, is my all time favorite way to take a step back and observe something in a different way. So if you are usually traveling in the holidays, you can step back and observe what parts of that are bothersome to you. You might start off by saying, all of it. I hate all of it. And then you get into a conversation, or you make some art about it and you realize it's not really everything. It might just be some expectations or anticipatory anxiety. So recognizing what it is that stresses you out, it really can slow you down and make you much more focused on the things that you do want to experiment with in terms of change. I want to talk about an experiment like replicating about the brain, knowing before you consciously know what's even happening. So let me give you some more of the details about this interesting experiment with that pre conscious neural activity. The details are people were implanted with this micro electrode teeny tiny electrode, and it recorded one single neuron in the posterior parietal cortex. And it would measure one neuron in the brain. And participants were told they were free to choose any kind of movement they wanted, just natural, normal movement. They would shift around or pick up a glass and have a sip of water. Whatever they would do that was just normal. And they could also choose to do something like intentional, like a stretch, stand up, something a little more goal directed. However, the participants were asked to do one thing to report click a button at the very exact first moment that they felt the urge to move. And this study showed that this one neuron is active before people even click the button. The brain is doing stuff before we're consciously aware of it, which makes total sense. The awareness or the consciousness is simply thinking. And thinking is not facts. It's a biological process, and it happens in a certain order. And the urge to move happens long before we experience, oh, I'd like to move. I'd like to reach out and grab my glass of water. And so this study is really confirming some of the prior studies about that posterior parietal cortex. It's also really measuring the amount of time. You know, it's hundreds of milliseconds before consciously conscious awareness comes to people's mind that they want to make a move. So here's kind of the newer things that have come out of this kind of research. This pre conscious activity is really a part of this dynamic neural population response rate. It's spreading out across the brain. And it indicates much earlier than we realize that we want to move. And these details related to neural timing is really suggesting that we're moving from this high level task, that the wish to grab a cup so we can have a drink, that reaching, grabbing the cup, then the decision to make a lemonade, that this is happening way before we're aware of. We need to be much more sympathetic to ourselves when we engage in habits that we wish we weren't. There's a biological reason why things are repeated and the brain just is behaving that way. You can begin playing with this idea in your own artwork by pulling out some art supplies and a blank sheet of paper and just notice your urge to make a move on the paper before you make it. So. This requires a bit of patience and a lot of present moment awareness. So if you put your pencil on the paper, and when you are consciously aware that you want to move your hand, pause and realize that your brain has already started that process before you had the urge to make the move, then make the move. A large part of what art therapy does is slow people down. And even in talk therapy, the idea of slowing down the racing thoughts becomes a source of wisdom. So the more you can notice, oh, I'm going to grab my glass out of the cupboard and then grab the glass out of the cupboard. The more you can slow down and narrate your own process, the more at ease you will be. So experiment in your artwork, use pencil, then use marker, then paints and notice the urge to move across the paper before you take the move, pause and then move your hand. This gives you a immediate experience of neuroplasticity. You're controlling that urge to move, and you're interrupting the brain's automatic urge to move. Now that you know all of these things about how our brain works and the processing happening so quickly, I really hope that you will have more empathy towards your own habits and the habits of others. And most importantly, you will have more empathy for yourself when you engage in behaviors that seem illogical or are taking you away from really what's most important to you, kind of those behaviors that are taking you away from your values. Now that you know, what will you create? Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'm excited to speak with you again in the next episode.