If you’re already a vegan and find that eating the perfect, plant-based diet is working out great for you, then this post might not be for you.

If, however, you’re a wanna-be vegan who struggles to stick to a vegan diet, or you’re a vegan with massive nutrient gaps because, though you eat no animals products, you’re binging on fruit, skimping on important foods that can provide you Omega 3s, creatine, B12, fat-soluble vitamins, and other important nutrients, or spending a million dollars on your grocery bill at Whole Foods without getting the stuff your body really needs, then it’s time to use the power of your subconscious mind.

“What?!” you’re likely thinking, “What does that have to do with going Vegan, and doing it right?”

Here’s a big secret that most people are completely ignorant of.

You can’t make new, good habits regarding healthy eating, better lifestyle choices, or even learning to play the Cello with your conscious will alone. You’ll face serious burnout and relatively quickly. It’s called decision fatigue.

Your Brain Chunk’s Information

There’s a reason for this. Your brain likes to “chunk” information in the form of unconscious habits so that it doesn’t have to spend so much energy making choices all day, every day.

Think about what you would do if you had to think about breathing, walking, or even driving. You’d get tired pretty quickly, and then you’d have no mental energy left to do other things. Important things like deciding to eat more plant-based foods, figuring out where you’re going to work out tomorrow, or even fantasizing what Vegan restaurant you’re going to visit on your next hot date.

In order to work with the brain, you’re going to need to set up habits that become unconscious.

There are a few ways to do this that are like taking massive short-cuts, but let’s start with how habits are formed.

You Can’t Really Undo a Bad Habit, You Can Only Create a Stronger Good Habit

First, you should know that you can’t really undo a bad habit. Don’t look so sad. All your bad habits aren’t going to stick to you like glue forever. There’s a work around.

In order to change a bad habit, you have to create new, stronger neural pathways. This happens via neurochemical messengers called neurohormones. You also have to strengthen the path that these new messages travel down so that they become like that path you wore thin between you and your best friend’s house in the 5th grade.

This stronger neural pathway then takes precedence whenever you go about your day, instead of the bad habit because the path is not as obvious to the brain. It’s as if trees have grown over the path. It’s still there, but it isn’t preferred by the brain because the brain likes efficiency. It’s not going to take a machete to the over-grown path when it can just go down a really clear one. That’s essentially a habit.

The brain stores all habits in the subconscious mind, but you can tell it which ones to use or ignore.

The 3-Step Habit Formation Process

All habits are formed similarly, as well.

There’s a cue, a trigger, and a reward. Three simple steps.

The cue is what happens just before you engage in the habit. Maybe your cue to reach for a bag of chips as soon as you walk in the door is feeling tired from a long day’s work. You could interrupt this cue by throwing a vegan protein bad in your bag and hitting the gym before you ever get home form the office.

The trigger in this same scenario might be seeing your bag of chips on the kitchen counter as soon as you walk inside your home. To change the trigger, you could put a bowl of fresh fruit, or have chopped celery and carrot sticks and some hummus in the fridge ready to binge on as soon as you get home.

The reward is the intangible or tangible thing that you get (as well as a heavy dopamine dump, a neurochemical heavily implicated in habit formation) that makes you want to engage in this habit again.

If you wanted to replace the reward of having the satisfaction of eating salty chips, you could instead reward yourself with your favorite magazine and have it lying on the counter where the chips normally are, and let yourself read it leisurely in a hot bath while you munch on the healthier hummus and veggies you’ve prepared ahead of time.

The trick is to know that you have to interrupt the habit before the cue, change the trigger, and be certain to create a reward. This will create that dopamine-dump that “sets” a habit in place, and causes your brain to start to chunk information in the form of a new habit. If you do this for a few weeks or months, soon you won’t even think about eating chips anymore, you’ll crave the alternative behavior instead.

Creating Positive Eating Habits on Warp Speed

Now that you know how habits are formed, let’s crack habit-formation to solidify your vegan lifestyle goals, but do it on full-speed-ahead mode.

To do this, you’re going to use two tools: binaural beats and creative visualization and affirmations.

First, you should understand that the subconscious mind cannot truly tell the difference between an imagined reality and waking reality.

There have been studies like the one conducted at the University of Chicago by Dr. Blaslotto proving, for example, that someone can practice a basketball free-throw in their minds 1000 times, or actually practice at a gym, and the improvement will be the same, even favoring the imagined practice in some cases!

When you pair affirmations that are accompanied with emotive, and clear visualizations, you are essentially teaching your brain how you want to live and be. You start creating new neural pathways without actually engaging in any actual activity.

Therefore, you can affirm to yourself several times a day, “I love eating fruits and vegetables,” and then picture yourself smiling over a big plate of greens. Imagine in great detail how eating this plate of greens makes you feel, look, and think. Is your mind clearer? Are you thinner? Do you have loads of clean energy?

Now, you’re going to take this positive affirmation and creative visualization and super-charge it using binaural beats.

Binaural bets are essentially a short-cut to a meditative state. They are created by playing two slightly different tones in each ear (usually through headphones) that then cause the brain to create a third “illusory” tone to try to create coherence from the two tones that don’t match. The by-product is called brain entrainment. Your brainwaves then alter to match a new frequency caused by the tones being listened to.

Musicians who play stringed instruments are familiar with this phenomenon. Whenever two strings on a violin, guitar, or cello are plucked, there is a third harmonic “note” that is created. Your brain then, is essentially trying to harmonize the sounds and bring order to chaos in your mind.

Beneficial Brainwave States

This ordering of chaos in the brain usually creates brain wave states that are more coercive to the subconscious mind including:

Beta – the state we are in most often when using our conscious minds, only the concise mind accounts for only about 10 percent of our total brain power, and can also be critical and negative.

Alpha – A relaxed, lucid, calm state of thought that is close to the doorway of the subconscious mind.

Theta – The state most often associated to deep meditation, and spiritual enlightenment, a-ha moments and extreme mental clarity and insight.

Delta – The state of deep, dreamless sleep when much of our physical and emotional clearing is completed.

Gamma and Epsilon – These are very rare brainwave states only measured on an EEG and other brain measuring equipment in seasoned meditators and monks.

The trick is to get out of the beta brainwave state (the conscious mind) and start to install new, positive habits at the level of alpha, theta or even delta. This way they are implanted deep in the subconscious mind, and bypass the inner critic that often keeps us feeling that we can’t change or make positive alterations to our lives.

If you can practice listening to binaural beats while you are also affirming positive goals for a vegan lifestyle, and imagine them in the present time, as if they’ve already come to pass, your brain not only won’t know the difference, but you will start to act on these newly implanted, subconscious thoughts in your waking hours as if by magic.

It will be as though you have always had healthy eating habits your whole life. You can also use this technique to renew your habits in other areas of your life and experience a spillover effect of positivity in the process.

Start with learning to love Brussels sprouts, and tomorrow you’ll be conquering your love life, finances, and career success. You’ll be simply unstoppable.

Just twenty minutes a day of this practice can reset your positive goals in as little as a week’s time. Try it out for yourself. We’d love to hear your feedback.