The Battle Between Knowing and Doing: Why You Can't Follow Through on What You Know

Have you ever said to yourself, "I totally know what to do. I'm just not doing it. Why can't I follow through? What's wrong with me?"

If that sounds familiar, this post will help you understand why following through can feel so impossibly hard. The answer lies in understanding the difference between two types of change: easy change and hard change.

Understanding this distinction can completely shift how you approach your health, habits, and life, especially when you're trying to make lasting improvements.

What Makes Change "Easy"

Easy change is what most of us try first when pursuing wellness goals. It's logical, tangible, and trackable. It fits perfectly into todo lists and calendars.

This is the world of meal plans, macro guides, step-by-step exercise programs, habit stacking, and behavior tracking. It's the "tell me what to do and I'll do it" strategy.

Think about how many of these you've tried: workout calendars, 30-day challenges, detailed meal prep schedules, tracking apps, morning routines. These tools are absolutely amazing. They help us level up and take that next step forward.

For some people, this approach works perfectly. They get a plan, follow it, make changes, and they're done. But if you're someone who has read all the books, made all the plans, created systems, and still find yourself stuck, backsliding, or sabotaging your progress, you're dealing with something different.

You're facing hard change.

When Change Gets Complicated

Hard change is an entirely different game. It's not about leveling up a little bit. It's about becoming version 2.0 of yourself. Hard change is never linear, rarely trackable, and doesn't live on checklists.

It lives in your subconscious.

Hard change is required when you both want to and don't want to do something at the same time. It's that internal tug of war between comfort and growth. It's when you realize that even though you know what to do, something deeper keeps pulling you back.

Why Your Subconscious Fights Change

Your subconscious patterns weren't built overnight, and they weren't built logically either. They were formed emotionally, repetitively, and often in childhood or through significant life experiences. Most importantly, they were created for survival.

Here's why these patterns are so persistent: they were formed through repetition combined with emotion. Your brain is a pattern-detecting machine that wires itself based on repeated experiences, especially ones with strong emotional charge.

Common examples: If you were comforted with food as a child, your subconscious probably associates sugar or snacking with safety and love. If you were rewarded for achievement but not rest, your brain may associate rest with guilt or danger.

These associations get stored not in the conscious part of your brain, but in the limbic system and nervous system - the parts responsible for emotion, safety, and survival.

This means your responses today might not make logical sense, but they make perfect sense to your subconscious. They often feel like truth instead of beliefs.

When Patterns Become Identity

Subconscious patterns become so normalized that you don't question them. You think, "This is just how I am" or "I've always done it this way."

You might have beliefs about yourself that sound like:

• "I just don't have willpower"

• "I can't be disciplined"

• "Consistency is elusive for me"

But what you're actually looking at is an old pattern running in the background, like computer programs you can't see but that slow down your system.

Your brain's primary job is keeping you safe. If your subconscious links certain behaviors with safety, then change feels dangerous, even when it's technically healthy. Your system says, "This new way is unfamiliar, and unfamiliar equals unsafe. Let's go back to the comfortable pattern."

This is why even positive change can trigger anxiety, self-sabotage, or grief. It's not that you're weak. Your brain is doing its job to protect what it thinks you still need.

Why Willpower Isn't Enough

You cannot willpower or white-knuckle your way through subconscious change. This is the trap of using easy change tools for hard change problems.

You can't solve an identity wound with a checklist. You can't out-discipline a subconscious fear. You need tools that meet you at deeper levels: curiosity instead of shame, compassion instead of control, awareness instead of autopilot.

This is where coaching, therapy, journaling, nervous system regulation, and breath work become transformational. These are hard change tools because they access the deeper layers where the roots live.

The Good News About Your Brain

Your subconscious may be powerful, but so are you. Once you begin to see these patterns, you can start to interrupt them. Once you interrupt them consistently, you can rewire them.

Neuroplasticity means our brains can change. Your subconscious can be rewired. It doesn't happen overnight, but tiny shifts, repeated intentional shifts, change everything.

Three Keys to Navigate Hard Change

1. Expect to Grieve

To fully step into hard change, you need to grieve the loss of old lifestyles, patterns, and behaviors that used to mean something to you.

Let me share a personal example. Since childhood, I loved candy. Growing up in a stressful household with a single mom, candy became my comfort. It brought joy, excitement, and soothing during difficult times.

But when I was at my heaviest weight, battling migraines, inflammation, mood swings, and low energy, I knew that to become who I wanted to be, I had to say goodbye to the candy habit for good.

I mourned it. There were emotions, memories, comfort, and even identity wrapped up in that candy aisle. Even now, years later, I can walk past displays and feel a flicker of sadness. That's okay.

What changed was my perspective. At first, I saw giving up candy as restriction. But through the real work, I stopped seeing it as something I "couldn't have" and started seeing it as a choice. I chose health, energy, and clarity.

2. Embrace Your Agency

Hard change asks you to lean into your most powerful tool: choice. You always have two options:

• What if I don't make this change?

• What if I do make this change and fully commit?

Follow up with: What are the consequences, both short-term and long-term? What do I gain? What do I lose?

When you understand both sides of a choice, you stop feeling stuck and start feeling in charge. As economist Thomas Sowell said, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs."

You're not being restricted when you make healthy choices. You're being intentional.

3. Think Small, Act Consistently

Hard change never happens all at once. Don't try to overhaul everything simultaneously. That approach kills momentum and overwhelms your nervous system.

Instead, it's 1,000 small decisions and tiny shifts. The best way to step into hard change is to test each small change in your real, messy life.

Try something. How does it feel? Collect data, adjust, repeat. Your brain and nervous system need time to adjust. When you take it 1% at a time, you give your system a chance to keep up.

One day you'll look back and realize it was a million small changes that created your transformation.

Knowing Which Type of Change You Need

Easy change tools are powerful, but they don't fix hard change problems. Hard change requires identity work, thought work, emotion processing, conscious choice-making, and patience.

The next time you find yourself stuck, frustrated, or spiraling, pause and ask: "Is this an easy change or hard change problem?"

If it's hard change, know that you're not broken. You're not using the wrong level of discipline or willpower. You might just be using the wrong tools for the type of change you're trying to make.

Your Path Forward

You are capable of amazing transformation, even the hard changes. The key is recognizing which type of change you're facing and choosing appropriate tools.

If you've been beating yourself up for not following through on what you "know" you should do, give yourself permission to explore the deeper layers. Sometimes the most logical next step is the least logical approach.

Your subconscious patterns developed to protect you. Now you get to consciously choose new patterns that serve the person you're becoming. One tiny, intentional shift at a time.

Ready to explore the deeper work of lasting transformation? Listen to the full episode of Wellness Mastery with Jen Hoyer for more insights on navigating the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Listen to Episode 27: The Battle Between Knowing and Doing