the Self in Making: How Behavior, Brain, and Environment Shape Lasting Change

Why is lasting change so difficult, even when we know exactly what we want to change?Insight alone rarely transforms a life. Willpower can start a process, but it often cannot sustain it. Lasting change emerges from the interaction between behavior, the brain, emotional regulation, habits, reward systems, and the social environment in which we live.The Self in the Making examines how these forces continuously shape one another. It explores neuroplasticity, learning and repetition, motivation, metacognition, emotional regulation, resistance to change, social dynamics, and the return to old patterns.The book approaches personal change as a dynamic process rather than a matter of simply thinking differently. New behavior has to be practiced, reinforced, integrated, and eventually stabilized within a system that includes both the individual and the surrounding environment.Michael Reekers brings these elements together into a clear framework for understanding why people remain caught in familiar patterns, why meaningful change can provoke resistance, and how new ways of acting gradually become part of the self.For readers interested in the psychology and neuroscience of behavioral change, this book offers a structured examination of how transformation actually takes shape.