A few yearfs ago, I decided I wanted a bathtub.
Not a yacht. Not a wing added to the building. A bathtub.
I live in an apartment with only a shower. Instead of simply figuring out what kind of tub would work in the space, my first instinct was to call the management company and ask whether I was allowed to have one.
I actually picked up the phone and sought permission from another adult to take a bath in my own home. Can you imagine?
I had owned houses, raised children, run businesses, managed complicated lives and made decisions with consequences considerably greater than whether or not I could soak in hot water, yet there I was, behaving as though somewhere in the leasing office sat the Keeper of the Tub, waiting to determine whether Monica Hebert had demonstrated sufficient maturity for bubbles.
Eventually, I read my lease.
There was nothing in it saying I needed permission.
Nobody had prohibited a bathtub. Nobody had told me I couldn’t have one. I had simply assumed that before making a significant decision about my own living space, I ought to consult somebody outside myself who might know better.
That is when the bathtub stopped being a bathtub.
What I was living out was an inherited belief.
I - like millions of us - was raised to believe that authority lived somewhere outside of me. Other people knew better. Other people understood how the world worked. Other people could be trusted to decide what was prudent, appropriate, sensible or permissible, and my job was to seek their approval before proceeding.
For much of my life, that belief followed me into places far more consequential than the bathroom.
For years, I would not even make my own political determinations. I looked to whatever man was in my life at the time and assumed he understood these things better than I did. I had intelligence. I could read. I could reason. I could examine evidence and reach conclusions. None of that mattered because I had absorbed a belief much earlier that said women did not possess quite the same authority in these matters.
So I handed mine over.
That is what inherited beliefs do so brilliantly. They rarely arrive wearing a little sign that says, THIS IS A BELIEF SOMEBODY ELSE GAVE YOU.
They arrive disguised as reality.
They become so familiar that most of us stop examining them. We don’t experience them as rules because nobody needs to remind us of them anymore. We have internalized the enforcement.
Another one I inherited was that rest must be earned.
Plenty of women my age will recognize that one immediately. Work first. Finish everything. Take care of everyone. Make yourself useful. Then, if the house is clean enough, everybody is fed enough, everything is complete enough and nobody can think of one more thing you ought to be doing, perhaps you’re entitled to sit down.
I have lived long enough now to see how absurd that is, but recognizing its absurdity does not automatically remove it from the nervous system.
A woman can understand perfectly well that she does not have to earn the right to rest and still feel guilty when she lies down in the middle of the afternoon.
That gap between what we intellectually know and what still feels true is where this gets interesting.
I carried another inherited belief for decades without realizing it: wanting something was never quite enough. I needed a supporting argument.
I couldn’t simply want the thing. I needed reasons.
If I wanted to spend money on something, I needed to explain why it was practical, useful, necessary, economical in the long run or somehow beneficial beyond the simple fact that it delighted me.
Right now, I want a fireplace in my living room.
There is no case to be made.
I do not need to prepare Exhibit A demonstrating its contribution to my quality of life. I do not need three supporting reasons and a closing statement. I want to sit in my living room and look at a fire.
That is sufficient.
It sounds almost comically simple written that way, but I spent decades believing desire required justification, that I could have what I wanted only if I could establish a sufficiently respectable reason for wanting it.
How many women have lived that way without ever realizing there was another option?
This is why inherited beliefs have become so interesting to me as I have gotten older, and particularly what they mean for retirement.
There is a great deal of talk about the freedom of retirement. The children are grown. The job is over or greatly reduced. The responsibilities that once dictated enormous portions of a life have changed. On paper, there may be more freedom than many women have had since childhood.
But removing the external obligations does not automatically remove the internal rules.
The boss can disappear while the work ethic he reinforced remains firmly seated at the kitchen table. The marriage can end while the habit of seeking someone else’s approval remains. The children can become independent adults while a mother still arranges her entire emotional life around their needs.
The circumstances change much faster than the beliefs.
This week, in my Tuesday night Breakthrough group, I asked the women to identify inherited beliefs they might still be living by.
They had trouble doing it.
That fascinated me because these are thoughtful, intelligent women. The difficulty wasn’t that they lacked inherited beliefs. The difficulty was that inherited beliefs don’t feel inherited once you’ve lived with them for fifty or sixty years.
They feel like facts.
If I had asked instead, “What false rule are you obeying?” they might have looked at me exactly the same way, because the rule doesn’t feel false while you’re inside it.
It feels like common sense. It feels like good manners. It feels like responsibility. It feels like being a good woman.
Then I listened to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman talking about neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change in response to experience, and suddenly this entire subject became much bigger to me.
Because discovering an inherited belief is not the same thing as changing it.
I can announce today that I no longer believe I need someone else’s permission to run my life. Lovely. My conscious mind has reached a new conclusion.
Meanwhile, I have decades of repetition behind the old one.
I have practiced looking outside myself for authority thousands of times. I have practiced justifying what I want. I have practiced earning rest. Those patterns did not remain merely philosophical ideas. They became familiar ways of thinking and responding.
And familiar matters to the brain.
Which is why changing one of these patterns can feel so uncomfortable even after we have decided, intellectually, that the old belief is nonsense.
Huberman used a word that stopped me.
Friction.
I had always thought friction was the unpleasant part of change, something to grit my teeth through until the new behavior finally became easier.
His explanation was far more interesting than that.
When an adult tries to do something unfamiliar, suppress an automatic response or deliberately produce a different one, the brain has to engage systems of attention and control that the old automatic behavior did not require. Huberman describes norepinephrine as part of the chemistry associated with the alertness and agitation we experience during that effort. Acetylcholine helps concentrate attention on what the brain needs to notice and learn. In his wonderfully direct description, “agitation and strain” can be an entry point into neuroplasticity.
That means the friction is not merely standing in the way of the rewiring.
The friction helps get the brain’s attention.
Think about that.
You have spent fifty years believing rest must be earned. One afternoon you decide that belief no longer belongs to you. You are tired. Nothing is on fire. Nobody needs rescuing. You lie down.
Within ten minutes, the old system begins objecting.
There is laundry. You haven’t answered that email. The kitchen could use attention. It is two o’clock in the afternoon, for God’s sake. Decent productive women do not lie around at two o’clock in the afternoon.
And suddenly you are uncomfortable.
This is the precise moment when many of us get up.
We interpret the discomfort as information.
See? I knew this wasn’t right. I can’t relax in the afternoon. This isn’t who I am.
But what if we have misunderstood that moment completely?
What if the discomfort is not a verdict?
What if it is evidence that we have interrupted something automatic?
You expected yourself to behave one way. Instead, you behaved another. The old pattern said get up, and you remained lying down. The familiar response did not get to complete itself.
Your brain noticed.
That is the moment in which the new behavior has to be practiced, not merely admired as a nice idea.
The same thing happens when I make a decision without consulting somebody else. The old urge may appear almost instantly: You should run this by someone.
If I automatically obey that urge, nothing much has changed.
But if I notice it and say, No. I am capable of making this decision, and then actually make it, there is friction between the deeply rehearsed response and the one I am deliberately choosing.
That friction is not an inconvenience sitting beside the work.
It is part of the work.
When the nervous system encounters a mismatch between what it expected and what actually happened, systems associated with alertness and focused attention become active. The brain has a reason to pay attention because the existing prediction did not quite work. Errors, effort and frustration can therefore become useful signals in learning rather than reasons to abandon the attempt.
I find that profoundly hopeful.
Because many of us have been interpreting the hard part backward.
We thought ease meant progress. We thought, When I’ve really changed, this will feel natural.
But of course the old thing feels natural. We practiced it for half a century.
The old road has pavement, streetlights and a damn Starbucks.
The new one is still being cleared.
If I refuse to justify why I want my fireplace, I may feel an urge to produce reasons anyway. That does not necessarily mean I secretly believe the fireplace is foolish. It may simply mean that the old behavior is still easier for my brain to retrieve.
So I practice the new one.
I want it. That is my reason.
Then I do it again somewhere else.
And slowly, something fascinating happens. The response I once had to manufacture deliberately begins to require less effort. What was unfamiliar becomes more familiar.
That repetition is part of how learning becomes embedded.
There is another piece of this that delighted me because it makes rest part of the story in an entirely different way. The intense learning effort and attention help set the conditions for plasticity, but lasting consolidation of learning happens later, particularly during sleep and rest.
So apparently the woman who was taught she had to earn her rest may discover that rest is not merely something she has permission to enjoy.
Her brain actually needs it.
There is some justice in that.
But the part of this that I most want women our age to hear is this:
We are not too old to change our brains.
There is no birthday at which the brain closes the renovation department and hangs out a sign saying, Sorry, wiring is permanent.
Neuroplasticity changes as we age. The adult brain generally does not learn with the effortless plasticity of a child’s brain, and deliberate change may require more attention, effort and repetition. But older adults continue to learn, adapt and change.
I need women to understand the magnitude of that.
Because “I’ve always been this way” can begin to sound suspiciously like another inherited belief.
I am 71.
There are thoughts I have rehearsed for decades that I can stop rehearsing. There are responses that once appeared automatically that I can learn to interrupt. There are ways I have used my brain for most of my life that I can decide no longer serve me.
And I can learn something else.
That does not mean I announce a new belief Tuesday morning and wake up Wednesday neurologically refurbished.
It means I notice the moment when the old thought appears. I make a different choice. I tolerate the friction created by that choice. I repeat it. I give the new experience enough attention for my brain to recognize that something has changed.
Then I allow time and rest to do their part.
That is astonishing to me.
And yes, at our age I immediately thought about cognitive aging and dementia.
I want to be careful here because I will not turn good neuroscience into a promise it cannot make. Rewriting an inherited belief is not a proven way to prevent Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia. Dementia is complicated, with many biological, genetic, health and environmental factors involved.
But there is good reason to care about continuing to use, challenge and engage our brains as we age. Researchers have found that particular kinds of cognitive training can benefit specific thinking abilities in older adults, while scientists continue investigating how learning, mental engagement and other lifestyle factors may help support cognitive health later in life.
The evidence does not justify promising that mental activity will prevent dementia.
But it certainly gives us no reason to treat the older brain as finished.
For me, that makes the possibilities of retirement much larger than I had imagined.
I used to think of reinvention primarily in terms of what we might do with our lives now that we have more freedom.
Now I am thinking about what we might do with our brains.
We can challenge assumptions that have gone unchallenged for decades. We can learn things that force us to pay attention. We can notice automatic responses instead of surrendering to them. We can confront a belief that was installed in childhood and discover, at 71, that it does not belong to us anymore.
We can give our brains something new to do.
Not because there is something wrong with us.
Because there is still something extraordinarily alive about us.
This has completely changed the way I think about the work I have been calling ReFoundation.
I don’t believe this stage of life requires us to become entirely new women. Quite the opposite. I think it gives us the extraordinary opportunity to examine the foundation beneath the women we already are and ask how much of it we consciously chose.
Some beliefs were handed to us by our parents. Some came from our churches, marriages, schools and communities. Some came simply from being female in the generation in which we were born. We absorbed them before we had enough experience to decide whether we agreed with them.
Then we practiced them for decades.
Now we get to look again.
Not simply at whether a belief is true, but at whether we want to continue giving it residence in our minds.
And when we choose differently and feel that uncomfortable tug toward the old way, perhaps we can stop immediately assuming that the discomfort means we are making a mistake.
Perhaps we can recognize the moment for what it may be.
Our attention has been captured. The automatic response has been interrupted. Something unfamiliar is being practiced.
The friction is doing its job.
At 71, that possibility interests me far more than becoming a better version of the woman the world trained me to be.
I want to know what else my brain can learn. I want to know what belief I can reconsider. I want to know what part of my life has been waiting on the other side of something I once mistook for a fact.
I would rather discover who that woman is when she stops asking permission from people who were never entitled to give it in the first place.
And yes.
She still wants the fireplace.
PS: Phew! I know this is a long, long article. I believe the information I presented is too valuable to reduce down to a 200 or 300 word missive. Thanks for reading all the way through!
To help you discover your own set of inherited beliefs, I suggestg you grab a copy of my RE-FOUNDATION Rescouce.
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✅ Step-by-step prompts to uncover what no longer fits
✅ Reflection pages that reconnect you to what still lights you up
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✅ Printable “Reclaiming” templates to track your transformation
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