Habits
- Research has shown that behavior is deeply ingrained in actual physical pathways in the brain.
- All of your beliefs and habits (everything making up your mental reality) is contained in these neural connections.
- Each time you take an action or think a thought, it is communicated to your neurons.
- Each time you learn something new, a new pathway is created.
- Next time you have an experience, your brain will search to see if you’ve experienced it before.
- If you have, the experience will follow the same pathway.
- The more often you engage the behavior or think a thought, the stronger the neural pathway holding that thought or behavior will become.
- This is how a how a thought or habit becomes a habit.
- A habit is more a cemented highway then a pathway.
That’s why the repetition aspect is a specific practice and is so important.
- It helps create strong highways that your brain can map to make the skill set associated with your goal habitual and automatic.
- Immediate feedback is important because it keeps you from reinforcing negative patterns , actions or behaviors that can keep you stuck
The final specific practice is to undo your bad habits by altering these neural pathways
- You can override the old bad habit by hiring a new behavior or thought pattern
- When you create new constructive pathways, the old destructive ones go away.
Re-source: Recondition
Our emotions carry a lot of weight
- If we are going to re-map our inner landscape and replace destructive habits with effective successful ones, we need to manipulate our emotions so that they are working for us and not against us.
- Focus on our emotional attachment to the end result
By forming these new positive associations with certain behaviors, we create strong cognitive maps that ingrain these behaviors into habit
By forming a positive emotional association with certain objects around you, you are more inclined to be successful.
- Objects in our environment can strongly influence what we think and practice
- Gearing your environment for success is crucial
- Manipulate yourself to see how the objects that might normally make you cringe into beneficial light
There always objects in your environment that have been hard-wired in ways you might not be aware of
- Things around you trigger certain behaviors (good or bad)
- You cannot rationally think these ingrained bad habits away.
- They are wired into your brain with actual physical associated connection.
- Swap out old objects trigger you negatively for new objects that trigger you positively.
Activity: “Associations” (good and bad) – facilitate your internal re-wiring to abandon bad habits create good ones. (examples below)
- Treadmill or running = fitting into skinny jeans and feeling better about yourself
- Vegetables = living a longer life
- Cigarettes = premature death
- Credit card leads to fear and debt
craving and resource from ““Unlimited” – How to build an exceptional life – by Jillian Michaels
