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Rewire Your Brain for Success!
Did you know you can “grow” your brain with new neural connections and pathways throughout your lifetime? Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections—is the response to new situations, life changes, and new environments.
Think of your brain as a dynamic, interconnected power grid. There are billions of pathways, or roads, lighting up every time you think, feel, or do something. Some of these roads are well traveled—these are our habits. They are established ways of thinking, feeling, and doing. Every time we think in a certain way, practice a particular task, or feel a specific emotion we reinforce the road and it becomes easier for our brains to travel this pathway.
People can master such things as a golf swing, memorization of a poem, a dance routine, or the content for their anatomy and physiology course. They just have to keep traveling the path until it becomes habit (hard-wired). In the same way, people create strong neurological pathways and master things like procrastination, lack of concentration, poor eating habits, and mental confusion.
The good news is we all have the ability to learn and change by rewiring our brain. If you have ever changed a bad habit or thought about something differently, you have created a new pathway in your brain and experienced neuroplasticity firsthand. Anytime we think about something differently, make a different choice, learn a new skill, or cultivate a new emotion, we start wiring a new pathway. If we keep traveling the new pathway, our brains begin to use this pathway more and the old pathway less.
Soon, this new way of thinking, feeling, or doing becomes stronger. It becomes second nature as the old pathway gets used less and weakens. This process of rewiring your brain to form new connections and weaken old ones is neuroplasticity in action. With self-awareness and repeated and directed attention toward a desired change, you can rewire your brain. This is how you do it:
- Identify a neural pathway you want to weaken (e.g., I want to reduce candy in my diet).
- Determine a new neural pathway you want to wire (e.g., I want to eat berries instead).
- Place reminders of your new plan everywhere (e.g., hang a sign up in your kitchen that says “Wire for Berries!”) to keep you self-aware and focused.
- Now, avoid candy, and when you get a candy craving, eat berries. Each time you are successful, you weaken the old pathway (candy) and strengthen the new pathway (berries).
- Over time, you’ll stop seeking candy, and berries will become a habit.
Are you interested in learning more about neuroplasticity? Explore the links in the Picked Fresh section of this newsletter for more information.