When you think about habits that seem impossible to break, it can feel like you’re a victim of something beyond your control. In a sense your brain is being kidnapped. We now know, thanks to functional MRI research, that each habitual behavior you have – good or bad – is determined by a unique pathway wired in your brain. Many patterns are healthy but everyone has a few that are unhealthy and need to be broken.
So why are they so hard to break? Your rational mind knows they are bad, yet somehow you follow them over and over.
One of my favorite quotes is from Dr. Jeffery Schwartz, author of “The Mind and The Brain”: “The brain’s gonna do what the brain’s gonna do, but you don’t have to let it push you around.”
The point is that with the right technique you can use your naturally powerful mind to physically rewire the pathways in your brain and defeat bad habits.
The first step is to understand what is going on. In your mind you know that a bad habit shouldn’t be followed, yet the pathway in your brain is wired too hard. Your brain has kidnapped your willful mind and is “kicking you around”. It’s not hopeless. You can use mindfulness awareness and attention to alert you to what is happening at that moment when your brain is initiating one of those undesired patterns. That gives you the power to take action. The first action you need to take is to label those trigger points as “kidnappers”.
That gets you started. There are more steps. They include setting up detours and creating new patterns that you can strengthen to replace and weaken the bad habits. It requires using your mind to train your brain. The Complete EM Brain Power Course will teach you all the skills you’ll need and will guide you every step of the way with unlimited personal support.
