There are many brilliant books written by articulate neuro-scientists that cover this in intricate detail. Here is a brief summary of how we can craft our habits to create the life we want.It is our habits - the little things that we do every day - that make the biggest impact on our lives. Habits are the things we think, say, feel and do impulsively and routinely. They can be very helpful, as we don’t have enough space or energy in our rational thinking mind to deliberate every tiny thing. However, many of the habitual actions or reactions we have are unhelpful autopilot behaviours that are holding back our physical, emotional and financial well-being.

A PEEK INSIDE THE BRAIN:• Our brain contains something like 100 Billion nerve

cells called NEURONS

• SYNAPSES are the space between them that allows an electrical impulse to travel between neurons

• Anything we think, say, feel or do is simply an electrical impulse flowing between a series of neurons and creating what is known as a NEURAL PATHWAY

• NEUROCHEMICALS are what make us feel good (dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin) or bad (cortisol)

• Neural Pathways that are repeated often (and especially if associated with neurochemical stimulation) become stronger. The gap between the neurons actually becomes smaller. An electrical insulation layer called MYELIN can also coat the pathway.

• Electrical impulses in the brain tend to follow the path of least resistance and as a neural pathway becomes stronger, it becomes the path of least resistance, so becoming our instinctive behaviour.

Do you remember learning to drive a car (or some other complicated skill)? At first it took all of your conscious concentration to coordinate changing gears, using the clutch, steering, indicating, checking your mirrors and deciding on your route at the same time. Now, you do all of that without any conscious involvement and can easily hold a detailed conversation and drink a coffee while cruising along the roads. You have created a strong neural pathway for driving.

If you have ever intended to go somewhere different on your way home from work and yet suddenly found that you have arrived home instead, that is because the neural pathway you built for following the route between work and home is so strong that taking one turn which was the same as the journey home was enough to trigger you when you stopped concentrating, the autopilot kicked in and you went there instead.

When a neural pathway is strong, it is very easy for the electricity in the brain to flow through it as soon as something familiar triggers us to start down that road.

DEVELOPING HABITS

MBMG Fact Sheet 02

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If you habitually binge on shopping or eating or drinking when you are triggered by stress, this autopilot is not going to be very helpful in achieving goals for health and financial security… On a more subtle level, If you have developed a strong neural pathway for a stress reaction when you receive bills, this will be unhelpful if you are working to build an abundance mindset.

STRENGTHENING NEURAL PATHWAYS

REPETITIONIf you want to develop a new habit, the most systematic and controllable way to do it is by deliberately repeating the habit as often as possible until the neural pathway becomes strong enough that it is the path of least resistance for electricity to flow through. Then it will become your instinctive response.

Neuroscientists say: ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’. Fire the same neural pathway enough times and the shape of your brain actually changes to wire that habit. A new habit can feel anything but automatic for a while, but that is because it is still just a narrow trail in a jungle of neurons. You need to repeat it very deliberately, regularly and consistently at first.

The resources you need in the energy of your brain to work a new habit are limited, so try not to work on too many things at once (and try to do them in the morning while your energy is higher).

Do you want to be the sort of person who sees the best in people or situations? Practice deliberately looking for it over and over again through the day… every day… soon enough, that will become your instinctive response.

Do you want to be someone who actually wants to exercise every morning when they wake up? Schedule it in and do it (even if you don’t feel like it) and concentrate on developing the habit rather than on pressure for any specific achievements and soon you will be doing it habitually and it will feel like it is just ‘who you are’.

VISUALISATIONThanks to our incredible human brains, we have the ability to imagine, in intricate detail, things that are not happening to us.

Amazingly, when we visualise something, the neural pathways can fire exactly as if we were actually doing it. Physiologically we experience it either way. The wonderful thing about this is that we can control our imagination.

By visualising, we can add repetitions of our new habits, giving us a chance to strengthen the wiring of the neural pathway even when we don’t have the opportunity to physically enact the habit.We should also consider the ways that we are habitually using the power of our imagination. Sometimes people think that we are only using our imagination if we are writing stories or painting etc…

However, every time we are visualising something that is not in front of us, we are using our imagination in a creative way and firing neural pathways.

If we habitually work ourselves up just by fixating on how someone may respond or worry about a disastrous potential outcome, or even play over in our head exactly how we messed something up, then we are strengthening the neural pathways of what we imagine - and we are strengthening the habit of a stress response to thinking about these things too.

We can work to develop more helpful mental habits by deliberately using the power of our imagination to visualise things that we would like to be our automatic response instead.

For example, if you habitually get stressed when opening bills, practice visualising yourself calm and peaceful, opening bills and feeling good about paying them… if you want to develop a particular physical skill, visualising it outside of your training time will help build the coordination, and so on.

Develop more helpful mental habits by using the power of imagination ...

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BREAKING HABITSBad habits can generally be classified as either impulses or routines. Impulses are actions driven by a momentary desire, like clicking on a Facebook link or eating something we know is bad for us - a case of instant pleasure over long term happiness.

By contrast, routines are not driven by desire but are actions we take simply because we’ve done them so many times before. Routines often cause downward spirals because we act them out even though we don’t derive any pleasure from them. On top of that, we’re often unaware when we’ve initiated them.

The easiest way to stop habits that are not helpful for achieving the life we want, is to replace them with a new habit that will use the same trigger. One reason that this is effective is that it can help us shift focus from something we are trying to avoid, onto something we want to move towards. This mode of thinking is more energising and less reactive and so will make it easier to access the rational part of the mind that we need when changing our autopilot response.

The only way to ‘delete’ a neural pathway is through dis-use. When a neural pathway goes unused for a while it gets marked with a protein that will get it digested and removed while we sleep. So if you are trying to rid yourself of an old habit, make sure that you get lots of good quality sleep to speed up the process!

The first step to accomplishing change is simple awareness and the second step is believing it to be possible. When you find yourself in the middle of a habit your intend to stop, it can be tempting to either give in or even if you stop, we can then play out the habit our heads on repeat, beating ourselves up for it. This burst of emotion (cortisol) and repetition (either real or through imagination) only strengthens that neural pathway.

A more helpful response when we slip into an old habit, is to simply stop it as soon as we realise. Then congratulate yourself on having the awareness to realise you were doing it and stopping. This will give you some good brain chemicals to energise you to now run the habit that is your new, chosen behaviour. Even if you can’t physically do the new habit right now, you can stop and replay what just happened in your mind with the new habit instead, to begin to strengthen that neural pathway.

EMOTIONAs well as by repetition, neural pathways are strengthened and paved (coated in Myelin) by bursts of neurochemicals.

When we repeat our habit with a deep sense of connection to why we are doing it and feel like we are moving towards our goals, we get a surge of happy brain chemicals that will pave the neural pathway.

They want to strengthen this behaviour faster if it feel like it is moving us towards a reward (once upon a time this was much more linked to survival than it is now, but we can use this knowledge as a brain ‘hack’ to form habits faster).

If you are lacking in motivation to move forward in your habit today, you can use this too. Connect with how doing this habit will get you the reward or goal you are headed for and you will get a burst of dopamine that is designed to energise you for action (originally to seek out survival needs like food, shelter etc - but it works just as well if you are trying to develop a habit of tracking your budget so that you can buy a house).

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CRAFT YOUR HABITSConnect with how you want your life to be, and how you want to experience it… how does that person behave, speak, think and respond? What are the things they do every day?

Set yourself up to win by selecting only a few habits to work on at a time. Give them focus. Be sure that you can feel how they will move you towards the life you want so that your brain chemistry can help to energise you. Schedule the habits if possible, because you won’t always feel like doing it, but it will need repetition every day and as often as possible…

Some habits that are routinely recommended by neuroscience researchers as well as immensely successful, happy and healthy people include:

• Meditation

• Gratitude practice

• Daily exercise and incidental movement throughout the day

• Time spent ‘unplugged’

• Eating nourishing, unprocessed, fresh food

• Having a morning and evening routine

• Staying hydrated

• Daily/weekly planning (goal setting, tracking, priority tasks etc)

• Breathwork & yoga

• Laughing

The habits that will be most potent for you are unique to where you are now and where you want to get to - what is universal is that we have the power to create epic change through crafting our daily habits.

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W E A R E W H AT W E R E P E AT E D LY D O. E X C E L L E N C E I S

T H E R E F O R E N OT A N A C T, B U T A H A B I T

ALBER T E INSTEIN