How To Change Old Habits by David Krueger

Old habits and accustomed behaviors are like being on a daily commute. Though repetitive, it is familiar. To change is like coming to the end of that usual path to suddenly enter uncharted territory with no reassuring landmarks. This is what actually happens in the brain as a grooved neuronal pathway and network — the default mode — is changed to generate new experience. The result? Feeling lost. The temptation? A return to the familiar, the old story, in preference to the discomfort of uncertainty. No one is comfortable in the beginning of a move into new territory.

Affecting Change

But we are not hard-wired for life. With new experiences, new neuronal pathways are created. This reprogramming can shift to more adaptive and more successful modes. New research shows that throughout our lives we have the ability to rearrange brain-cell connections (a process called neuroplasticity) as well as produce new brain cells (neurogenesis). In other words, by creating new experiences consistently, we can generate newneuronal pathways and neural networks. And, as some remarkable new research shows, consistently repeating new experiences even alters gene expression. When we change our minds and our behaviors, we change our brains. Methods and tools exist that can effectively catalyze and accelerate the process of change; I have discussed many of these in my previous columns. There is an infinite sea of new possibilities to be created for arriving at new goals. But they come with a caveat. If you want to write new script for new experiences, you have to take action to diminish preprogrammed responses. And there are no shortcuts, since long-term change requires consistent practice to groove new neural patterns — until it becomes the default mode, as automatic as the old story.

Change from a familiar pattern of repetition may manifest in significant anxiety. Change creates discontinuity and disrupts cohesiveness, a hiccup in the experience of self. In the beginning, change not only disrupts the usual order of things, but constitutes an uncertain and precarious venture into new territory of mind and brain — the steps to get there not yet etched like the old story. What are the guidelines for proceeding with a new story?

• Tolerate risk in departing the familiar
• Hold a belief of successfully filling a new space
• Read present anxiety or uncertainty as an understandable signpost of moving ahead without familiar landmarks
• Contrast the old model’s anxiety as danger-head-for-cover with present anxiety of the new

With sustained change, you can retranscript—reprogram—your mind and brain.

Copyright David Krueger MD and MentorPath Publications
Excerpted from OUTSMART YOUR BRAIN: AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL
How Neuroscience and Quantum Physics Can Help You Change Your Life
www.NewBrainStory.com