How to Rewire Your Brain
My book for breaking bad, unhelpful, old synapsis links that don’t serve my purpose now.
Neuroplasticity is creating new brain synapse connections. However, often our behavior that we want to change is so deeply rooted in subconscious beliefs that are almost impossible to identify.
Sometimes we just react to a situation without knowing why. Why did that trigger such a reaction in me? I don’t know. It was some unconscious limiting belief that no longer service us, and we want to stop it. We know it’s not part of our desire to be a better person.
But short of white knuckling it, how do we stop a behavior when we don’t even know where it starts, what triggers it?
Enter … the little Breaking Bad Book – breaking bad synapses from firing one dendrite at a time.
When the behavior happens, immediately write it down in your book, call yourself out, say, “This is bad, I don’t want to continue this behavior, this reaction any more”
If you do it immediately when the behavior happens, your brain starts to make the connection to where the synapsis fired and your desire, your conscious wish to not have that happen.
Your brain locates the offending synapsis and makes the connection that you want to do something about it, you want it to change.
My Breaking Bad Book
My Breaking Bad Book is a small Moleskine; easy to carry and stands up well to heavy travel abuse.
Your subconscious needs to identify the offending synapsis
Eventually, when the trigger comes along, and your body, your brain is subconsciously aware of it before you are consciously aware of it. Your brain says, “STOP”, we don’t want to go there, close that synapsis and reroute to something else.
Even Seneca, the stoic said to write everything you did that caused a pique in your conscious, something you knew you shouldn’t have done and felt guilty about ten seconds after doing. Even Seneca two thousand years ago understood the power of neuroplasticity in rewiring your brain.
“Every night before going to sleep, we must ask ourselves: what weakness did I overcome today? What virtue did I acquire?”
Moving away from punishment and towards reward
Every Time you do something that makes you cringe, that is your body punishing you. When you change that bad habit, eliminate that annoying synapsis pathway, guess what? Your body rewards you with good feelings! And this will help to cement those outstanding new synapsis in place coz who doesn’t like the self-feeling reward of doing good?
Choose your response rather than having a knee jerk reaction.
My Breaking Bad Book is a small Moleskine; easy to carry and stands up well to heavy travel abuse.
Now, I’m going to tell you something personal about me, why I carry this book, my specific non-serving synapses. Lines, queues however you call them, Indians aren’t keen on them.
If I am waiting in line to use the ATM or at the post office, people will just charge right to the front, pushing and reaching to get ahead, to be the first in line.
This really triggers my dark side.
And it’s not so much that I want to just allow this behavior to happen with a smile of acquiescence, but my reaction is usually one that I’d rather not admit to. It’s very unpleasant and causes me a lot of guilt just a few minutes later. (And now is not the time nor place to get into why they do that and why it triggers me. For now, I just want to rewire my reactionary response.) So I want to correct this, rewire my brain for a more thoughtful response.
I need to build in a pause.
So I carry my little Breaking Bad book with me where ever I go and write down immediately whenever the offending behavior rears its fugly head. And I’m here to tell you, since I started to do this, just the idea that I have the little book has made my synapses find a better route.
Watch this blog post on YouTube as a video ’cause we all have different learning styles!
How we interpret life’s events, determines how we behave.
We control 100% how we respond. Ask, stopping yourself,
“am I making an assumption here?”
Look at your emotional state, if you are experiencing an emotional state that you dislike, ask yourself the question,
“what choice have I made here? What decision have I made, What assumptions have I made? Have I assumed the best of this person, the circumstances and the situation? Or am I catastrophizing and assuming the worst? If I am just catastrophizing and reacting emotionally, is this where I want to be?”
“The ultimate goal of yoga is to always observe things accurately, and therefore never act in a way that will make us regret our actions later.”
Consciously choose
We’re always immersed in our own experience. The question is, how aware are we of the choices we are making? And are they helping us towards our goal?
By consciously noting when we are reacting in a way less than we want to be, we are taking the first steps to change that behavior by changing the neural pathways in our brains.
My Personal Recommendations
Here are some resources I’ve found useful in my journey towards personal growth.
The Huberman Podcast
The Huberman Lab Podcast on YouTube has an incredible wealth of information. As one listener wrote, “It’s still unreal, the quality of education I can access from a small town in India.” I think we all kind of feel that way listening to Dr. Andrew. If high-quality research and practical information is your thing, check out Huberman Labs, you won’t be disappointed.
Achology
I’ve studied everything from CBT to NLP to Hypnotherapy with Achology. This is a very supportive group that gives you opportunities to practice many helping modalities. Highly recommended!
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