Why is it that we know what to do and yet sometimes, we do the reverse? Why is our brain keeping us stuck in our bad habits? I was visiting my parents in Quebec a few weeks ago and the corn field was absolutely majestic! I remember the times as a kid where I was running in it with my 15 cousins. Find out in the video, why I needed to be the fastest one in order to maximize the fun! I just could not help but filming this short video for you. Enjoy.
Neural pathways in your brain are responsible for your self-sabotage. Imagine you live in a house surrounded by a thick cornfield. When you leave your house, there is no other path to follow except walking on the corn. You start stepping on it, and as you walk through the field, the corn bounces back up behind you. The second time you step on the same path, the corn bounces back up, but it breaks a little and doesn’t bounce back up completely. The third time, the corn is weakened even more, and so on, until, one day, you have a perfectly flat path in front of your house that leads to your preferred destination.
At this moment, when thinking about a bad habit, the only path you currently know, leads to self-doubt and self-sabotage. The pathway you have created carries information travelling along the neurons (nerve cells) of the brain. This affects your memory. The more you review your pathways in your mind, good or bad, the more deeply they are etched in your neural pathways. As you continue to work to « walk on new corn » to change your thoughts, you will create new neural pathways inside your brain. That is how habits are built. You will begin stepping onto a new path. This may feel foreign and challenging in the beginning, as you have to “break the corn” to create the path, but once it’s created and you have been there several times, the path will be clear and wide. The old path will still be there, however and there will be times you may be tempted to take it. You will use the strategies you are learning every week in my blog to stay on the new path. With time, the old path will grow new corn and will not exist as a path anymore, and you will soon forget about the old route.
Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.