Larson Institute of Self-Mastery » Habits

5 Steps to Change Habits by Changing Your Brain – Create New Neural Pathways

Guest — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:02:24 +0000

Guest author Marilyn B. Gordon

Because of the brain’s ever-changing potentials called neuroplasticity, anything is possible. People who’ve had strokes can retrain their brains to function again by building new pathways. Smokers and overeaters and many others can learn new behaviors and attitudes and can transform their lives.

I used to drive with one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator, and I wanted to train myself to drive with one foot only. It took some time, as I had a strong neural pathway for two-footed driving. But because I had the will to do it, I built a new pathway, and I rewired or reprogrammed my brain. You can remove a behavior or thought or addictions directly from the brain.

Some Powerful Ways to Retrain the Brain

1. Use aversion therapy.

This isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’s an optional path. I like to call it “the maggots on the chocolate cake technique.” I used to love candies and sweets, and when I stopped eating them, I still had to pass by them when I walked by the candy store in town. I used aversion to train my brain to walk on by: “That’s junk,” I said to myself. “It’s made in factories, sickeningly sweet, makes me feel bad. The company makes it so sweet just to addict buyers. I don’t want any of that.” So I talk myself out of it. I’ve use it with many clients (only those who say they want it) on smoking, junk food, cocaine and many other behaviors.

2. Create a specific plan and choose what to do instead.

When you get specific, it’s easier to build new neural pathways. You “make it official.” Decide if you want to exercise instead of overeating or if you want to eat fruit instead of candy. Just keep focused on the new choice. You may want to create affirmations and anchors to reinforce your choices. This can be “I’m free or “I’m in control.” Reinforce this with energy therapies like EFT or other techniques.

3. Transform the obstacles.

Look at what’s in the way. Look at secondary gain – what you’ve been getting out of the old habits or pathways. Look at the stress in your life and how you can handle it differently. Get your mind in the place of possibility. Handle the emotions and thoughts and get on a new superhighway in your mind.

4. Connect with your Higher Source for inspiration and support.

Listen to our guidance. Know you have the Force within you, and therefore you have great power. Meditation creates new pathways and brain changes. Actual studies have been done on the brains of monks to show meditation’s effect on neural circuits of the brain.

5. Transform and make the shift.

Know that transformation is always possible and that you can create new brain pathways whenever you’re ready to make the shift. When you keep your mind in the “I can do it!” space, you get a clear sense that you’re done with the old and on a new beam now.

Want to learn more about life transformation, spiritual growth, and healing? You can download our 100 page free ebook, Extraordinary Healing at http://www.lifetransformationsecrets.com. You can also subscribe to our wonderful free monthly newsletter, “The Transformation News.” Marilyn Gordon is a life transformer, board certified hypnotherapist, teacher, speaker, healer, school director, and author with over thirty years of experience. Her latest book is The Wise Mind: The Brilliant Key to Life Transformation and Healing.

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The Power of Subconscious Mind: Let It Take Over You

Guest — Mon, 16 May 2011 08:20:47 +0000

Author – Asim Bawany

“We must realize that the subconscious mind is the law of action and always expresses what the conscious mind has impressed on it. What we regularly entertain in our mind creates a conception of self. What we conceive ourselves to be, we become.” – Grace Speare

“The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.” – Carl Jung

“Every person is the creation of himself, the image of his own thinking and believing. As individuals think and believe, so they are.” – Claude M. Bristol

The human mind is more profound than what we have imagined. The power of subconscious mind can bring us to the equilibrium that we have envisioned. Do you ever wonder how unfair life is to some and how impossibly good life is to others? We see many people work as hard as they can but they seem to be stuck in one step of the ladder and never able to reach the top. Meanwhile, there are others who did not even sweat a single drop but reached their aspirations. These examples are not that much of a shock. But you have also met people who are not that much of a good friend to others, yet have been given many opportunities in life. There are also those people who are the kindest in the world yet receive fewer chances in life.

Success in life comes from more than just mere positive thinking. Even positive thinking itself is not enough evidence of pure mindset positivity. The power of the subconscious is way beyond positive thinking… It is believing. The reason why it can bring you to success is that the subconscious part of the brain can enable you to aspire, believe that aspiration, and eventually allowing your “believing” makes your aspiration come true. To give you better understanding regarding this matter, let me simplify to you the steps on how to put the power of your subconscious to action:

1. Believe

This is the foundation of what the actions that the power of your subconscious mind can do. Let there be coordination between you and your subconscious mind. Allow yourself to cooperate with your subconscious mind. When your subconscious mind tells you to succeed, try hard to go with it. This way, you desire, and you believe your desire.

2. Mold your mind

Mold your mind to believe what you want to happen. Make it a habit. This way, you are practicing your subconscious mind to continue working. Also, this way your subconscious would be in control.

3. Try to increase the power of your mind

Increasing the power of your mind will allow you to be controlled by your subconscious mind. How can you do that? There are many ways to increase the power of your subconscious mind, or your mind alone. Problem solving is one example. Solve problems while you are not under any pressure. Just allow yourself to think. One example of problem solving is answering your own questions. Think beyond the usual rationality of man. Think deep and imaginative thoughts. Expand your level of reasoning. Both thinking and feeling are all fruits of the mind. We are how we think we are. The subconscious mind tells us what to do, but the conscious mind might contradict it.

Bring your subconscious mind to life and you’ll be able to keep track of your life. It is hard to do it sometimes. But if you allow the power of your subconscious mind to train your conscious mind, there would be nothing impossible to achieve.

The power of subconscious can lead you to success if you allow it to take over you.

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Breaking Bad Habits – 5 Simple Steps for Changing a Habit

Guest — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:39:01 +0000

Guest author T. McDonald

“Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with” and “Bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with”, according to Brian Tracey, a well-known motivational teacher. You may recognize that to successfully manage habit changes, breaking bad habits may be required in order to develop new ones.

Breaking bad habits takes at least 21 days. Of course, in difficult cases, it can take as long as a year. Here’s an example of the process of how to change an unhealthy habit to a healthy habit. Suppose you’ve decided that coffee is not good for you and right now, you drink coffee with sugar daily. The new habit you would like to institute is to drink herbal tea without sugar.

At first, it may be challenging to break the bad habit of drinking coffee. You will have to use self-discipline for the first few weeks but gradually it will get easier. Once you are able to change the old habit to a new healthier one, it will serve you very well. Habits are remarkable because they don’t require thinking. You just “do it” for years until you find yourself changing the habit again.

Here are 5 easy steps for changing habits:

1. Awareness: You must become aware of your habits. What is this habit exactly? How is this bad habit or group of bad habits affecting you? How is this habit affecting others? For example, smoking often has negative effects on others as well as on you.

2. Wanting to Change: As someone with a health problem, you must decide that breaking bad habits through a conscious effort is a worthy goal. You must convince yourself that the change in the habit is worth the effort involved.

3. Commitment: You must be determined to do whatever it takes for breaking bad habits so that you can better control your life. You make a decision that “no matter what” you will change the habit. You do the work required to stop. Here are some examples of habits you might want to change: Smoking, eating too much, eating processed foods, not exercising, drinking coffee or other beverages with caffeine in them, eating too much sugar or fat, drinking alcohol, procrastinating, etc.

4. Consistent Action: It is important to focus on changing just one habit at a time. Then, take consistent daily actions for breaking the bad habit that has been causing problems and take the actions to develop a new one. We suggest doing this process one step at a time rather than trying to do it all at once. Sometimes changing a habit can be done “cold turkey” like smoking and sometimes it works better to make a gradual change.

Be sure to give yourself positive rewards often for taking small actions toward changing a bad habit. Continual day-by-day actions are what are critical. This is NOT about an occasional action or step. It is about being consistent every day.

5. Perseverance: There will be times when you question whether it is all worth it. You’ll say to yourself that breaking these bad habits is too difficult; that you are too “weak” to change. Your old self, often so comfortable living with the bad habits, is trying to hold on. Breaking your old patterns may require meditation and prayer.

Visualize regularly the rewards for following through and the costs of not following through on breaking the bad habits and especially the value to your future of building new better habits.

Get support from others, especially other people who want to make changes in their lives and read about people who have been successful in breaking bad habits. Affirm that, no matter what, you will not backslide into your old bad habit patterns.

Now, you are armed with a 5-step process for breaking any bad habit or other condition that requires changing. If you have an addiction to something such as alcohol, these steps alone may not be enough. You may require additional professional help or a support group, but for most cases this 5-step process will do the trick!

T. McDonald is a lifelong student of inner growth and a writer. She edits Diabetes Guide where you will find information on the glycemic index diet, weight loss, diets, managing diabetes, alternative sweeteners, breast cancer bracelets, how to prevent breast cancer and much more.

You have permission to reprint this article as long as all links are hyperlinked and the resource box and copyright are retained intact.

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Habits – The Software of Your Mind

Gary N. Larson — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:04:05 +0000

Let’s talk about habits. What are habits? I’ve been in the computer industry for nearly twenty years and I’ve written over a million lines of software code in that period of time. I understand how a computer works. I understand software. I know how a program works. A program is simply a set of instructions that tell the computer what to do. The computer can make decisions and perform operations based on those instructions. You can load different programs in a computer and it will follow different instructions depending of what program you have loaded.

Like a Player Piano

I kind of relate it to a player piano when I try to explain software to people. When I was a kid our family had a player piano. We had a lot of fun with it. It wasn’t electric so we had to sit at the piano and pump the pedals with your feet to get the air going which made the piano go. In the piano you would put a roll, a piano roll. It sort of looked like a paper towel roll almost. Actually more like a scroll. In this paper were punched little holes. Depending on where these holes were punched in the paper, that would determine what notes would play and how long the holes were would determine how long the note would play.

So you could take a piano roll and put it in the piano and it would play a song. You could take out that roll and put another one in and it would play a different song because it was a different set of instructions. That is similar to how a computer program works.

Like a Computer Program

You can install a computer program in a computer and it’s a set of instructions and it tells the computer what to do in given situations depending on the inputs that are given. Now a computer is a little more sophisticated than a player piano. A computer can detect mouse movements, it can detect keyboard input and it can detect a number of other things and make decisions based upon those inputs. A computer program can read data from files that are stored on the hard drive and make decisions dependant on the data.

Our brains are much more sophisticated than any player piano or any computer that exists on this earth. But there are some similarities between how computers work and how our minds work.

With a computer you don’t have to tell it every little thing it does. You give it some instructions or commands and it does a whole lot of things under the covers that you never see. It executes millions of instructions that you will never even know about. Our brains are the same way.

We don’t have to tell our brain to move every little muscle in order to walk or in order to pick up a pencil. We just think, “pick up a pencil” and our conscious mind sends a command to our subconscious mind and our subconscious mind takes care of all the nitty-gritty details. I don’t know how many muscles control a hand, but all we have to do is give the command to pick up the pencil and our subconscious mind takes care of all of the little details of picking up a pencil. It’s because we have learned it in the past. There’s a pattern or program in there that says execute “Pick Up Pencil” program and it runs that program and all the little details are taken care of and our hand moves and based on input, our sight, our touch, our hand is able to move towards the pencil, grasp it and pick it up without us even thinking about it – its’ running a program!

We Wrote the Software!

Inside of our minds are millions of programs, millions of programs that we have written ourselves. The software of our brains – We Wrote! These programs are called habits. This is called learning. When you learn something what you have really done is you have created a program in your mind.

When you learn to golf, to hit the ball, to hit that long drive and you practiced over and over again – what you were doing is you were creating a program in your mind so that the next time that you stand up to the tee and you grab that same golf club and you put the same ball down and you get into the exact same situation, then your mind suddenly says, “Ah! Run the program to drive the golf ball.” You have pre-programmed that so you don’t have to think about, “Where do I put my foot? Where do I put my hands? How do I swing?” It’s already there and you just run this program and whammo, you hit the ball and there it goes. You don’t have to re-learn it all again because you have created a program in your mind.

There are millions of programs in your mind that you have created. Some of those are good programs and some are bad. But they all are programs and that is what we call ‘habits.’

Habits

Now, a habit is sort of like a flywheel. Once you get the flywheel going it doesn’t take much effort to keep it going. Once you create a habit it doesn’t take much effort to repeat that habit again and again. To stop it is very difficult. To change it is very difficult. We have to erase the pattern, erase the program and create a new one. This is how habits work in our minds and the idea is that we can be the programmer of the software of our minds.

Reprogramming Our Minds

Now a lot of the software or programs in our minds were created without us even thinking about it, without even trying, especially the bad habits, the bad programs. But guess what – we are the programmers and we can reprogram our minds, we can recreate those programs the way we want them to be. We don’t have to let it automatically happen. We don’t have to put up with these programs or habits that are in our minds. We can change the software of our brains.

That is an astounding thing to think about. That is a gift that we have that animals and other creatures don’t have. They follow instinct. They come to this earth with most of their programs pre-written. For example, take a newborn horse or deer. Within a matter of hours after birth they are standing up and walking around. How long does it take for a human to walk? A year? Most everything we do we have to learn and program ourselves or learn from our parents. Most of the animal kingdom comes to this earth with nearly everything pre-programmed into their minds, into their brains. Humans do not.

Triggers

These programs that we have inside of our minds – how do they run? What makes them run? On a computer you can enter a command. DELETE FILE, COPY FILE, EDIT FILE, etc. Or run a program by typing the name of the program on a command line or by clicking on its icon.
Inside each of us are commands or triggers, however you want to call them – conditions that then set off the programs – a set of conditions that then tells your mind to do a certain thing, to run a certain program.

Friend of Foe?

When we think about these habits that we have, sometimes we tend to think about habits as negative, bad things. We think of them in a way that makes habits seem undesirable. But habits, in and of themselves are not bad. They are neither friend nor foe, they are neither negative nor positive. It’s our use of habits and our control and development of habits that determine whether they will be beneficial or detrimental to us.

We can use habits. They are powerful. We can let habits control us – we can be bound by our habits or we can use habits to benefit us. It’s sort of like fire. Fire can be used for good or evil. Fire of itself is not good or evil. A fire can burn down a home and yet a fire in a fireplace can keep you warm and keep you alive. Just as fire is not evil or good, neither are our habits. Habits are not evil or good. It’s how we use them that make them bad or good.

Daily Routines

A very simple example of a program that you have inside of you is this, at least if you are like me and put on pants and a belt every day. I want you to think about how you put on your belt. Usually you just grab your belt and you put it on. You don’t have to think about it. Usually you put it on one certain way-either you start it going through your left belt loop or you start it going through your right belt loop. Whichever way you do it, try doing it the opposite way. Take your belt off and put it on in the opposite direction around your pants and see how that feels.

This new way is something you don’t have programmed into your mind and so you have to think about every little thing. You have to think about which loop to put it through. You have to think about how to do it. When you put your belt on the other way you don’t have to think about anything, you just run the program – it’s already programmed inside. You may not even realize you have put your belt on because it is so automatic. But when you do it the opposite direction it’s difficult, it’s weird, it doesn’t feel natural. But if you did that for thirty days, every day put on your belt the opposite direction, eventually you will have programmed your mind and then you won’t have to think about it any more. You have created a habit in your mind. You have programmed your mind.

What Does it All Mean?

So what does this mean to us? How can we use this information? It is my belief that there are many aspects about our personality that we just accept as just being the way we are, when, in fact, it is simply a program that was created unintentionally long ago. I believe we can change any aspect about ourselves. I believe we can re-program the software of our minds. At a later time I will explore this concept and talk about the methods and processes for doing it. Until then, pay attention to programs you run every day in your mind and know that they can be changed.

Decide to Decide

Gary N. Larson — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:33:00 +0000

Fork in the road

What if there was a key behavior that if you could master, would save you untold pain, worry, effort and time? What if this behavior could make your efforts to achieve total self-mastery ten times easier? Today I’m going to teach you a simple concept that seems to elude most people, yet is so simple.

One thing you share in common with nearly every one else is that your day is full of decisions. Dozens of times a day you are faced with a fork in the road and must decide which way to go. Humans are naturally lazy creatures so when you are faced with two choices you tend to gravitate toward the easiest path. Why choose the long, hard road when you can take the short, easy one? Or why do something when you just don’t feel like it? As you stand there at the fork in the road and evaluate the situation, the pull to the easy road becomes powerfully strong. More often than not, if you are like the average person, you are sucked into the easy road.

The problem here is that the easy road is not always the best road to follow in the long run. In our minds we know which road is the best road but somehow we end up going the wrong way. What I am explaining here is the answer to a long held question. It is:

“Why do we do what we do when we know what we know?”

In other words, why do people do things they know aren’t good for them? The answer is because we are making our decisions at the wrong time. We are making our decisions when we are standing at the fork in the road.

Let me give you an example. If every morning you make the decision of whether to get up or not at the time your alarm clock goes off, you are making that decision at the fork in the road. In your mind you are deliberating, “Should I get up? Should I sleep for ten more minutes? I’m so tired! Just a few more minutes of sleep.” And back to bed you go.

Do you see the problem here? The time to make the decision of when to get up in the morning is not at 6:00 in the morning!

“Right decisions are easiest to make when we make them well in advance, having ultimate objectives in mind; this saves a lot of anguish at the fork, when we’re tired and sorely tempted.” – Spencer W. Kimball

There are dozens of decisions we face every day that should already have been decided long ago. We shouldn’t have to agonize and re-decide the same decisions a hundred times! Many of these decisions only need to be made once. This statement by William James describes it so well:

“There is no more miserable person than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of deliberation. Half the time of such a man goes to deciding or regretting matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.” — William James

The whole point we are trying to make is to determine early on what things you will and will not do and be done with it. Look at your long-term objectives and make the decisions now that will lead you in that direction. You only need to make those decisions once.

For example, my wife made the decision long ago that she will go out running every morning, no matter what. There is no deciding each morning as to whether she is going running or not. That decision has already been made. There is no painful deliberation and analyzing that takes place. It is as automatic for her as the rising of the sun each day.

Now I want you to think about the decisions you make on a daily basis. Aren’t there a number of them you could make once and for all and be done with them? Aren’t there decisions about what you will eat or not eat, decisions about exercising, decisions about daily habits, decisions about all kinds of things that you can make once and forever be done with them?

I challenge you to consciously examine your life and make this one key behavior change. Examine each fork in the road you come across on a daily basis and see which ones you can decide once and for all. You will be so much further along the road to self-mastery.

“We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.” — Aneurin Bevan

What are your thoughts about making decisions once and for all? What are the ones you have the biggest challenges with? Have you found ways to make this process easier? Please share with us in the comments below.

Thank you.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life