|
|
Greetings!
Happy New Year! The first few days of 2007
have passed. Most of us have gone back to
work after the flurry of holiday travel,
food, and fun. For many, the beginning of a
new calendar calls for looking ahead and
gazing back. You may be thinking about what
you accomplished last year or what you’d like
to see happen over the next twelve months. In
this issue, you’ll find an article on
creating new habits, a favorite topic every
January. (This article is a newsletter
exclusive available only to
subscribers and their friends!) If you’re
trying to
break an old
habit, there is an
article on my blog that you might find
useful.
To my new readers, welcome! You can expect to
receive the Zugunruhe (pronounced
zoog-un-rooey) News on the first
Friday of each month. If you’re a continuing
subscriber, thanks for your support in 2006.
I’m looking ahead to a new year full of
helping people to achieve their goals. What’s
on your list? Is there something new you’d
like to learn? An obstacle you’re ready to
conquer? Whatever it is that you’re looking
forward to, I’m ready to give you a hand. To
set up a complimentary coaching session to
get your plans in motion, click
here.
Peace be with you and Best Wishes for a
Wildly Successful 2007!
Tara
 |
|
|
How to Create a New Habit
Some habits are ridiculously easy to create.
Chocolate, cookies, golf all seem to fall
into this category (at least for some of us,
any how). But what about those habits that
provide us with good health, wellbeing, and
success? Habits like exercise, flossing your
teeth, and following through on contacts. It
seems that those habits are hard to cement
into place but once done, they pay huge ROI.
One of the problems with creating habits like
exercise is that the reward (e.g., admiration
by others, strong heart and lungs, weight
loss) is disconnected from the activity
itself (walking thirty minutes a day).
Likewise, the “punishment” (e.g., high blood
pressure, weight gain) is similarly
disconnected from the poor lifestyle choices
that created them. Brain research (also known
as neuroscience) may provide some insight
into how to use natural tendencies of your
mind to create lasting, helpful habits.
When you are pursuing a given goal, you
generally have a belief that the activity
you’re engaging in will pay off in success.
It turns out that your brain is naturally
designed to weigh the trade-off between
doggedly pursuing a source of known reward
and abandoning that pursuit in favor of other
options. Because there is an element of risk
(you can count every calorie and still not
lose weight), your brain is constantly making
predictions about your success and the
rewards you’ll get if you follow through.
Your brain’s ability to reliably predict
reward is the one of keys to creating desired
patterns of habit.
One piece of the puzzle is that in healthy
people (that is, those not prone to
addiction), the brain naturally chooses
behaviors that produce small but reliable
payouts and avoids behaviors that have bigger
payouts but carry greater risks. To establish
a habit you want, you need to look for small
rewards that you can provide yourself in the
moment, a bit like a treat you might give
your pet when he does a trick.
Interestingly, your brain has a special
region that links rewards to experiences: the
part of your brain that sits directly behind
your eyes. This region, called the
orbitofrontal cortex, takes all the sensory
information you receive, puts it together,
and weighs how rewarding your experiences
are. To create a reward that your brain
values, you have to convince this section of
your brain that you are having fun. One of
the simplest and non-fattening ways to do
this may be music. It turns out that your
orbitofrontal cortex loves music to the point
that the brain responds with what one paper
describes as “intense pleasure.”
Here is a simple plan to help you create
healthy habits:
1. Find some music you enjoy.
Basically any
music that makes you smile and feel good will
work well.
2. Prime your brain to value the intended
habit. This means you should be doing the
activity when you satiated because your brain
assesses rewards based, in part, on hunger.
If you’re starving, and you give your brain
exercise instead of candy, the brain will not
value exercise very highly.
3. Pair the music you like with the activity
you want to reinforce. What this does is
stimulate the orbitofrontal cortext to say
“hey, I like that!” at the same time you are
doing the behavior. This links the reward
with the experience.
4. Repeat steps one through three. Common
wisdom suggests that it takes 21 days to
create a habit.
Technically speaking, habits are somewhat
unconscious behaviors which is to say they
are things we do without thinking about them
(like turning on a light switch). Complex
sets of behaviors (like physical fitness) may
never be true habits because you will
probably always need to think about them. But
if you are consistent in linking reward with
experience, you increase the likelihood of
getting the results you want and enjoying
both the long and short term rewards on the
time and effort you invest.
|
|
As a part of our service, Zugunruhe Coaching LLC may
create links allowing you to access third-party
sites. We are not responsible for the content that
appears on those sites and do not endorse those
sites. Please consult those sites' individual
privacy policies to determine how they treat user
information.
|
|
