Refire and Rewire Your Brain : Get Unstuck With Empowering Habits - John Assaraf

Well, from our brain's perspective, habits are ways of freeing up all of our cognitive capacity by automating certain behaviours or actions or thoughts or feelings. And so they've got a few things in common. They're generally learned over time by repetition. It's a behavior we have or a thought pattern that we have and that we repeat over and over and over again, generally because we get some kind of reward. But in time, they get embedded and hardwired in subcortically in our brain, in a brain region called the striatum. Now, what's important is, once they get hardwired in, whether there's a reward there or not, or a motivation or a desire, it doesn't really matter. What happens is a particular cue or trigger will cause that behaviour or cause that thought pattern or cause that emotion to just occur without any kind of conscious control over it.

And so is that what causes people to. To be stuck in achieving, whether it's their financial results over and over again, or business success over and over again, or any result in their life, is it that repetitions of these habits that causes the same results?

Yeah, and that's typically, you're in a particular environment, you have a particular thought, you encounter a particular person, and then you just have this chunk of behavior or thought pattern that just happens automatically. You don't have a lot of control over that. You're performing that unconsciously. So, yeah, that happens time and time again and it's often completely unrelated to any particular goal you might have in mind. And they're very, very hard to break. So when it's a true habit, from a neurobiological sense, you have your trigger, you have your habit, form performs itself, and it's very, very hard to kind of unwire that habit to break that bad habit.

And I like to consider habits as neither good or bad, but empowering or disempowering, Reinforcing what you want or in some cases, reinforcing what you don't want.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And so from a neuroscience perspective, we have habits that, you know, we think the same way they cause these emotions, which causes some behaviors if we want to change or to create more empowering habits. From a neuroscience perspective, what are a few of the things that we can do to maybe, I don't know, stopping is the right word. But I know that one of the things we want to talk about is talk about how do we refire to rewire the brain for more empowering habits so we can achieve our financial life, relationship, health goals?

Yeah, well, I Think the most important thing to do is spend a bit of time to be very mindful about determining what the trigger or the cue is for the particular habit that you don't want to perform anymore. Is it a particular person, is it a particular place, a particular activity? You know, do you arrive in a certain house, you interact with a certain person, what is that cure and what is that trigger that causes that habit? And once you've decided what that is and found out what that particular cue is, then you can learn a new positive behavior, wire a new positive habit in its place. And that's where the refire to rewire model comes in. And it's a six step process that I've developed from my work that I did in neuroplasticity research and pulling from kind of sports psychology and positive psychology, the six step process that, that gives you tools and resources and a roadmap in a way to wire in that good new habit in place of the old.

And in discussions that you and I have had in the past, you never really remove a bad habit or a good habit. You actually can add onto it and create a new pattern that then drives a new trigger or new emotion, new behavior. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's correct. So you can have the same cue. The old habit will stay there. What you want is a new positive behavior. And it's. And I think when you understand that, it's very hard to unwire an undesirable habit if it does reemerge for some reason. I often use that as a bit of a canary in the gold mine kind of time to sort of sit back and assess, not berate myself, that I lack willpower or motivation or desire to change, but that, you know, that's just kind of my brain doing what my brain does. And perhaps it's time to just kind of go through that refire to rewire process again, practice a new positive, desirable behavior.

So what I just heard, and I'll act as interpreter as well, is let's say you're out of shape and you get into shape and then you start to get out of shape a little bit. All you've got to do is start doing the behaviors that got you into shape to begin with.

Yeah. And just be a little bit compassionate with yourself that, you know, you fall into that bad habit again, that's fine, that's normal. That's what we all do. Just take time to just be a bit mindful, reassess your cue and trigger and then refire that new habit once again.

Love it. When we talk about being mindful, one of the things I love to share with people is one of the inner sizes that we teach is called aya A I A and the A stands for just be aware of your thoughts, emotions, feelings, behaviors and sensations without blame, shame, guilt or justification awareness. Then you use the I for what's my intention?

Yeah, right.

And then you take one small action to move you towards what you want. One small positive action. Does that fit into the neuroscience model for developing a positive habit?

Oh, absolutely. And the first letter of refire is R and that stands for reason. And I'm not a fan of this idea of goals. I find them quite long and linear and they're in the distance and often we, I think they can be some kind of demotivating or fill you with a little bit of fear. It's a goalpost that's too far away. So I like to think of this new change you're making as a project you're working on. It's almost like being in the middle of a great big of piece. You know when you're doing a puzzle, it's a thousand piece puzzle and each time you just put one little piece in that puzzle, you feel really good. Like you feel good, you put one piece in, sort around for 10 more minutes, you put the next piece in. And the goal isn't. Well, I suppose the goal is to create that whole puzzle piece.

So you start off with the vision.

Of what you want, the vision that you want, but I mean the satisfaction and those little kind of motivation, kind of those little bursts of dopamine, those little feel good moments come each time you put that little piece in. It's just these little steps along the journey to kind of keep you going towards this goal which can sometimes seem like this post that's so far away that you're never going to reach the end.

Let's go through step by step for the refire to rewire process for more positive empowering habits.

Yeah.

So number one, you just said sure.

Number ones are is your reason, you know, why? What are you hoping to do? What change do you want to make? What's your, I like to think what's the pro project that you're working on? So E is for engage and there's two kind of parts to engage. One is really just kind of engaging in this new project that you're working on, but engage a team around you, people to help you. Maybe you need a coach or a mentor or a tribe or a team that are kind of working alongside with you, because they'll help give you feedback, they'll help motivate you. And if you're kind of taking on the role of the coach or the mentor and the guide, it's really important to understand what. What motivates people to help them tap into the intrinsic motivation, not always provide external goals. So engage really is about engaging and working with other people on those tasks.

Being in the environment where you're getting.

These feedback loops, it's so important to close off those feedback loops. So F is about feelings. And we know that it is far easier to make a change if you're feeling positive and you have great emotional regulation. Of course, we do know that habits can get wired in quite rapidly if someone's in a particularly negative or traumatic or emotional situation as well, which just kind of shows that power of emotion. But if we are involved in putting all those little pieces in the puzzle, working away on that project, we can get in that state of flow. So kind of halfway between a challenge we're working on, that's not too hard, that's not too easy. Somewhere between being half asleep and being hyper stimulated, you're kind of in that. That sweet spot emotionally, that flow zone, that flow zone. And sometimes it takes a bit of time until you find that, right, that sort of sweet emotional spot and you learn to recognise that emotional state and you can train yourself to get into that emotional state and you'll have a lot of tools in your program that help people tap into that. So that's the F. The next is I. One of my favourites, this is for imagine. This is about visualisation, mental rehearsal, imagination. And our brain doesn't really differentiate between an imagined experience and a real experience. Of course, there are some slight differences there. But sports people, professional athletes, use mental rehearsal to great effect. You know, practicing how to kick a goal or make a shot. In basketball, musicians can rehearse a performance in their mind's eye. And one of the really cool, I think, tools that you can use visualisation for is to rehearse how you're going to respond emotionally to a situation. Perhaps you've got a job interview coming up, you're going to give a talk, you're public speaking, you know you're going to sit an exam and you typically get overwhelmed with nerves. You can rehearse how you're going to respond in a positively emotional way to that event as well. So you can train yourself emotionally, not just in terms of motor skills and performance.

It's interesting, as Dr. MacKay was saying something about firefighters, you know, who learn how to walk into or run into a burning building, they have to learn how to respond instead of react. And that's a part of mental rehearsal, but also practicing. Okay. In controlled environments before the actual event occurs. And is that to lower the firing threshold, maybe the amygdala and the fear center? What happens in the brain when we are mentally rehearsing behavior we want to take, or if we're mentally rehearsing something we want to stop doing?

Yeah, I think it's far better to rehearse a way that you do want to respond rather than not respond. Because if you're practicing how I'm not going to respond, then you're almost practicing the response itself. So you don't want to practice the negative response. Maybe you want to have a strategy that you're going to forgetting yourself. If you're going to be in that situation, how are you going to choose to respond? Respond instead. But basically it's a way of practicing when you can't practice. So when you encounter the situation for real, your mind and your body is in a state of I've been here, I've done this many times before. This is no big deal. And you kind of know what to do. You've rehearsed it without being in the state.

You're seeing me so excited because I've got so many questions that you're firing off by the token of what you've just said. That would also mean if people are consistently ruminating on why things won't work or why they're not good enough, or what if I fail or what if I succeed? Then by what you just said for practicing what they do want, if they're practicing in their brains all the reasons why they can't or why they shouldn't or what might happen, they're reinforcing those patterns.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what negative thought patterns are. And it's pretty easy to get in a kind of a downward spiral of rumination and kind of roll the same idea. It's kind of like rocking on a chair. You never get anywhere, but it gives you something to do. So you know that thought's going round in your head over and over and over again and you' putting any kind of positive action in place to move you out and on and. Yeah, and you do. You're basically just rehearsing that situation and ingraining that thought pattern as a habit. And once it's in there, it's going to be very, very hard to break.

So we have R for reason E for engage, engage.

F. F for feel.

For feel, emotion.

I for imagine.

I for imagine.

And we've got another R, if you remember how to spell here. R. R is for repeat. This is around these ideas of what fires together, wires together.

Neurons.

Yeah, neurons and synapses firing together and wiring together. And you want to embed this new thought or behaviour or habit in a neural circuit. So you want to practice it regularly, over and over again. And this sometimes isn't fun. This is where grit and determination come in and where you can get a bit bored. And people don't like to feel frustrated and uncomfortable. And so sometimes you've got to cycle back. You know, you're finding this kind of practising a bit dull or a bit, you know, it's not really very enjoyable. Maybe you've got to, you know, re. Engage, get back to your reason or get your team back on board or find your flow. Find a way to make that repeat, repeat, repeat kind of a little bit more enjoyable. Because if it's not enjoyable, it's going to be that much harder. But that's grit and determination. You've just got to look at the, you know, the Roger Federers of the world and the great athletes and the people that have got that real grit and determination, you know, they've got there with just a lot of repetition and.

They'Ve got, I think, the emotional reasons why they want to do it. One of the reasons I created our programs is to give people a variety of different things to do to activate their curiosity, to activate the tenacity, their resolve, so they can do different things so they don't get bored.

Yeah.

And so we've had R, E, F, I, R. And the last.

The last is E for excess. And this is this idea that. I know you're quite a fan of, John, this idea that you can rehearse something until you get it right. But the key is, and that's what the pros do, is that they keep practicing until they can't get it wrong. And to get to that point, you've got to extend yourself. You've got to get beyond your comfort zone. You just can't practice over and over again. You can't keep hitting a tennis ball back and forth and practicing your serve. You've got to extend yourself and get yourself just outside your comfort zone.

Challenge.

Challenge yourself. And I think I use this analogy of like skiing. You know, you can just ski the blue runs and you'll never get any better. You've gotta challenge yourself by skiing the black runs, you've gotta take yourself out of your comfort zone and that's how you kind of add a little bit of that friction in there, a little bit of that tension to help wire that positive habit in. And then you can cycle back around again, go back to your R and your E and your F, I, R, E again.

And that's why I call a lot of this inner size, because you're actually strengthening your neuro muscles, the tenacity muscles, your belief muscles, your habitual muscles, your resolve muscles, so you can achieve goals you didn't achieve before. Now, my final question is you've had a chance for a couple of years now to see our students who are using our programs and are achieving great results. You've had a chance to review the program yourself. Any thoughts on what you like about the program that people are watching may get from a neuroscience perspective?

Yeah, look, I'm a pretty skeptical conservative neuroscientist and I really like to make sure that what I'm involved in and what I'm endorsing is really strongly based in evidence. And there are a lot of the inner size exercises that you teach that have a very strong evidence base. A lot of them are based around cognitive behavioural therapies, the visualisation and the mental rehearsal that I've just talked about. And I think it's really important for people to, to realise that there is a great amount of research, psychology and neuroscience research, that's strongly supporting many of these components. And I think that's one great part of it. And I think another part of your program, which people may not realise when they first come in, is what a great sense of community there is. And as I say, that's the E of refire is engaging with a community. And one of the great fears that many of us have is kind of being alone, sort of maybe standing up above the crowd or outside of our tribe. We have this social brain that desires to connect. From the moment we're born, we need to connect with other people. So it doesn't matter whether you're 9 months old, 9 years old, 19 or 90, you need the social connection with other people. And that's what's empowering and that's what's supportive and I think that's what will give people that extra encouragement as they're going through, through. So it's just such a great, great, powerful piece that you've got going there.

Thank you so.

Much.