Why Are Your Habits So Hard to Break?

Alright. Hey, this is John Assraf and I promised you a video, hopefully before the end of Monday. And right now it's 10:40pm I tried to download the answer to the question of why is it so hard to break our habits? And so when I tried to download it, the file must have been too big and Facebook didn't allow it. And so I got a flip camera, got a little tripod. Sitting here on my desk over here behind me is one of my favorite players of all time, Michael Jordan. So let's get into it. The reason that habits are so hard to break is because of a couple reasons. And every bit of the work that I do focuses on what is the cause as opposed to the effect. So if we go back in time and understand a bit about genetics, what we know is that approximately 50% your thought patterns, 50% of your perceptions and 50% of your behaviors are because of your genetics. Meaning your parents gave you their very best. Their grandparents or their parents and grandparents and grandparents, grandparents, grandparents, all gave us some of their genetic predisposition that got passed down from one generation to the next. And this, as you know, in nature is used as a survival mechanism to keep us safe for the most part and to really evolve the species. Now, we also pick up some traits that may not serve us well, and that is the randomness of genetics. So 50% of your behaviors, 50% of your thoughts, 50% of your perceptions about the world are because of the genetic code, the software you were born with. Now when you are raised by the people who gave you their genetics, now you're in the environment, that causes you to actually see some of their genetics at play. So you see their behaviors, propensities, etc. Now in the brain we have something called mirror neurons. Like a mirror. And especially as a child, we start to mirror things that we see in our environment. And when we're very, very young and our brain cells are making the connections, as our eyesight is forming, as our hearing gets better, as our sense of smell and taste and touch, we start to create these networks in the brain. Now why is that important? Well, it's important because there are two types of memory systems in the brain. One is called the explicit memory system or the declarative memory system. That's when you can read a book, go to a play and say, here's what happened in the play. Listen to a song and get the hymns of the song, have an activity or experience happen, and you can remember and declare what happened. That is one of the parts of the brain that is a declarative part of the brain that you can talk about it. Here is the other part of the brain, the one that is the more important one for you to know. Most people in the whole world don't talk about this, so it's probably your first time. These memories in the brain are called non declarative or procedural or otherwise known as the implicit part of the memory of the brain. So the implicit memory system is part of the genetics you've been born with, plus the things that you've been repeating over and over and over and over and over again, they become part of the procedural part of the brain. When you learn how to drive a car, when you ladies learn how to put on makeup, and maybe some of you men as well. When we learn to do something repetitively over and over again, whether it's good or bad or indifferent, it becomes hardwired in the brain as a way to save us from thinking or from repeating or doing the same action over and over again. That's the good news. The bad news is if it's not the right thinking, not the right behavior or perception, then we get caught up in a self fulfilling either doom loop or a self fulfilling habit that will not give us the best results. So all of the work that I've done on myself, on changing the inside, is by really focusing on what I call inner size, Utilizing some of the tools in visualization and affirmations and meditation to be able to access the implicit part of the memory system and rewire the brain for higher levels of success. So if you want to know why it's so hard to break habits is number one, you're not genetically predisposed to break habits. You're genetically conditioned to acquire habits that make it easier for you to do that thing that you want or not want to do. So what is the formula for breaking the habit? What is the formula for changing habits? You first want to atrophy the neural networks, the cells that have connected together, that have wired together, that have formulated part of your identity and part of your belief and habitual pattern. You want to understand that in order to break those, the easiest way is to actually create a new neural network. So how do you do that? Number one, you've got to have the right knowledge and you have to have it in the right order. Number two, you have to have the right instruction of what to do with that knowledge. How do you use affirmations properly? How does the brain work to absorb affirmations? Because for the most part they don't work for most people. How do you visualize? How do you access the part of the brain, the visual cortex of the brain, the processing center? And how do you access that to change the internal image that you currently have about your present life, your circumstances and your reality? That is a process that athletes use. It's a process that singers and songwriters and highly successful entrepreneurs use, whether they know it or they don't. And then meditation is not some airy fairy fufu stuff that came out of India. We've been meditating for eons in the West. Now we're learning that by meditating we're able to access different levels of consciousness, different levels of awareness and perception. But we're also able to change some of the habits, some of the neurological wiring at deeper levels of when we are in a different brainwave frequency than the level it takes to choose your goals and your vision and your habits. So information in the right order, instruction. And here's the other thing. You must have experience that is emotional enough for you to create the neural networks and then repeat that over and over and over again. The reason most people don't change in a day or a weekend or a week or two or three weeks, because it takes a little bit longer for the procedural part of the brain to take hold and make it into a habit. So we know that it takes at least 30, 60, 90 days to see the early stages of breaking a habit and acquiring a new one. So that brings me to this. This week and next week, you're going to be hearing about my having it all challenge that I've been doing for several years. This is where I take people for six months and help you break the habits that are not serving you in health, wealth, relationships, your career, business, money and everything. Create the right information in the right order, backed by instruction and support day in, day out, week in week out for six months. If you're serious about changing this year, having a great life this year, pay attention to the emails and to more of the messages that I'm going to post right here on Facebook. And please share this with your friends. I want to help change the world. I want to teach people the real stuff. I'm sick and tired of people who are trying to sell stuff that doesn't work. I've been fortunate, read my bio, to have had some wonderful mentors in my life. But I've taken action and applied it. I want to teach you how to take the right information in the right order so you can have something that I call a predictable transformation and predictable results in your life. I hope it was worth the wait. Lots of love to you and your family. Bye. Bye.