Encourage Your Brain: Your Brain on New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year. The calendar is turning to a new year, and like clockwork, the whole of human consciousness seems to attune to where are we in the timeline of our life. And with that attunement, we often consider New Year's resolutions. We resolve to do something differently, we resolve to be different in some way, and some people love making those resolutions and some people don't. Regardless of how you feel about New Year's resolutions, here's an invitation to just get curious about how your brain may feel about the principle behind them. And basically the principle behind them is that resolutions are simply a focus for your brain. A focus for your brain. And it's important that we think about what we are focusing on because the brain has a busy job processing some 11 million bits of data every single second. That's actually done subconsciously. 11 million bits of data being processed whereas consciously we can process only about 50 bits of data per second. 50 versus 11 million. So it behooves us to think seriously about what do you want to give your attention to. So if you're thinking about resolutions, cooperate with your brain. Remind it a resolution is simply what you want to give attention to. And if by chance you get that negative narrative sabotage, sort of saboteur voice going on, imposter syndrome, whatever it might be, that says you haven't done enough, you didn't do it well enough, you'll never nail this, just give up, whatever it might be, think about focusing back to what is it that I want. Not so much about what I don't have yet, what I didn't do enough of, but instead what is it that I want. And wouldn't it be a lovely gift to give your brain, yourself, and this world more of what you want this year?