Breaking Bad Habits Rewire Your Brain for Success 🎹 #classicalmusic #neuroscience

And there's a couple of reasons why bad habits are so hard to get rid of. One is that when you've done something a lot, the pathway in the brain that kind of supports that skill or that behavior has become really well myelinated. I think a lot of people have heard about myelination, but basically the neurons that are involved in communicating for you to do that skill, they get wrapped up in something called myelin, which is just a layer of fat that allows the neurons to communicate more effectively, essentially. And when a pathway in your brain is myelinated, it feels really automatic to do that skill. So I often say, like, especially for, you know, anybody who, who is literate, writing your name is very automatic. You don't have to think about how to write your name. You don't have to think about how to make the letters. But if you have any, like, small children in your lives who are, who are just learning how to write, you know, it's really hard for them. They really have to concentrate on it. They might make the letters backwards, right? Because that pathway is not myelinated for them yet. So it's a really sort of effortful, conscious process that they really have to think about. But once that pathway is myelinated, you just do it. You don't even think. You just, you know, it'd be kind of ridiculous as an adult to think, wait, how do I make this letter? Right? Like, you don't have to do that. And so when you have a bad habit, it's myelinated, just like the, the pathway that's been myelinated for writing your name. And so, I mean, can you imagine writing your name and someday somebody comes in and tells you you've been making one of the letters backwards your entire life? And you have to learn how to not do that. Like, you can feel how hard that would be to suddenly make a letter a different way, even if it was not difficult to do it the other way. You'd really have to think about it because you just automatically write your name how you'd always written your name. And so with bad habits, they just, they just happen automatically, like without thinking about it. And so when you're trying to create a new habit, it can feel very frustrating and kind of arduous because you have to think very, very consciously about the new habit, just like if you had to suddenly make a letter totally different than you'd ever made it before, you'd really have to think about that.

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