The new year begins and things are going to be different from now on! You make lots of good resolutions on your list and are highly motivated. However, changing all those good new habits is incredibly difficult. Why is that?
Contents
- What exactly are habits?
- Reasons why it is difficult to change them
- What role do neurons play in establishing new habits?
- How chiropractic can help you implement new habits more easily
- Tips for implementation
What exactly are habits?
Our brain is actually a very comfortable organ that loves to put certain human processes on autopilot. This is efficient and saves a lot of energy. Dispatch likes it simple and therefore loves the same routines over and over again. It virtually “hates” change of any kind. You will be able to confirm this, because when you start a new job, you are usually totally exhausted in the first few weeks due to all the new conditions and tasks that you have to master.
Firing and connecting neurons
If we take a closer look at the brain, changing habits is all about neurons.
Neurons are the cells in our nervous system that are responsible for transporting information from one place to another and ensuring that everything is properly connected. Why do you still not manage to maintain new habits or achieve new results?
When these neurons “fire”, they release electrochemical compounds, and when these react with their target, the message is passed on. According to the principle of efficiency, our body creates patterns in everything we do and reuses them to conserve energy.
This means that when you do one activity (moving, thinking, feeling, breathing, etc.) together with another activity, these activities become linked, and the more often you do them together, the more strongly they are wired together.
Habits are simple – change makes you grow
It’s very easy to eat the same thing every day, work in the same job, talk to the same people, think the same thoughts, have the same feelings and go to the same places.
This means you relive the memories of the past over and over again. Your future will look similar to your past. If the past was negative, your future will be too.
Chiropractic helps to establish new habits more easily
Vitalistic chiropractic works on the autonomic nervous system and helps our brain to switch from tension, stress, fight or flight mode to relaxation. This means that when you are tense or in constant stress mode, you have a high release of cortisol.
You are less able to think clearly or make decisions because you are under the constant influence of stress. The more relaxed you are, the more creative your mind is and the clearer your decisions will be. This makes it much easier for you to make new decisions.
It is therefore much easier for you to decide on new habits and put them into practice. We often observe that patients at Chirolounge Munich start to move more again of their own accord because their body wants them to. They start to change their eating habits and consciously decide to let go of bad habits (smoking, alcohol consumption).
A good book tip on the subject of changing habits: Atomic Habits
Change just 1% a day – that’s 365% a year
We tend to want to change many things at once and as quickly as possible. Most people fail at this and give up. The book explains the effect it has on your life if you change just 1% of your habits. If we change 1% a day, we change 365% a year.
The only person you should try to be better than, is the person you were yesterday.
Tips for implementation
Strong positive or negative feelings/experiences are the glue that holds a memory in your brain. The more intense the feeling (good or bad), the more likely you are to remember something vividly. This means that in order to overcome a negative or traumatic experience or break out of a bad cycle, you need to reprogram your brain with a stronger positive emotional memory.
How do you do that? Take a moment and write down what you want for your life. Create a picture in your mind’s eye of what your future looks like, especially how you feel about it. Once you have created this new future, take as many minutes as you can every day to visualize this vision of your future again.
Since the brain cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, you will find that the more the neurons fire and connect with each other, the more the decisions and outcomes in your life will align with the future you have decided for yourself
We hope you enjoy implementing and letting go of old habits. If you would like to know more about vitalistic chiropractic, please write to us.
The Chirolounge team Munich
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