Are You Beating Your Brain?

Outsmart Your Brain With Smart Strategies

You think your goals will get you there?  They won't... but your small, sustainable, daily habits will.

Consider this...

The Father of American Psychology, William James once said, "All our life...is but a mass of habits."

Precisely.

A belief is a thought you keep thinking which forms your belief system.  A habit is a pattern of thinking, feeling, behaving, being.

Lets face it Beloved, you are all your habits and your habits are you!

Your habits are subtle, automatic routines you do repeatedly - without thinking.  Undesirable habits, if unchecked, can affect your health, wealth, emotions, relationships, and your productivity.

To help you make the connections, lets do a habit check....

Are you consistently late to work or not?

Are you constantly leaving the toilet seat up or down?

Are you usually flipping insults in a road rage or not?

Are you financially stable or just over broke?

Whatever your responses, you have successfully trained your habits.

Here's how...

.........thanks to the Habit Loop.  In his book, The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg introduced the habit loop.  All behaviors follow the same pattern: there is a CUE, the ROUTINE, and the REWARD.  These three components wrap around in a seamless loop.

First, the CUE, often called the trigger, prompts the ROUTINE into action - automatically.

There are five types of CUES:

• Time of the day
• Your location when the habit occur
• Your emotional state
• The actions of others
• Your last action taken

Anyone of them can trigger a certain routine.  Once a particular CUE exists, its related ROUTINE emerges instinctively.

And like a turbo engine boaster at the rear end of a rocket, the REWARD propels the return of the habit loop if the brain likes the reward it is getting.

You get a psychological reward, one that you give yourself, without thinking about it.

Incidentally, the reward is the part of the habit loop that is usually difficult to determine.

Why?

It is usually hard for you on the surface of the habit, to determine why you crave what you crave or do what you do.  You want to ask yourself, what's the benefit I am getting from it?

Realistically,  unless you intentionally create your own reward for a new habit you want to train, you have no control over the reward you get.  The REWARD reminds the brain of the habit loop in the future on the condition that the brain likes the reward it is getting.

Bottom line?

No matter what habit you've trained, your brain wants to reduce the amount of time and energy required to make choices - that is why it forms habits.  Once a task becomes second nature, your brain essentially shuts down.

Researchers at The University of London discovered that it takes 66 days to train a routine into a habit.

Habits are malleable and replaceable.  You don't break habits; you replace them.  You can outsmart your brain with smart strategies.

What habit would you like to change today?

What is triggering your habit?

And what reward are you getting from it?

Here's to your success!


 I'd like to hear from you.  Leave a comment so others can learn from your insight and find inspiration.

Thank you so much for stopping by.  I really appreciate your presence here.  Thank you for reading and contributing.  Your thoughts are important to me.  

Thank you for the pleasure of your time.

Inspire personal change.  Wake up excited about your life!