Two Brains, Not Working Together (All The Time)

From Rewire by Dick O'Connor:

The discovery that the brain changes physically in response to our life experience is the biggest news in psychology in decades. Neuroscientists know now that all habits have a physical existence in the structure of the brain.

Their early traces were laid down in childhood and adolescence. As we practice bad habits more and more, they become like railroad tracks -- the only way to get from here to there, from stress to relief -- and we ignore the fact that there are much healthier and more direct ways of getting what we need. 

So under stress we take a drink, or have a snack, or pick a fight, or get depressed, all without awareness that we have made a decision; our bad habits operate unconsciously. This is one of the forces behind the undertow -- it's so difficult to overcome bad habits because they are etched in the brain. 

They don't go away as we practice better behavior; they just fall into disuse, so they can easily be revived. 

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Say you've been eating unhealthily for years. You start out on a diet hoping to lose ten pounds in two weeks. When you don't, you get discouraged and give up. But you wouldn't expect to learn to play the guitar after only a few weeks' practice, or speak a foreign language, or type like a master. 

Yet because we know perfectly well what we have to do to change ourselves, and it seems so simple, we expect to overcome a lifetime of bad habits in only a few weeks. 

Just because it's simple, doesn't mean it's easy. Habits die hard. Each time we engage in a bad habit, we make it more likely we'll do it again in the future.

But in the same way, each time we engage in a good habit, we make it more likely that we'll do it again.

You can learn to program your own brain so that making the right choices and exercising will power comes to seem easy and natural. Focused attention and practice, repeated over and over, will change the brain's reward system, so that bad habits will lose their appeal and be replaced by new, self-constructive behavior patterns.