The Brain Can Sabotage Resolutions
Health 24
The New Year has just begun and already you’re finding it hard to keep those resolutions to junk the junk food, get off the couch or kick smoking.
There’s a biological reason a lot of our bad habits are so hard to break – they get wired into our brains.
That’s not an excuse to give up. Understanding how unhealthy behaviours become ingrained has scientists learning some tricks that may help good habits replace the bad.
“Why are bad habits stronger? You’re fighting against the power of an immediate reward,” said Dr Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and an authority on the brain’s pleasure pathway.
It’s the fudge vs broccoli choice: Chocolate’s yum factor tends to beat out the knowledge that sticking with veggies brings an eventual reward of lost kilos.
Temptations
“We all as creatures are hard-wired that way, to give greater value to an immediate reward as opposed to something that’s delayed,” Volkow said.
Just how that bit of happiness turns into a habit involves a pleasure-sensing chemical named dopamine. It conditions the brain to want that reward again and again – reinforcing the connection each time – especially when it gets the right cue from your environment.
People tend to overestimate their ability to resist temptations around them, thus undermining attempts to shed bad habits, said experimental psychologist Loran Nordgren, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“People have this self-control hubris, this belief they can handle more than they can,” said Nordgren, who studies the tug-of-war between willpower and temptation.
In one experiment, he measured whether heavy smokers could watch a film that romanticises the habit – called Coffee and Cigarettes – without taking a puff.
Upping the ante, they’d be paid according to their level of temptation: Could they hold an unlit cigarette while watching? Keep the pack on the table? Or did they need to leave the pack in another room?
Smokers who’d predicted they could resist a lot of temptation tended to hold the unlit cigarette – and were more likely to light up than those who knew better than to hang onto the pack, said Nordgren. He now is beginning to study how recovering drug addicts deal with real-world temptations.
Living Your Values – Part 1
By Steve Pavline
I’ve read many books that stress the importance of understanding your personal values, getting clear about what’s most important to you in life. But at the time of this writing, I haven’t yet come across a source that covers this incredibly useful concept with sufficient depth. Most of the values coverage I’ve read takes you through a process of eliciting your current values and then leaves it at that. But I want to take you much deeper into this rich subject and show you how to intelligently connect your values to your goals.
In Part I, I will guide you through a step-by-step process for eliciting and prioritizing your personal values. It’s entirely possible you already have such a list because this is a common exercise you’ll find in many personal growth books. However, I still encourage you to read through this process because you will deepen your understanding.
My second goal is to explain the process of living with integrity to your values, so you learn how to consciously use your values to make decisions and take action. There’s no point in discovering your values and then filing them away and forgetting about them. This will be covered in Part II.
Attitude Is The Key To Life
By Bob Proctor
Victor Frankl once wrote, “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Frankl was right. Attitude is a choice. You could be faced with a thousand problems, many or most over which you have absolutely no control. However, there is always one thing you are in complete and absolute control of and that is your own attitude.
When you surrender control of your attitude to what appears to be a negative situation, you will react to that situation. More often than not, reacting is inappropriate. On the other hand, if you were to remain objective, you would respond to the situation appropriately, thereby creating a winning situation.
If attitude is such an important word, why do so few people understand it? To be honest, it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s when I finally understood its full impact. All through my teens and into my early adult life, I can’t tell you the number of times that I heard, “Bob, if you’d just change your attitude, you would do a lot better.” In retrospect I can easily see the cause of my problem. I didn’t know what attitude was, let alone know how to change it!
Attitude is the composite of your thoughts, feelings and actions. Your conscious mind controls feeling and ultimately dictates whether your feelings will be positive or negative by your choice of thoughts, then your body displays those choices through action and behavior.
Attitude is actually a creative cycle that begins with your choice of thoughts. You do choose your thoughts and that choice is where your attitude originates. As you internalize ideas or become emotionally involved with your thoughts, you create the second stage in forming an attitude; you move your entire being – mind and body – into a new “vibration.” Your conscious awareness of this vibration is referred to as “feeling”. Your feelings are then expressed in actions or behaviors that produce the various results in your life. (more…)
Living In Awareness
By Tracy Webb
Sacred Inspirations - http://www.sacredpea.co.uk/
“You create your own reality” and “You are what you think you are.” At first I thought this was great and very simple – all I have to do is think in a particular way and I will be/have all the things I ever wished for. However, there are certain universal laws at work. It didn’t take long to find out that, although these universal laws work, it is not so much what we do but more about how we are being that makes the difference.
We choose to be certain ways. We can choose to “be happy” or to “be sad” at any given moment – usually this is an unconscious choice. We tend to allow circumstances, past conditioning and social norms to dictate to us how we act. We then find ourselves reacting to situations instead of responding to them. This can be quite a challenge especially as we are so mind dominated.
When we try to act in certain ways because we think we “should” or have been told that it is good to behave in certain ways, we soon end up with feelings of resentment. When we are peaceful, happy and in a place where we understand that God provides for us exactly as we ask and in accordance with the energy vibration we are sending out, then striving becomes futile. We can then see how weak and insignificant our egos are and the process of being able to “Let go and let God” becomes more natural. We split the natural polarities of the universe in two and decide on one over the other – therefore invalidating one in preference of the other. This creates more of the same, as the polarity that is rejected will keep coming back until it is accepted.
We are pulled between bouts of realized peacefulness and our strong ego desires. By shutting out the chatter of the mind/ego, we can more easily hear the God presence or spirit aspect of us. Bringing the mind, body and spirit into balance – instead of the extremes we create. For example – we can abuse our bodies, feed it foods that don’t nourish it and take addictive chemicals into our systems. We can let our ego/mind become so engrossed in having and wanting more, believing that we are our minds and are identified by what we have. (more…)
TRUST IN RELATIONSHIPS
Kim Olver
www.kimolver.com
We have been taught to believe trust is a commodity to be earned by others. Once they have passed certain tests, then we feel safe to extend our trust. I would like to entertain the idea that trust can be a verb, rather than a noun. It’s a choice you make and says much more about you than it does the person to whom you are extending that trust.
When you are involved in a relationship and you say you trust that person, it is more than a noun. It’s not just a thing you extend to a person like a gift–it is followed up with behaviors–things you do and things you don’t do.
When you trust someone, you know he or she will do the right thing. You know they have their affairs (no pun intended) under control. They are faithful and loyal. You don’t need constant reassurance of this–you just know.
What you don’t do is constantly grill a person about where he or she is and with whom he or she is spending time. You don’t have him or her followed looking for proof of infidelity. You don’t snoop around in his or her personal belongings or private places. You trust that he or she can be trusted.
Trusting has so much more to do with who you are as a person than it does with who your partner is. When you are secure in yourself and know that you are worthy to receive love, then it is natural to trust.
