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.
The Perfect Plan
By Chuck Danes
Do you sometimes feel that life’s unfair, that future hope is bleak?
Do your day to day experiences leave your spirit feeling weak?
Do you ever think the joys in life are reserved for just a few?
That your hopes and dreams you’ll never reach no matter what you do.
Have you ever thought how hard it is to get ahead these days?
That strain and strife are part of life and nothing you do pays?
If you do, take heart my friend, so many think this way.
But there is hope a brighter path that you can take today.
It will require a shift in thought, it may challenge your beliefs
But it will guide you to a life of joy, content, relief.
So listen closely and absorb this perfect plan I share
Implement these steps you’ll learn and soon you’ll be aware
Of a life that’s filled with joy beyond your wildest dreams
Regardless what “appears” to be no matter how life seems.
Focus your attention on what you soon will learn
The wisdom in it, if acted on will provide those things you yearn
The answers are available just seek and you will find
That all which you’ve experienced is a product of your mind
These troubles you encounter now that you feel get in your way
Are due to thoughts, emotions felt that you had yesterday.
For long ago the plan was made which allowed you to be free
From all these limitations that you now perceive to be
You have been given power which you’re not yet aware
It’s through misuse of this gift that’s created your despair
For in the plan there came a clause that remains within it still
That each and every soul on earth be entitled to free will
You chose to limit your results by absorbing false belief
The plan designed to bring you joy through your own choice brought you grief (more…)
Be-Do-Have
The natural way of getting what you desire
By Kenneth Ho
www.Subconscious-Secrets.com
I’m writing this article because I thought it is important for you. I remembered during one of the classes that I’ve conducted, there was a conversation that went like this……
I asked one of the participants, “If everything is possible for you, what do you want to achieve?”
“I want to do my own business!” The participant replied. “Why do you want to do your own business?” I asked. “So that I can make more money.”
“Then why don’t you start doing your own business now?” I asked. “Errrr, because I don’t have enough money. If I have the money, I’ll do my own business.”
“If you have all the money you need to support your business, what business do you want to do?” I asked. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“If you don’t know, how are you going to start your business?” “When I have money, I’ll think about it. There are so many businesses I can do.”
How Some People Sabotage Their Own Success
By Kenneth Ho
The subconscious mind is basically sensitive to three things: Affirmation, Visualization and Emotion. These are the three basic ways through which the subconscious mind is programmed and reprogrammed.
All the three ways to reprogram the subconscious mind are important. But if you were to point a gun at me and force me to rank their importance in terms of their effectiveness in influencing the subconscious mind, I will rank Emotion, followed by Visualization and then Affirmation.
Unfortunately, not many people understand how the subconscious mind works and how their emotions play an important role in their success or failure in life.
As a result, they always sabotage their own success. Here is how……
Let me ask you a question.
When was the last time you were worried about something? How long did you spend worrying about it? 1 day? 1 week? Forever?
Now, when was the last time you were happy about something (for example, achieving something of significant importance)? How long did you spend indulging yourself in that happy moment?
I remembered when I got my first-class honors degree, I was only happy for a short while. On the other hand, when my business did not do well, I spent weeks worrying about anything and everything under the sun.
The point I’m trying to make here is most people spend a lot of time pondering over their problems rather than remembering their successful experience.
