Wouldn’t it be strange if you learned that yes, you can make brand new habits, and that the brand new habits can stick, and yet . . . that the old habits are still somewhere deep in your brain, and given an old triggering environment, the old habits may return?! That seems like the exact opposite of what you would want to hear on Jan 2, getting ready for the New Year and for new habits.
There’s actually valuable information in this – it’s the information of ‘be careful.’ Be careful not to fall into your old habits and old environments in which those habits fester.
Bob Condor of a Seattle newspaper writes, “What [Ann Graybiel] has found is that the brain never completely deletes old patterns, say, smoking, eating junk foods or, yes, riding a bicycle, from the basal ganglia region deep in the brain’s neural structure. Instead, those habitual patterns “retain memory of context,” such as a cocktail and conversation for an ex-smoker or potato chips in the pantry for the junk-food snacker.”
Ann Graybiel is a Neuroscientist and Professor at MIT. Her latest researach about the basal ganglia brain region appeared in the journal Nature in October, 2005. In short, Connors argues that you can beat yourself at the same old game. By keeping the resolution and the new habits at the forefront of your mind, you can act successfully towards creating new habits and setting aside old ones. Connors suggests several verified techniques: do the new habit consistently, write your goals down, and do not put yourself into environments in which old habits are easily triggered (“Just the sight of a piece of chocolate can reset all of those good intentions,” says Graybiel).
This echoes the thoughts of philosophers from Aristotle to William James. Aristotle says, “We are what we repeatedly do.” Continue reading “2006 Resolutions! … Can Old Habits Be Broken?”
