My Brain: Habits

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything in the “my brain” series. It’s not because I’ve not been thinking about it, but more to do with the path of assimilation that I set myself.

Recently I have been thinking about habits and how we change them, or develop new ones. I’ve got a number of bad habits that mean I am generally overweight and unfit, I’m also too busy and drink too much coffee.

I’ve been trying to decide whether it is best to focus on breaking these habits or to build new ones that supplant the old ones.

Today I came across this article in the New York Times entitled: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

I’m not sure it answers the question I’ve been trying to answer, but it says some interesting things. In particular it talks about being in a position of “stretch”:

Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

Although, in my current over-weight circumstance I quite liked the following piece of news:

“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will… .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

This leads me back to where I started this journey.

Recently I have been trying to stretch myself with a new set of crosswords, it’s quite depressing moving from a situation where you are used to completing a crossword to one where you can only complete half of it without help. If it was easy it wouldn’t be a stretch.

Personally I think I spend more time in the “stress” zone than the “stretch” zone but hopefully I am coming out of the other side of it a bit. This week I have done an excessively long week and my brain is definitely feeling the strain. So I’m going to try and use this weekend to rest my brain, because that is important too.