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Change Your Patterns, Renew Your Mind

Elizabeth Long, LPC

It finally snowed. Although winter teased us in early December, the first true blanket of whiteness just arrived. A few snowflakes are still gently falling, and the effect out my window is one of stillness and beauty. The drab and dreary landscape has been given a rebirth of freshness. For now, it looks new and pristine.

After the holiday excitement and dust settles, many of us struggle with drabness of spirit. The return to ordinary time, isolation, lack of sunlight, and often-abandoned resolutions creates a defeated, discouraged soul. These are the months when many struggle with depression and lose hope for true internal change. We want change.  We want this year to be different. Somehow we feel so stuck, frozen in unwanted patterns of behavior.

Neuroscience informs us that perception can be reality within our brains. Most of us are reacting to well-worn neural paths that were formed through early experiences.  In childhood, our brains stored new experiences and responses in our memory. Soon these responses became less thought through and more automatic. For example, as you read this you don’t have to struggle identifying each letter within a word. When learning to read, decoding a single word took time. Developing a definition and response to each word was laborious. It took a lot of focused attention and experimentation before learning. Now, due to the neural pathways previously formed in your brain, you have read three paragraphs effortlessly, perhaps while multitasking, like drinking a cup of coffee or responding to texts.

These same neural pathways exist in our emotional and behavioral responses. As a child when we heard an angry voice or saw an angry face, we identified, decoded, defined, and chose a response. The development of this response is similar to the reading example. Our emotional responses to an angry person, whether fear, anxiety, or mirrored anger informed our next behavior, perhaps withdraw, ignore, or fight. We repeated behaviors that worked for us at that time. These behavioral responses soon became well-worn paths that are predictable.

The ability to create new neurons, make new neural connections, and prune those no longer needed is called what researcher Dan Siegel, M.D. calls neuroplasticity. Although the period of greatest growth and change within our brain occurs during childhood through adolescence, recent research strongly suggests that neuroplasticity can be enhanced at any age. All of our behaviors are a series of chain reactions generated from the brain. We can alter the chain reaction by renewing our mind.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. ~ Romans 12:2

How does one renew the brain? Dan Siegel’s research has identified three specific activities that stimulate new neural pathways: aerobic exercise, focused attention exercises, and novel learning experiences.

Any learning that expands your meaningful level of creativity, such as learning a foreign language, to play an instrument, or to build furniture, encourages neuroplasticity. Memorizing the first ten pages of the phone book does not qualify-unless you have a very creative way for using that memorized list of numbers.  ~Anatomy of the Soul, Curt Thompson, M.D.

In honor of January and new beginnings, explore which novel learning experiences you can engage with this month and throughout the New Year. Not only will it be fun, it will prime your brain for renewal and refresh your soul. Identify three activities you will try in 2012. For example:

• Learn to snowshoe, ballroom dance, snorkel
• Try a new ethnic restaurant, learn four new phrases in that language, plan a trip to this foreign country
• Join a cooking class, acting class, yoga class, photography class
• Design a garden, rebuild a motor, weld patio art, roast your own coffee beans

Be inspired, be creative, change your patterns, and begin to renew your mind.