Try Something New When Adopting Resolutions This New Year

Your Brain Responds and Rewires When It’s Confronted with Something Unexpected

Your brain is like a photograph negative.

Remember those sheets of processed film that you carefully avoided leaving a fingerprint on? In the negative, subjects that were light in the world appear dark in the negative and vice versa. It’s a representation of the world that we saw when snapping the photo.

So What does this tell us about your brain and how changes in your brain occur?

Your Brain Builds an Internal Map of the World Around You

Like the film negative or perhaps a city map, your brain develops its own representation of the outside world.

This insight about an internal map is critical because your brain is an energy-hungry organ. By developing an internal model of your world, and predicting what to expect next, your brain can conserve energy. When your day is unfolding pretty much as expected, your brain operates in a low-energy mode that conserves your precious fuel.

But when we encounter something unexpected, our brains light up in an energy-hungry way.

“Your brain does not want to pay the energy costs of spiking neurons, so the goal is to reconfigure the [neural] network (i.e., your brain’s internal map) to waste as little power as possible.” — David Eagleman, LiveWired (2020)

Lighting up the brain, however, is central to the process of updating our internal map of the world, rewiring the brain, and successfully making positive changes.

Surprise and Directed Attention are Central to Updating Your Brain

Your brain updates its internal map when it encounters something unexpected (Eagleman, 2020).

Because our internal map causes the rain to expect or predict certain things, something unexpected will surprise us and result in our attention being directed at the new event or experience. That attention and focus lets us update our internal map.

In contrast, when life unfolds pretty much as expected we do not direct our attention, nor expend the energy, to change our mental map.

If your brain is predicting perfectly, then there is no need to make any changes.

Break the Routine This Holiday Season

With the annual new year’s resolution season almost upon us, how can you use this insight about the brain’s internal map and predictions to rewire your brain and support new habits?

Remember that your brain is hyper-sensitive to experiences that are unexpected. Whatever resolution you make, approach it in a novel way, and try to avoid simply falling into a predictable new rut. Keep it fresh.

• Taking up running? Keep it fresh by following a range of different routes or perhaps invite different exercise partners each week. Mix up the experience by throwing in some run-walk protocols, or cycling then jogging in sequence.
• Learning to cook? Pursue new recipes each week, try a range of different cooking classes (online or paid), and invite different people to join you for the meal.
• Studying History? Feed that appetite for knowledge with different perspectives and authors. Debate your take on history with people who hold a different point of view. Write up your ideas on a personal blog (it need not have a lot of followers).

These are but a few examples of how you can create experiences that are not perfectly predicted, thus igniting your brain’s neural networks, directing attention, and updating your internal map.

Disciplined Variety Will Be Key

We cannot simply abandon all discipline and routine.

Give your brain a steady dose of new experiences while behaviourally staying disciplined. Plan a time each day for your new activity, break that activity into a series of small parts or units (not big blocks), and have fun each time you take a small step forward.

If there is any advice emerging from behavioural science about how to succeed with change, these ideas are pretty close to the top of the list.

• Repeat the new behaviour while keeping each experience fresh
• Break the activity into a series of small steps
• Have fun when taking each small step

A little each day will generally be more successful than one big investment. You cover the same distance, in the end, but tiny steps will work better.

In this way, you can rewrite your brain’s internal map and make it easier — less power-consuming for your energy-hungry brain — to adopt new perspectives or habits in the new year.