You can have anything you want if you will give up the belief that you can’t have it.

— Dr. Robert Anthony

In 1956 Earl Nightingale wrote and recorded The Strangest Secret on the technology of the day, an LP record.  It became the first non-entertainment record to sell a million copies.  What caught everyone’s attention was the simple, yet true message, “We become what we think about.”  At the time, there was no scientific evidence to support that claim, but in the past 10 years, scientists have proven that our thoughts do shape our world.

Scientists have named the ability of our brains to adapt, neuroplasticity.  This is the ability that our brains have to physically adapt to new circumstances.  Neuroplasticity is what allows people with traumatic brain injury or damage from a stroke, to recover.  Not so long ago, scientists believed that when the brain was injured there was very limited or no recovery.  When my grandmother had a stroke, we believed that she couldn’t really come back to full functionality.  Her life would be severely limited by the damage to her brain.  Eventually, she gave up trying because she and we believed it was “no use”.

Today, scientists have figured out that it is simply a matter of knowing how to induce the brain to build the new connections that allow other portions of the brain to take over for the injured part of the brain.  This doesn’t make it easy, it just makes it possible.

What We Think We Know

Scientists now believe that our brains and our bodies comprise a feedback loop.  What we think affects our body and changes our brain physically.  What we do changes our brain physically.  When we go to bed each night, our brain is literally different than it was when we woke up that morning.  What we’ve thought and done has either created new pathways or deepened existing ones.  This is neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity allows us to change how we interact with the world.  Every time we repeat a thought pattern, we deepen that pathway.  We tell our nonconscious brain that this is what we want by reinforcing the same thought pattern over and over.  When we choose a new thought, we begin to change where we are going.  As we repeatedly think the new thought, that path deepens and our brain begins to move us in the new direction we’ve chosen.  In other words, “We become what we think about.”

What’s In Your Gray Matter?

You’ve seen those pictures of the brain, gray matter with lots of furrows and ridges in it.  We create those furrows and ridges with our life experiences.  Things that we do repeatedly use the same pathways to complete the task.  Thoughts that we repeat also use the same paths and the more we do something or think something, the deeper that particular path.  That’s where habits and beliefs reside in our brains – in the deep paths that we’ve created.

I learned about this when I was still in college.  In order to graduate, I needed to pass a phys- ed class.  The class I had chosen was tennis.  Being naturally clutzy, I didn’t do too well at tennis.  My hand-eye coordination wasn’t great and I probably missed as many shots as I made.  But worst of all were my serves.  Hitting the ball was bad enough, but trying to actually get it into a specific spot was waaay beyond my ability.  I needed to be able to serve successfully in order to pass the class and a friend took me out to practice.  After, we’d practiced for a while, he suggested that I practice “in my head.”  Amazingly it worked.  To this day, I know how to serve correctly – all because I reinforced the path in my head.  (I’ll probably still know it if I have Alzheimer’s.  I may not know anything else, but somehow I’ll know how to serve a tennis ball.)

The Feedback Loop

There’s one more piece to this puzzle that needs to be added.  Our brain cells are connected to one another.  The more a particular path is used, the stronger the connections along the path.  This means that some thoughts come easily to our consciousness because we’ve come this way before – a lot.

Other ways of thinking feel less natural.  This is because our connections are more tenuous or haven’t been forged yet.  This does not mean that the new thoughts are somehow wrong, they are just unfamiliar and like with many things that are new, we are less comfortable with them.  As wonderful as the design of our brains is, it also creates a tremendous pull to not change, to stay the way we are because that’s what we believe we are.  We just need to remember, beliefs are nothing more than habits.

So we end up in a continuous loop.  In order for us to live in our complex world, we do many things by rote.  We don’t have to reinvent our morning routine every morning, we just do what we’ve “always done.”  When we change it, we feel slightly uncomfortable.  I have a friend who changes things up all the time just so she will stay open to change.  Her instinct is right – when we get comfortable we resist changing.  I don’t know about you, but I resist being even slightly uncomfortable.

Building the Brain You Want

So that’s the point.  We are what we repeatedly think about because we repeatedly think it.  To change in any meaningful way we must choose to “try” new thoughts.  We must choose to stretch.  We must lift ourselves out of our ruts and carve a new path.

Change can be uncomfortable.  Even thinking differently can make us uncomfortable.  In many cases, we’ve inherited some of our thoughts from our parents and grandparents.  Old thoughts are like old shoes, so very comfortable.  It is like coming home.

But our world is different from our parents’ world.  Things change so quickly that adaptation is a must.  In the past we may have said that we’re too old to change, but now we know that we’re never too old.  Our brains are flexible.  It’s time to start believing that we are too.