Updated July 26th 2023

In previous blogs, I have been promising we would look more at how to speed up learning new habits. We have been talking about how we can actually visualise the neuronal connections happening, in order to actually speed up the process of changing our habits!

One of the best ways to do this is to follow the steps below:

1) Decide what your new habit is going to be.

2) Sit back or lie down, making sure you are comfortable.

3) Close your eyes

4) Take 5 nice big deep breaths, breathing in through your nose, and out through your mouth. As you breath in, focus on your belly expanding and your lungs filling with air. As you breath out, feel the body softening and letting go of tension.

5) Let your breath return to its natural rhythm, in and out through your nose.

6) Scan your body from the top of your head down to your feet. Feel the contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Does it feel heavy? Where is the heaviest point of contact? Feel your hands and your feet on the floor. Allow everything to relax into the chair or floor as you scan down.

7) Get a picture in your mind of you doing the new habit. Will you be placing vegetables in to a pot as you cook a healthy meal? Will you pumping sweat and feeling energised at a gym, an exercise class, a dance class, or a climbing wall?! Will you be having comfortable warm conversations with clients that leave you and your client feeling good afterwards? Will you be asking more questions and listening more to the responses in a meeting with a colleague, because you have realised that telling people what to do is not coaching them effectively?

8) As you get that image really clear in your mind, hear the sounds you are hearing, feel the feelings you are feeling (happy, strong, enthralled, excited etc), see everything around you that would be there; the people, the weather, the building, whatever and whomever you are surrounded by.

9) As you see, hear and feel everything that goes with performing this new habit (making the image and the actions as vivid as possible), as if you are really in the situation (i.e. not watching the situation!), take as long to do the new habit in your mind as it would if you were doing it in real life.

10) Now, once you are vividly experiencing that experience, start to run it faster and faster until you feel your whole body feeling the emotions that come with having that new habit.

11) Now, as you run through the experience, imagine the neurons throughout your brain firing and connecting, just like in the image above. Imagine the neurons passing their electrical charge along to each other and see pathways being formed that represent the new habit. You could even imagine them speaking to each other as they pass the electrical charge along.

Take a look at a few seconds of this video clip to get a clearer picture of neurons communicating and to help you to imagine this happening in your own brain.

Do this exercise every day for a week, repeating the visualisation and the imagining of the experience of the event, with the neurons firing and creating pathways throughout your brain. Imagine that experience and the pathways being created 10, 15, 20 times in one sitting.

Please remember, that you have to also practice the new behaviour for real!! You have to physically cook that healthy meal, ask more questions of your colleagues or clients, or do the physical exercise!!! You need to do both the real and the imagined. Physically performing the new skill, visualising yourself performing the skill or behaviour and imagining the neural connections will work quicker and more effectively than just performing the behaviour or just thinking about it, in forming the new habit. If you want to feel healthier or have effective communication, training yourself and practicing repetitively for a few weeks will make it all stick.

Read back on previous blogs if you would like to learn more about how and why this exercise will help you to speed up a change in your habits.