SELF-DIRECTED NEUROPLASTICITY
What is neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity, is your brain’s ability to reorganize itself through your environment, behavior, thinking and emotions. You can do this both physically and functionally throughout your life.
The way you age is not dependent on your genes. 75% of the way that you age is in your control – which means your environment, lifestyle and behavior have more of an impact on the way that you age vs the 25% attributed to your genes.
There are two major brain regions that have the ability to continually give birth to new neurons in adults:
- Hippocampus – your hub for long-term and spatial memory
- Cerebellum – your hub for coordination and muscle memory
These parts of your brain are responsible for most of your memory, the hippocampus and the cerebellum being the two regions with the highest rate of neurogenesis.
The reason why these two regions of your brain are important for neuroplasticity is because they’re full of granule cell neurons, which have the highest rate of neurogenesis.
Let’s be proactive
By immersing yourself in rich, exciting and new experiences you’ll be able to partake in high-challenge activities that’ll serve as part of your lifelong learning.
Step #1: Find clarity
Building your brain plasticity is about changing your behaviors. And before setting out on any new behavior change, most people miss the critical step of finding clarity. Knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, and more importantly why you want to accomplish it, is foundational to making any real changes for the long-term.
Finding out what’s at the core of your value system is huge. Your core values, your priorities and your personality traits all play a critical role in not only motivating your behaviors but also in giving you a true sense of meaning and purpose.
And when you’re fulfilled and partaking in things that actually matter to you, you’re more likely to continue your good behaviors that challenge you and help you grow over time… nice, a positive feedback loop.
Once you have a crystalized understanding of your core values, you can start to align everything else around those core values. That alignment of your core values is the secret to making better conscious decisions, which ultimately helps your brain to grow.
Step #2: Set meaningful goals
Once you have clarity you’ll be able to hone in on meaningful goals to set for yourself and also a better understanding of which ones to tackle first. Goal setting is key to setting yourself up for lifelong learning, and lifelong learning is a critical part of increasing your neuroplasticity.
Step #3: Take micro-steps
The trick is to take the most minute micro-steps every single day when working toward your goal. The last thing you want to do is to overwhelm yourself with too much to do, or worse yet, a much-too-big picture goal that leaves you not knowing where to even start.
When your brain first records changes, these initial changes in your brain are only temporary. To make lasting changes in your brain patterns and to build up the most brain plasticity, you need to be diligent about challenging yourself daily.
Step #4: Adopt a growth mindset
The growth mindset step is critical and helps you tap into your sense of endurance and stamina. We can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems.
When chasing any challenge or goal with a growth mindset, you need to seek those pitfalls and look forward to triggers or pain points because hidden in those trying times and those annoying experiences is a treasure of growth and learning. We all have fears, and avoid challenges because of our fears, but if you can shoot straight for the challenges and seek them out, this’ll change everything.
Step #5: Practice mindfulness
Self awareness is so powerful when developing any new behavior. Once you’re more aware of your surroundings and thoughts, and when you’re more awakened to what’s happening in your brain and consciousness, you’ll be more likely to make value-based decisions, which are basically better more meaningful decisions.
It’s about having:
- Self awareness
- Self control to make value-based decisions
When it comes to increasing your neuroplasticity and changing the patterns in your brain, this is especially important. If you’re living on autopilot (which most of us are), it’ll likely take extra energy to get used to awakening your prefrontal cortex, the decision-making part of your brain, before creating any new good habit.
So practicing mindfulness is a critical part of awakening your consciousness, so that you’re able to make clear decisions.
When people say that the brain possesses plasticity, they are not suggesting that the brain is similar to plastic. Neuro refers to neurons, the nerve cells that are the building blocks of the brain and nervous system, and plasticity refers to the brain’s malleability.