The Magic of Neuroplasticity in Personal Transformation
Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity or neural plasticity, means that your brain is capable of being altered, both physically and functionally, anytime during your lifetime. This is contrary to the previously held belief that an adult’s brain remains physiologically static or hard-wired after critical developmental periods in childhood. While it’s true that your brain is much more adaptable during the early years, plasticity exists throughout your life.
In my other article titled The What, Why, and How of Personal Transformation, we established that:
a. Personal Change (or changing oneself) really means to be able to comfortably demonstrate new behaviors that produce new results in your life which in turn causes you to feel differently.
b. When aiming to change your life in some way, you are essentially running after a particular feeling. For example, you want to feel confident and attractive when you decide to lose weight, you want to feel happy and accomplished when you determine to follow through on your side projects/hobbies, etc.
c. Your beliefs (i.e. the statements you unchallengingly hold as truth) determine the thoughts you have, your thoughts regulate the choices you make, your choices drive the behaviors you exhibit, your behaviors decide the experiences you have, and your experiences finally generate the feelings.
Beliefs → Thoughts → Choices → Behaviors → Experiences → Feelings
d. The first step towards making a long-lasting change is to identify your self-limiting beliefs (beliefs that impede or hold you back from achieving the desired results in your life) and change them to the new beliefs that reflect your desired destiny.
As we explore how Neuroplasticity is relevant to Personal Change, let’s first understand what beliefs are on a physical level.
Beliefs exist in the brain similar to how memories do. Memories are formed in the brain when networks of neurons fire together due to a stimulation caused by a particular event/experience in your life. The more a neural network is employed (either by creating more of such events/experiences in your external environment or by mentally reliving the same experiences by thought alone), the more it fires and the stronger the memory becomes. On a physical level, beliefs are certain strong memories that have developed into a finite set of neural networks in the brain.
So then, would you agree that to truly change, you should be able to develop new neural networks that are equal to your new beliefs and erase the networks that have not served you well?
The concept of Neuroplasticity, therefore, becomes quite significant since it presents the possibility of changing the existing undesirable neural networks and come out of your automatic thought processes, behavioral patterns, and feelings that you have memorized so well such that it is now your second nature.
The good news is that with conscious intervention, it is possible to break this automatic programming. When you mindfully move your awareness from being the old (automatic) self to becoming a conscious observer of the old self, you reclaim the power to no longer be the old self by making different choices, demonstrating different behaviors, and experiencing different feelings.
Every time you observe your old thoughts but make a different choice and take a new course of action, you are weakening your old neural networks and forming new ones that reflect your new beliefs, and literally changing your brain physically and functionally. With time, as you continue down this road, the new neural networks become your primary neural networks, while you also erase some of the irrelevant (or no longer relevant) connections in the brain — all thanks to Neuroplasticity!
This is when true transformation occurs since the neural networks (equal to your self-limiting beliefs) no longer fire in your brain. And Neuroplasticity’s most fundamental principle says “neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that no longer fire together no longer wire together”.
