There are truths we believe which are actually lies. Your brain is doing this to you. Part of it is because you’re lying to your brain. How many times do you tell yourself something like, “I want to lose weight and eat healthy?” However, your behavior doesn’t change. That’s a lie in my book.
Your brain has established a habit, a script which runs in the background. You established this habit. Now, you’re going to have to tear up the script by acting against the habit or loop you’ve established. Confused yet? Now throw in the whole mind of Christ concept and “Houston, we have a problem.”
Your Brain
You can figure it out, though. Really, you can. Let’s start with understanding your brain. You rely on your brain for a variety of things. Of course there are the normal things, such as brushing your teeth, going to work or fixing dinner. How do you remember to do these things?
In actuality these are habits stored in your brain. Your brain runs a script that says, “Brush your teeth. Go to work. Fix dinner.” You do these things at specific times. Your brain just runs a script, a shortcut, something which doesn’t take a lot of brain power to figure out. Your brain says, “You just got up, now run the brush your teeth script.”
How Habits Work
The same scripts are run for a variety of things. You get in the car to go to work and before you’ve even thought about which direction you’re going, you are already there. This even happens on trips which aren’t daily trips, just every once in-a-while trips. I have several events I travel to once a year. I don’t have to think about how to get there. I just point the car and the script in my brain takes over.
These are neural pathways which have been formed in your brain in order to conserve energy for bigger things. Habits are also neural pathways. The brain doesn’t know which habit is good and which is bad. So, it can’t stop a habit. All you can do is overwrite a bad habit with a good habit.
If you change jobs, you can’t do away with the old neural pathway which says, “Go to job.” You have to overwrite it by intentionally thinking about your new route to work until your brain has a overwritten the go-to-job pathway with a new script with the same label.
Changing Bad Habits Into Good Ones
This is how you change a bad habit into a good one. For instance, if you are snacking late at night and want to stop, you have to overwrite it with a different thing to do. Maybe you decide instead of eating you will drink a cold bottle of water whenever you are tempted to snack.
Maybe you decide instead of eating, you will go to bed earlier, work a crossword puzzle, write in your journal, read a book. You have just changed the habit in your brain which says “late-night snack.” Now, the late-night snack script will be a bottle of cold water before bedtime.
If you want to stop eating something specific, such as ice cream, you can begin eating something healthier for you, such as a piece of fruit, cheese or nuts.
Janet Perez Eckles 
Shawn Akers 
Abby Trivett 
