Building Brain Pathways

Similar to yesterday’s sledding metaphor, think of your toxic thoughts, destructive behaviors, or addictions as a cement superhighway inside your brain and your healthy thoughts, righteous actions, or sobriety as a narrow, dirt path somewhere off to the side of the highway.

When under stress, your brain seeks the most efficient route, the superhighway, not the narrow unbeaten path. In order to replace the problem thought or behavior, you must deconstruct the superhighway and build up the dirt path. Think godly thoughts for thirty seconds, and you have spent thirty sec­onds expanding the small path.

Old neural pathways are worn and easy to tread, so your brain will want to reroute to the highway. When this happens, you must make a conscious decision to return to the small path, and you must choose that small path again and again before it becomes the easier one to walk.

At first, you might have to make that conscious deci­sion to reroute ten times a minute or more, but each time you return to the small path, you remove a slab of cement from the superhighway and place it on the side path. Eventually, you only need to switch back to the path maybe five times a minute, then a few times every ten minutes, then a few times every few days, and so on. This mental rerouting work gradually converts the destructive superhighway into a small path and the small path into a healthy, life-benefiting superhighway.

This brain path construction project is also why you can’t give up after a failure. The hard truth is that making any kind of change almost always includes some degree of failure. But when you fail, you don’t lose your hard work because your brain hasn’t rebuilt its former destructive superhighway. At least not yet.

Get back on the path to continue building the brain pathways you want. And imagine leading a life in which good actions and thoughts flow naturally. It’s possible!

Takeaway: Any kind of change almost always includes some degree of failure.