Free I Heart Me by David Hamilton Page A

bullet, the one insight that will effortlessly change their life forever. But here’s the thing: that insight is that change takes repetition . Change comes when we put insight into practice and do it consistently ! That’s what most people miss. It’s the consistency that wires neural networks.
    Basically, consistent practice – physically or in our imagination – can wire networks of ‘I am enough.’ And once the networks have built up, our enough thinking and behaviour will become automatic. Our brain isn’t hardwired. It’s in a constant state of flux, responding moment by moment to our thoughts and movements and what we learn and experience in life.
Neuroplasticity
    Most people, professionals and some academics included, assume that the brain is hardwired. This popular attitude is why we get the idea that change is so difficult.
    As a university student in the late eighties and early nineties, I learned that in childhood the brain was like dough. Easy to mould. Impressionable. But then sometime in our late teens,the dough went in the oven and came out with a crust on it. Everything was now set. For life. You couldn’t change it. The way you were was just the way you were.
    This hardwired notion was actually abandoned nearly 20 years ago, although many still believe it. And that belief does make change quite difficult to effect. But the actual truth is that our brain is changing continually and will continue to change until we take our last breath, even if we live until we’re over 100. It’s called neuroplasticity , or brain plasticity.
    Copious amounts of research have shown that a person can imagine doing pretty much anything and their brain will react almost as if they were actually doing it. A 2014 search of the PubMed scientific database under ‘mental practice’ revealed over 30,000 publications. 1 You could imagine swinging a golf club, serving at tennis, playing piano, typing, diving off a springboard, shooting baskets, lifting weights, kicking a ball or even moving an impaired limb if you had suffered a stroke, and your brain would process it as if you were actually doing it.
    In my book How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body , I shared research in which the brains of people playing a sequence of piano notes were compared with the brains of people imagining playing the notes. After five days of daily practice, the brains had undergone identical levels of change, with the area connected to the finger muscles growing through neuroplasticity by around 30–40 times. Looking at the brain scans side by side, you couldn’t tell who had played the notes from who had imagined playing them. 2
    That wasn’t a one-off set of results. In each of the numerous neuroplasticity studies that compare physical practice with imagined practice, the results are the same: the brain changes regardless of whether a person is doing something or imagining doing it. As already noted, the brain doesn’t distinguish between real and imaginary.
    Equally important, however, is that you need to keep doing the work to retain the brain changes. Studies show that if you stop a particular practice or imagined practice, the regions of the brain that have grown simply shrink back down again, just as muscles atrophy when you stop using them. Neuroscientists refer to the phenomenon as ‘use it or lose it’.
    Have you ever forgotten how to do something? Say long division, for example, that you learned at school? You forgot how to do it because you didn’t keep up the practice. The brain networks you built up as you learned it at school simply shrank back down, or disconnected.
    Through exactly the same process, you can actually forget how to have low self-worth. It may sound impossible to you right now, but as far as your brain is concerned, you simply need to stop practising low self-worth and instead focus on consistently applying the principles and exercises in this book. As