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The pain of resisting a habit eases once a new habit forms. You can do that in forty-five days if you repeat a new thought or behavior every day without fail. If you miss a day, start over with Day One. The new choice will not make you happy on Day One, and it may not make you happy on Day Forty. Even on Day Forty-Five, it cannot trigger happy chemicals constantly. But it will invite enough electricity to free you from a vicious cycle.
If you remained attached to a person who is not available to you, your genes would be doomed.
A brain can construct an image of a bad world despite abundant evidence of good.
Instead of building new trust with new people, they keep trying to build it with the abuser because they’re wired to expect good feelings from them.
The first step to happier habits is to do nothing when your cortisol starts giving you a threatened feeling. Doing nothing goes against your body’s deepest impulse, but it empowers you to make changes in your life. Once you do nothing, you have time to generate an alternative. At first, no alternative looks as good as the habit does, but positive expectations build if you give a new pathway a chance to grow. Each time you divert your electricity in a new direction, you strengthen your new circuit. It all starts when you accept a bad feeling for a moment instead of rushing to make it go away.
New goals sound great, but once you start slogging toward them, well-paved neural highways may tempt you. You can build a new highway if you slog for forty-five days. Exciting destinations will become accessible, so your old roads will be less tempting.
To establish a new trail through your jungle of neurons, you must repeat a new behavior every day. Otherwise, the undergrowth will return and your next pass will be just as hard as the first. Spark your new trail each day whether or not you feel like it, and you will eventually pass it with ease.
Appreciating what you have is difficult to do because the mind naturally seeks what it doesn’t have.
You can free yourself from an escalator if you are willing to do something different for forty-five days.
