Responsibility Rebellion: An Unconventional Approach to Personal Empowerment

by Kain Ramsay

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and optimise your neural networks throughout your lifetime. In brief, every time you learn a new fact or skill, your brain changes. Your brain is somewhat like a circuit board comprised of billions of pathways which become active every time you do, think, feel something. Your habitual behaviours, thoughts, and feelings exist along the paths that are most travelled in your brain. Every time you choose to sleep nine hours, eat the same junk food you’ve told yourself you’d give up years ago, procrastinate, or light a cigarette, the same pathway in your brain becomes active and this pathway becomes stronger, making it easier and easier for your brain to activate this pathway each time it’s triggered. This also means it becomes harder to deactivate. This is why addictions, depression, procrastination, and other mental illnesses flourish. Your brain activates the same neurological pathways until they become an automatic response, such as drinking or binge-eating, rumination, or becoming suddenly anxious in crowds or depressed over a certain thought or event. The brain, like people, prefers taking the easiest route, and the path it’s most familiar with is the one it’s travelled the most.