Stop Smoking Tip: Practice Repetition

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an action, but a habit.” — Aristotle

Successful change requires concentration and repetition. In the beginning, it takes a tremendous amount of conscious awareness and energy for us to create and break habits and change habitual thinking. Our brains are designed to conserve energy for important things like breathing and coordinated motion. Our brains, if given the choice, will choose to revert back to established habits because they require less energy. However, as we continuously practice our new habits over and over, neurons begin to bond with each other. In other words, neurons that fire together, wire together. After a period of time and with repetition, your new habits won’t require energy.

A research psychologist by the name of Dr. Michael Schlund conducted a test to determine what happens in the brain when we learn a new behaviour based on rewards. Schlund put volunteers into an MRI machine and they were asked to press one of two buttons to make decisions. When they pressed the right button, they would win money, which was their reward. The volunteers soon learned which button was the correct one to press in order to win the money. They repeated this process over and over and over.

Schlund discovered that when volunteers achieved the money reward for clicking on the right button, the frontal lobe lit up. The frontal lobe is the part of our brain associated with self-control, decision making and behavioural change. With each repetition, their frontal lobes lit up more and more, which meant their brain activity continued to increase as they learned the new behavior. Here’s the good news – within about 50 repetitions, the reverse started happening. The frontal lobe lit up less and less. The brain started to exert less and less effort and finally minimal effort once the task officially became a new habit and wired into the brain.

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