Using the science of neuroplasticity to manifest the life you want.
First of all what Is Neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity is a blanket term referring to the ability of your brain to reorganize itself, both physically and functionally, throughout your life due to your environment, behavior, thinking, and emotions.
Advances in neuroscience tell us that neurons can shift their shape, make new synapses and build new neural pathways in the brain to allow for life-long adaptation. This is, in fact, a life-long process that occurs continually as you learn new behaviors, memorize new data, and as your brain develops. It is a way for your brain to fine-tune itself for efficiency by adjusting existing nerve pathways in the brain. Brain reorganization and reconstruction take place through mechanisms such as "axonal sprouting" which is where undamaged nerve networks develop new nerve endings to reconnect neurons whose links were previously damaged.
This is your brain “rewiring” itself. This rewiring of the brain helps define new nerve pathways to accomplish lost functions. At any age? Why yes, new neurons can still be generated, and your neurochemical balance can be altered at any age.
The brain can even remodel, rewire, and adapt to trauma or a disease process.
Over the last 40 years, the predominant view on neuroplasticity has shifted a great deal. The concept of a changing brain has recently substituted the previously held belief that the adult brain was simply a physiologically static organ or hard-wired after significant developmental periods during childhood. While it is true that your brain is much more malleable during the early years and its potential declines with age, plasticity actually happens all throughout your life.
The implications of Neuroplasticity on your life
Neuroplasticity is the method by which all permanent learning takes place in your brain, such as playing a musical instrument or mastering a different language. Neuroplasticity also enables people to recover from a stroke, injury, and birth abnormalities, overcome autism, ADD and ADHD, learning disabilities and other brain deficits, pull you out of depression and addictions, and reverse obsessive-compulsive patterns.
Neuroplasticity has far-reaching implications and possibilities for almost every aspect of human life and culture. Its limits are not even known!! Not by a long shot. However, the same characteristic, that makes your brain amazingly resilient, also make it vulnerable external and internal, habitual unconscious, influences.
As I shuffle through the endless articles, as they relate to neuroplasticity, I can't help but see the way it can be utilized to manifest the life you desire via the Law of Attraction. To me, it has become abundantly clear that by understanding the mechanisms that govern neuroplasticity you gain a deep understanding of how to rewire your brain to create the life, love, and even health that you desire literally without having to lift so much as a finger.
Neuroplasticity and The Law of Attraction.
So, can you teach your brain how to be a more effective manifester?
I believe you can, through neuroplasticity, which as we learned is the brain’s ability to be flexible, and to create new neural pathways.
Through an understanding of the brain’s neuroplasticity, you can learn how to best utilize your brain to manifest anything you want.
Essentially as you practice a skill, the neurons associated with that skill will gradually create a pathway. The more you practice that skill, the faster and more accurate you become at it because that neural pathway is coated with a neural substance called myelin. Myelin serves to speed the conduction of nerve impulses in nerve fibers. Why would manifesting be different from any other learned skill?
After all, the law of attraction is solely concerned with thoughts. And, it is shown that thoughts have just as much an effect on the brain’s neuroplasticity as actions. For example, a pessimistic person can train their brain to be optimistic, just by practicing that skill.
And, the process of creating new neural pathways does have remarkably a lot in common with the process of manifesting your desires.
It should be noted that if you practice a skill incorrectly, the brain has no way of knowing. It will create a neural pathway of an incorrect performance of a something, just as happily as a correct performance.
The same is true for the law of attraction. You can just as easily manifest something unwanted, due to the attention you give to unwanted thoughts and emotions, as you can manifest something wanted. It’s the same process either way, but it’s completely up to you what you manifest.
With neuroplasticity, an unused neural pathway will eventually shrink and become less efficient. What is the obvious way to undo an unwanted manifestation? Stop practicing the thoughts that created that neural pathway.
The brain is the ideal manifestation machine. Afterall everything that ever was created in this world was a thought first, right? And, with the understanding of how to use your brain, you can manifest anything you want.
Your brain doesn’t care what you practice. Whatever you give it, if repeated enough, it will become better and more efficient at it. It comes down to creating a thought pathway to your manifestation. A pathway that becomes second nature to access.
What Are You Manifesting Now?
This is the current state of your thought pathway.
If your abundance pathway is leading to poverty, then you know that you’re making some errors in your practicing of abundance.
If your relationship pathway is leading to isolation or attracting the wrong types of partner, then you can be sure that somewhere along the way you’re making some errors in your practicing of love and romance.
The key here is to find and correct any errors, then practice the correct version instead.
So, for now, run through your manifestational thought pathway. If your goal is greater abundance, then run through the abundance pathway by thinking of your goal in greater and greater detail. Is there resistance, indicated by bad feelings, that pops up when you access this desire? These resistant thoughts and feelings are your errors or the bugs in your program. You can’t fix your pathway unless you know what exactly is going wrong.
When you come across resistant thoughts don't ignore them. Instead, acknowledge and release them, then bring your focus back to the positive thoughts and emotions you desire to manifest.
Every time you release a piece of resistance, you can enter more deeply into the feeling of your manifestation, and it will be easier and easier to do so. Creating easier access to manifesting in the future.
Add details to your goal. What will it look like when you have it? What will you be doing? Find details that are easy to feel great about.
It’s best to find some detail that best defines your goal.
Just choose a detail or two that defines your goal. Then, visualize that, or write about it, if visualization isn’t your thing.
This is where “acting as if” enters into the equation. Imagine what your life would be like if you had this manifestation. A form of faking it till we make it.
Resistance will certainly arise somewhere along the way. Just simply acknowledge it. Then let it go, without fighting it.
As you access more and more specific details about your goal, your subconscious mind will start showing you things you’re holding on to that aren’t allowing this manifestation. For instance, if you’re trying to manifest abundance, but holding on to some belief about money being bad, then your brain is going to let you know. Just acknowledge that old belief, and let it go. It no longer belongs to you and likely has never served you to begin with.
What you are aiming for here is a profound feeling of having it. It should get to the point where you don’t even care if you receive it because you have already given it to yourself within your own mind.
Thoughts become things.
Your brain is a thought machine. It is literally shaped by what you think about most. Think negatively, and your brain makes it easier to think negatively, and therefore manifest negative experiences. Think positively, and your brain makes it easier to think positively, and therefore manifest positive experiences.
You have a manifestation machine right inside your own head. You can literally be, do, or have anything you want, if you would only think your way there, first. Your mind is THAT powerful.
You are born a blank slate when you enter into this world. Over the next several years, programs get installed in your subconscious mind from your parents, family, friends, even teachers. Those programs will run, largely outside of your awareness, for the rest of your life, or until you change that programming, either during deliberate subconscious work or sometimes unintentionally through powerful life experiences.
So now you have the way to create a thought pathway to your manifestation, using the concept of neuroplasticity.
Patients with emotional disorders can be trained to self-regulate a region of the brain known as the amygdala (located deep within the cerebral hemispheres and believed to influence motivational behavior) by self-inducing sadness and monitoring the activity of the amygdala on a real-time fMRI readout. Stroke victims have been capable of reacquiring lost functions through self-induced mental practice and mental imagery. This kind of therapy takes advantage of neuroplasticity in order to reactivate damaged areas of the brain or to deactivate overactive areas of the brain.
Utilizing Neuroplasticity/LOA
Science has confirmed that you can access neuroplasticity for positive change in your own life in many ways.
In his book, Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life, Dr. Michael Merzenich lists some core principles necessary for the remodeling of your brain to take place:
- Change is mostly limited to those situations in which the brain is in the mood for it. If you are alert, on the ball, engaged, motivated, ready for action, the brain releases the neurochemicals necessary to enable brain change. When disengaged, inattentive, distracted, preoccupied or doing something without thinking that requires no real effort, your neuroplastic switches are “off.” (We will get into how to create this environment yourself down below)
- The harder you try, the more you’re motivated, the more alert you are, and the better (or worse) the potential outcome, the bigger the brain change. If you’re intensely focused on the task and really trying to master something for an important reason, the change experienced will be greater.
- What actually changes in the brain are the strengths of the connections of neurons that are joined together over time. The more something is practiced, the more connections are changed and strengthened, and made to include all components of the experience.
- Learning-driven changes in connections increase cell-to-cell cooperation, which is crucial for increasing reliability.
- Initial changes are temporary. Your brain first records the change, then determines whether it should make the change permanent or not. It only becomes permanent if your brain judges the experience to be fascinating or novel enough or if the behavioral outcome is important, good or bad.
- The brain is changed by internal mental rehearsal in the same ways and involving precisely the same processes that control changes achieved through interactions with the external world. In other words, you don’t have to move an inch to drive positive change in your brain. Your internal representations of things recalled from memory work just fine for progressive brain plasticity-based learning. In the same way, your brain believes a vivid dream is real, you can create the "real" environment with your thoughts and imagination alone!
- Memory guides and directs most learning. When you learn a new skill, your brain takes note of and remembers the good attempts, while discarding the not-so-good attempts. Then, it recalls the last good pass, makes adjustments, and improves from there.
- Every movement of learning provides a moment of opportunity for the brain to stabilize and reduce the disruptive power of it. Each time your brain strengthens a connection to improve your mastery of a skill, it also weakens other connections of neurons that weren’t used at that specific moment. This negative brain change erases some of the irrelevant or interfering activity in the brain.
- Brain flexibility is a two-way street; it is just as easy to generate negative changes as it is positive ones. You have a “use it or lose it” brain. It’s almost as easy to drive changes that impair memory and physical and mental abilities as it is to improve these things.
Neuroplasticity can be halted or enhanced by a complex array of interacting factors including the physical and psychosocial stimulation in the environment, drugs, stress, growth factors, learning, and the aging process.
Neuroplasticity\LOA Exercises
Here are a few tactics for those of you interested in self-directed neuroplasticity enhancement. Deliberate, consistent practice is likely to result in cognitive benefits.
Meditate
There is a huge body of research studying the structural and functional changes in the brains of meditators. The results are remarkable. Studies show that meditators exhibit increased grey matter, improved attention, and greater performance on learning and memory tasks. These benefits may be seen with as little as 5 minutes a day of guided breathing meditation. Some studies have shown measurable gray matter growth in as little as 8 weeks of practice! Meditation practice comes with countless other benefits, including immune system strengthening, and overall stress reduction just to name a few. Which leads us to ...
Reduce Stress
One of the most noticeable effects of the environment on the neuroplasticity of the brain is the well-studied phenomenon of shrinking dendrites on neurons in the hippocampus as a result of exposure to chronic stress. Chronic stress has a toxic effect on the brain. Identify relaxing activities and set goals for engaging in those activities on a regular basis – not as a reward for hard work, but as a deliberate exercise for brain health.
Foster Positivity in Relationships
Better relationships lead to enhanced neuroplasticity. Traumatic relationships can have the opposite effect, creating a hostile environment for brain change. Feeling understood by others creates appropriate climates in the brain for learning. Take steps to create a supportive growth environment – whether that means shaking up group dynamics at work or focusing on improving intimate relationships. The brain is a social organ, negative social interactions will hamper your ability to respond successfully to new challenges in any area of life.
Try Something New
Learning a new skill such a new language or a new instrument gets new neurons firing and wiring together. What if you’re an Executive Coach working with busy clients that don’t have the time for such an undertaking? Neuroplasticity can also be promoted by something as simple as taking a new path to work. Shake things up – even small deviations from the daily norm can promote brain health.
Exercise
Research is showing that exercise enhances this process of neuroplasticity. Exercise promotes increased blood flow to the brain and the upregulation, or increased production of a brain chemical called BDNF, Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor. BDNF is a growth factor that may slow the progression or even reverse symptoms by improving the efficiency of dopamine. It acts to protect the brain from further degeneration. The concentration of BDNF in blood increases in proportion to the intensity of the exercise. So make your workout vigorous to get the most bang for your buck. Plan on sweating a little bit each day. The best kind of exercise to change the way your brain functions is rigorous, intense (heart rate elevation/become slightly breathless) and goal-directed.
It is proven that one single bout of aerobic exercise promotes the perfect brain environment for optimal relearning / neuroplasticity. After you catch your breath, practice doing whatever it is you want to teach your brain. This is a very “sticky” time for your brain to rewire because BDNF concentration stays high for about 2 minutes after the exercise interval. This exercise must be ongoing and regular for it to be meaningful. This is the best chance for regaining automatic behaviors such as upright posture, heel strike walking, and rotation.