Once again I took a long and unwanted break from blogging and as August kicked in I thought it’s high time to get back on track. Not just with blogging but with other positive habits as well.

As it happens, in today’s Daily Calm Tamara Levitt spoke about habits and reminded me of an old saying in neuroscience: neurons that fire together, wire together. Apparently the phrase was first used in 1949 by Donald Hebb, a Canadian neuropsychologist, who worked with associative learning. Basically it means that the more you do something, the stronger the neural pathways become that reinforce that activity.

Languages and instruments are good examples where this comes into play and I can remember situations where I’ve felt that the more I’ve spoken a foreign language, the more natural and automatic it has become. Same goes for the piano and the guitar. Eventually, if you continue long enough and practice rigorously – and this applies also to emotional habits – the activity will require less energy and thought.

An interesting point that Levitt brought up was that neuroscience has discovered that to create new habits you’ll have to do more than just build new neural connections. You’ll also have to phase out old habits and the metaphor she used was spring cleaning. The idea is that you need to do “synaptic pruning” in order to make room for new habits.

I definitely need to get rid of a few bad, old habits in order to make room for new better ones. I should probably reread James Clear’s excellent book Atomic Habits (which I’ve mentioned before in an article On the addictiveness of caffeine). I remember the book containing a lot of practical tools for getting rid of bad habits and nurturing good ones. Key ideas included systems thinking, designing your environment to make success easier, and making tiny changes that deliver big results.

I feel this is an excellent time to start growing flowers instead of weeds.