A Thanksgiving Habit (Thanksgiving, habits, and neuropsychological health)

Happy Thanksgiving! What do Thanksgiving, habits, and neuropsychological health have in common? ...

Recently I have been listening to an audio book (free through the Hoopla app and the Free Library of Philadelphia) by Darren Hardy, titled “The Compound Effect.” While he shares a lot of very good and helpful information in his book, one of its benefits for me so far has been the reminder of the extreme importance of habits.

This is of course not a new idea. We all know this. I could probably research and generate a rather long list of books on the importance of habits. However, while I know habits are super important, I am not always good at harnessing the power of healthy habits.

As I listened to this audiobook and the discussion of habits I began to reflect on the benefits of habits from a neuropsychological perspective, for brain health and health of mood and memory.

One of Darren’s thoughts that I found helpful was the idea that we are all always living according to our habits, whether we choose to or not. Life is made up of our habits. One problem is that often we develop habits by default rather than purposefully, and these default habits tend to either keep us stuck in life, or make things worse rather than better. The key then is to work at being more purposeful in what habits we are creating, habits that help move us towards our goals and values rather than keep us stuck or moving backwards.

Our behavior impacts our brain - the mood parts, the memory parts, and all other parts of the brain. This is a necessary part of neuroplasticity: brain changes in reaction to our behaviors. Greater brain changes result from consistent, repetitive behavior: habits. This process is necessary for any skill and performance-related activity, like playing the piano or golfing or becoming fluent in a new language. Improvements in these skills happen because of changes in the brain as a result of habits played out over time (and the benefits of those habits increase/compound over time, which is the main point of Darren’s book).

While many different parts of the brain are necessary for benefiting from habits, one in particular is worth highlighting: the cerebellum. The cerebellum is particularly important for development and improvement of skills and habits. The cerebellum is like the automation expert of the Brain Office. It is responsible for taking tasks (both physical and cognitive tasks) that we do repeatedly and turning them into more automatic behaviors. The more we practice those behaviors, the more the cerebellum can automate them. The more the cerebellum automates these behaviors/skills, less and less brain power will be required to perform them and keep them going.

We can use the benefits of habits and the cerebellum’s automation to improve our mood and memory. There are many habits we can develop and nurture to help improve mood and memory. Other posts and pages of this website discuss mindfulness for strengthening attention and various memory improvement strategies. The more we can turn those skills into habits, the more effective they will be for us (the more the cerebellum can make them automatic, strengthen those brain regions, and improve Brain Office efficiency and performance).

What if we view Thanksgiving as not just a holiday, but also a skill? The skill of thanks giving. The skill of giving thanks. This is also not a new idea. This is just a re-wording of “adopting the attitude of gratitude.” There are many benefits to this. Developing a habit of thanksgiving is one very important and effective tool for re-training an unhelpful emotion employee (see the Brain Office. “Emotion employee” = limbic system = emotion/mood circuitry of the brain. Problems with depression, anxiety, or other stubborn and unhelpful moods involve this emotion employee/circuitry misbehaving and needing to be re-trained).

Instead of an emotion employee, we could view the brain as having different mood/emotion/attitude muscles: a happiness muscle, joy muscle, thankfulness muscle, sadness muscle, worry and anxiety muscles, etc. Muscles for worry and other negative emotions typically don’t require purposeful strengthening; they seem to be good at exercising themselves for most of us. On the other hand, the more pleasant emotion muscles often need purposeful exercise (especially in stressful times of life). Nurturing a habit of thankfulness can be thought of as a form of weight lifting for some of the more pleasant emotion muscles. By doing this thankfulness-strengthening consistently over time, the unpleasant emotion muscles will become less dominant and overpowering.

Because moods and emotions interact with and affect memory, attention, and thinking skills in general, then establishing and nurturing the habit of thanksgiving will help not just mood/emotion but also have downstream benefits for memory and cognition.

​With so much to be worried about this Thanksgiving (pandemics, politics, and such), it might take a little (or a lot?) more mental effort and purposefulness to identify reasons to be thankful. It is in these very times though that it is even more important to do just that.

I challenge you this holiday season to begin (or further improve on) a daily habit of thanksgiving. Your brain will thank you!