Hello tiny sparks reader! Joining you this week with another audio exploration - this time of perseverance. I’m pasting the transcript below for those of you who are readers rather than listeners. Wishing you a great week ahead~

Decided this week to do another little short recorded exploration versus a written exploration just to give my eyes a little break from the screen.

I am still in the midst of writing my candidacy exams for my PhD which means I'm spending a lot more hours on my computer every day reading and writing so I wanted to still bring you some information to explore just in a different format and in pursuit of me continuing to do my exams I want to talk a little bit about perseverance and how we make little changes in our life towards what we want for ourselves.

That is the name of this newsletter after all, Tiny Sparks.

And so I want to talk about this concept of how we take little incremental steps towards a really big thing. And the first thing to understand is that making a change in your life, even if you think it's a small change, is actually a really big thing to your brain.

So from a neuroscience perspective, the goal of our brain is to maintain allostasis and allostasis is essentially keeping everything the same because that is what feels safe to the brain. So it doesn't matter if you feel good, if you feel comfortable, if you feel happy, if you feel you've achieved what you want to do. All that matters to your brain is that you keep things the same so that you are safe and you're not using up energy that the brain wants to conserve.

That's really important because when we want to make changes in our life or move towards completing a big project or task a lot of times we think well I really want to do this thing so why don't I feel motivated to do it or why is it so hard to take steps towards doing what I want to do

Now there's a lot of other things that come into play based on our history, our environment, any trauma or stressors. But just from a really basic understanding of our brain, our brain will actually resist changes. And the bigger the change or the bigger the project that you're undertaking, the more likely it is that the brain is going to get in your way.

So to understand this a little further, what you've got to understand is that when you take steps towards changing something, working on a big project, setting a goal for yourself, you're asking your neurons in your brain to fire a new neural pathway.

And so to understand what that means, you can kind of think about when you're driving around your city every day, wherever you live, maybe you're driving on a big, huge interstate, or if like me, you live somewhere more rural, maybe you're driving on just a two lane highway, you know, 55 miles an hour. But wherever you are, it's most likely that you're driving on a paved road that's pretty well maintained (unless you live in Michigan where the roads are horrible) but you're driving on roads that are at least somewhat maintained they're paved they're familiar you know the speed limit you know where your turns are and so that's what it's like in our brain for things that are familiar to us notice I didn't say good things I said familiar so for example if you have the habit every morning of picking up your phone when you wake up and scrolling on social media for half an hour that's actually a neural pathway in your brain

And so if you say, I want to stop doing that. I don't want to get on my phone when I wake up first thing in the morning. It makes me feel weird. It doesn't start the day off on the right foot.

Well, that's great that a part of you has identified that you want it to be different. But your neural pathway, your interstate highway in your brain is to pick up your phone and start scrolling.

So when you wake up and you say, I'm not going to scroll today, you're sending your neurons in a direction they've never gone before.

So here you are driving on the interstate and now you're telling your brain, hey, get off the highway here and head on into the Amazon jungle.

And if you know anything about the Amazon jungle, you know it's incredibly dense. There's not roads through it and trying to even clear a path to hike through it takes a lot of really intense equipment and the jungle sort of grows back around you as you go.

So that's what it's like in our brain.

When you wake up and you say, I'm not going to scroll today, you're stepping off the interstate. You're pulling your car off the interstate and getting out of your car and saying, I guess I'm going to hike through the jungle.

So maybe you do it the first day and you're like, yeah, I did it.

And the second day you're like, yeah, I'm on a good routine.

Then by the third or fourth day, your brain starts feeling a little fatigued from you trying to send these neurons down this jungle pathway, instead of going down the nice, comfortable, familiar interstate.

And so that's our brain resisting the change to our allostasis or to keeping things the same.

So when you want to work towards a big project or a goal change, that's why we do it incrementally. We start with small little pieces.

So maybe instead of saying, I'm not going to pick up my phone and scroll in the morning ever again, you could just start by saying, when I wake up and I first open my eyes, I'll take 30 seconds and I'll just look around the space or I'll sit up or I'll do a little mindfulness practice for 30 seconds or

Maybe I'll just get up and stand up for a second and even if I want to sit back down in bed and scroll, that's fine.

But then you can link together those incremental stages and incremental choices that you're making to start building a new pathway towards the jungle.

And so for me, as I'm working on my exams, I am having to dedicate a lot of time and energy that normally would be used for resting, self-care, doing other work like cooking and cleaning to write. And it's a big change from not doing that. I haven't been in classes for a little while to doing that.

And so if I said, I'm going to sit down every day and spend three hours reading and writing, I know for myself that I would never do that.

But if I set a little goal for myself to say, I'll just sit down and look at this for 15 minutes, and when the 15 minutes are up, I can keep going if I want to, or I can stop.

And I do that a couple times a day, I find that without the pressure, I can get going and oftentimes spend 30, 45, 60 minutes and not feel fatigued.

Another thing I do for myself is I let myself take a day off.

It's stressful. I'm under a time crunch. I only have 10 weeks to do this. But my brain is also adjusting to a big change in my routine.

And I know that if I want to produce good quality work without burning myself out, I have to allow my brain to adjust by taking things slowly and not shocking my brain.

And so that's why perseverance or tiny sparks or little incremental steps towards building a new pathway in your brain are much more effective than relying on big bursts of motivation where you might try to make a huge change and make it last for a few days or a few weeks and then not stick to it.

So if you have something you're trying to change or a little thing you're curious about moving towards - let me know! Let me know how it's going for you.

And maybe consider if there's a way you can break it into small steps, and not even small steps, but tiny steps, remembering that your brain is trying to keep you safe by resisting those big changes.

And so you can either fight your brain and feel pretty miserable, or you can say, I'm going to be on the same team as my brain and just allow my brain to feel supported in making tiny sparks this week.

So have a great week.

Thanks for being here with me, and I'll see you again in two weeks.

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