ESL Blogs

Over recent decades, this topic is one which bear heavy consideration. Actually, everybody wants to develop about their personality and their lives. I will show a simple way to help us create a great habit. 

When I was first learning to mediate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath and when my mind wandered to bring it back. How about you, if you are a new meditator?

Sounded simple enough. Yet I'd sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirt in the middle of winter. I'd take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work. Actually, it was exhausting. The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important. So, why is it so hard to pay attention? Well, studies show that even when we are really trying to pay attention to something-- at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream. So what's going on here? It turns out that we are fighting one of the most evolutionarily- conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that's conserved back to the most basis nervous systems known to man. This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement and basically goes like this. We see some food that looks good, our brain says " Calories!... Survival!" we eat the food, we taste it- it tastes good. and especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, "remember what you are eating and where you found process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward

Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, "you know what? you can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why do not you try eating something good so you will feel better?" we thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we're mad or sad, we feel better.

Same process, just a different trigger. Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal-- feeling sad-- triggers that urge to eat. Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids out side smoking and we think " Hey, I want to be cool" So we start smoking. The Marlboro Man was not a dork and that was no accident. See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit. So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet. Now, with these same brain processes, we have gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world.

I will back to the breath in the next writing...

Could you tell me about your opinion and about this writing?