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