The 24 Hour Diet: Lose up to 4lbs in a Day. Joanna Hall

messages based on vast amounts of information. This information is carried via neurons; I like to think of these as message-carriers. Each message-carrier needs to travel to a specific destination in the brain for the information in the message to be acted on. The message-carriers reach their specific part of the brain by travelling along neural pathways; you can think of these as a mini transport system. There are millions and millions of neurons in the brain, all carrying messages and travelling along neural pathways. Different parts of the brain deal with different types of information, and if the information goes to the wrong part of the brain or doesn’t reach its correct end destination, the information is lost, never to be acted upon.

      Although this is a major simplification of the amazingly complex workings of our brains, you can appreciate the brain is a very busy place. Our brains simply cannot process all this information. At their end destination the neurons deliver their message; their information gets processed and an action may or may not occur. The brain gets very good at doing the simplest thing: taking a message and sending it along the most accessible neural pathway, delivering its message and creating an action. Some of these actions are so familiar that they become automatic responses requiring no conscious thinking by us. When this happens you’ve given birth to a habit.

      Other bits of information can never reach their specific end destination in the brain, so the part of the brain responsible for handling the information to carry out a particular action becomes dormant. Your brain may receive the same information again and again but each time the message-carrier gets lost in the smaller back roads of the brain’s transport system, never to reach its destination.

      How this Relates to Habits

      So now we can begin to see why applying the five-per-cent rule and taking small steps can be so effective. If your brain is already doing a similar action, the pathways taking the information will be established. Making a small tweak to that action is therefore easier for your brain to process and develop than trying to carry out a brand-new action that appears totally alien. The message-carriers will need to travel along unfamiliar neural pathways to a destination in the brain that may be dormant.

      Habit grooving – getting your brain to work with you – need not be that difficult. The trick is to piggy-back your new habit onto something you may already be doing so both your brain and your body have a familiar reference point.