Can you rewire brain to get out of a rut? (Yes you can …)

Regardless of the context, routines — once comforting and safe — can gradually become ruts. Stable relationships, familiar patterns, and secure jobs can quickly lead to boredom, depression, unconscious anxiety, or a debilitating addiction. As Brooklyn clergyman Samuel Parkes Cadman once said, “the only difference between a rut and a grave is a matter of depth.” Ruts are indeed threatening and stultifying. But are we doomed to be in them once we fall into them, or can our brains be changed? To answer this question, psychologist and brain researcher Caroline Di Bernardi Luft and her colleagues conducted a study, drawing on what we already know about how we fall into ruts in the first place. Why do we get stuck in ruts? We become stuck in ruts due to our brains’ habitual electrical patterns. Past experience shapes present and future behavior. Faced with new situations, our brains will apply rules based on prior events to match the current context. And there’s a part of the brain that is especially wired to do this. Called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) — think of it as the brain’s “pattern seeker” — this brain region works hard to find old rules that can be applied to the here and now to circumvent the chore of new learning. Dr. Di Bernardi Luft and colleagues wanted to see if people could get out of ruts when the brain’s pattern seeker was blocked. How to create a rut in an experiment In order to explore this, they had to first get people int...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Behavioral Health Brain and cognitive health Source Type: blogs