The Association Organ

Have you ever tried to kick a habit but kept falling back into the old behaviour?

It may be because your brain is an association organ. Your brain associates behaviours and habits with times and places that they happened in or were repeated in.

If you sit on the couch each night watching TV and eating snack foods after dinner; your brain creates the association with this behaviour and your surroundings, both time of day and location. Then you decide that you don’t want to do this anymore as it is not healthy but every time you sit on the couch after dinner and turn on the TV, your brain associates this with eating chips or biscuits. The cravings then set in and the battle of will begins.

Repetition of actions and behaviours trains the brain and it will associate this with time, places and people. This will drive cravings, feelings and emotions. Your brain and body will start to signal each other triggering the impulse to do the action or behaviour.

Changing the patterns of the brain and the associations that have been created require putting yourself in different settings to create new association patterns. Regular brain based chiropractic adjustments can serve as a stimulus for this change but they can be undone by repeating old actions and settings reinforcing the old association patterns.

This is yet another reason why you will hear me say that we are what we repeat.