Do you remember the days when you couldn’t wait to dive into a new book or explore a new topic? Did you ever have days like this? Learning may have been something that brought you joy and excitement, but now, it’s become a chore. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry – you can retrain your brain to love learning again! In this blog post, we’ll explore the power of repeated habits and how you can use them to reignite your love of learning.
Not everyone is a fan of learning. We’ve already looked at how struggles at school can effect your love of learning.
As kids most of us would probably have preferred to be outdoors playing with our friends rather than in a classroom being taught something we may never use in real life.
College or university doesn’t always improve our relationship with learning. It often comes at a time when we’re learning life lessons more readily than classroom lessons.
After years of school, your brain may have adapted to dread the learning process. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The good news is that you can train your brain to love learning just as easily as it was trained it to hate it. It’s possible to hardwire your brain to love learning. Here’s how we go about it.
Repeated Habits Are Hardwired into Your Brain
Repeating the same behaviour over and over again is like teaching your brain a lesson. After a few repetitions, your brain starts to recognise the pattern and creates physical circuits in your brain that turn your action into a habit. The more you do it, the easier it gets – it’s like your brain is on autopilot.
The repetition tells our brain that this habit is prioritised as very important. This is the reason why it’s so hard to change bad habits. If you’ve done something often enough, time after time, you’re even more inclined to do it in the future. This is true even if the outcome is negative.
It may take some time, but you can both break those bad habits and teach yourself to enjoy the learning experience.
Build your learning muscle
Building muscle takes dedication and hard work – you can’t just lift a weight once and expect to be toned overnight. It’s all about hitting the reps. The same goes for building a learning attitude – it’s all about putting in the reps. Repetition, repetition, repetition – that’s the key.
This means that to begin with you have to actively choose to learn something new every day. Over time though this continual repetition of learning becomes a habit.
As you develop the habit it becomes easier. Now you wake up and you look forward to finding something new to learn, some new skill or piece of knowledge. Many learning apps have automatic systems to gamify the learning process and make it easier for you to develop the learning habit. If you’re following a more manual system of learning, then you can always use a habit tracker to help you build that learning muscle.
Learning doesn’t have to be a chore. By retraining your brain to love learning, you can make the process of learning more enjoyable and rewarding. Once you have developed a positive attitude towards learning, you will find that your enthusiasm for learning will grow. Use the power of habit to retrain your brain to love learning again.