Walking With Christ

Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.(ESV)

The human brain is a machine of habit and repetition. This aspect of how we are built plays so much into how we live. To learn something new the brain literally builds new neural pathways or connections in the brain. Every time we repeat that new thought the pathway is strengthened which makes it easier to use that pathway. After enough use that pathway forms a proverbial rut in our brain that makes choosing a different path more difficult. This is how habits are formed. There is a physical reason why habits are so hard to break.

It’s also interesting to note that the formation of a new pathway requires more energy and more focus to get as much detail about the event as possible. This is why time seems to move so slowly as a child. We are actually paying more attention to everything. As we get older and need to form new pathways less often, we begin to rely on the neural pathways that have already formed more and more. This means that there is much less need for hyper attention to detail. Since the brain is not needing to pay attention to everything, we actually store less and less segments of time in our memories. We’ve “been there and done that” so there is less need to pay attention. Thus the allusion that time is moving faster.

This is also why the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response is so taxing on the human brain. When we are stressed (anything that can trigger the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response such as anxiety or physical injuries), we need to pay closer attention to our surroundings as a survival mechanism. The brain moves back into that hyper aware state taking mental note of every detail of every moment. This is physically taxing because of the amount of extra energy the brain is having to spend. This is also why those times of stress hold such power over us and vacations always seem so short. We are hyper focused during those times of stress but not at all focused when we are truly relaxed.