Neuroplasticity & Growth Mindset

Core Blog - Overcoming mental adversity

05 February 2024

Imagine this. You’re a peak-performance athlete, dedicated to pushing your physical limits. In your latest training session, a sudden equipment failure shatters your hip, leaving you bed-bound in a hospital. The once rhythmic pounding of your feet on the track is replaced by the hum of medical machinery. Surgeries and months of rehabilitative physiotherapy loom ahead. You’re faced with the daunting task of adjusting your diet to account for the sudden loss of activity, and uncertainty clouds your thoughts as you question whether you'll ever run and train with the same intensity again.
Decades of medical advancements have taught us the art of rehabilitation and therapy for the body. We've honed the ability to treat minor injuries, viewing them as temporary setbacks. However, when confronted with major injuries, precision, discipline, and a laser focus on optimal outcomes become imperative. In this realm of physical recovery, we have learned to embrace the tenets of rehabilitation.
And yet, in the broader scope of human well-being, the principles of rehabilitation extend beyond the physical. Enter the realm of neuroplasticity – the brain's ability to reorganise itself, forging new neural connections throughout life.
In this context, poor time management, stress sensitivity, and negative self talk are all like the minor injuries our body might experience when training. The daunting factor with these is that they start out minor but when left untreated over long periods of time turn into more severe and harder to fix problems for people, developing into chronic procrastination, burnout and low self-eseteem.
Neuroplasticity makes us aware of our brains ability to change these habits and start treating and rehabilitating them. When we try new things and focus on the way we do them our brain begins to build new neural pathways, when we do this intentionally over a period of time the old pathways begin to weaken, much like roads. We have seen it time and time again, when a new major road opens with lots of space and higher speed limits people begin to use these roads as a mainstay of their daily commute. Take transmission gulley as an example, it has only been open for a couple of years now but we can already see the impact it has had on the old statehighway 1, the old highway is almost deprived of traffic. This is the same thing that happens when we flip our mindset. If you are able to adjust your negative self talk even just in a minor way, you can train your brain to feed your positive messages, instead of “I can’t do this” try adding “yet…” to the end of that sentence, within a week you might find yourself more focused, more positive and more composed when facing challenges in your daily study routine.
Here are the principles of neuroplasticity:

In the landscape of mental health, acknowledging and embracing neuroplasticity is akin to fine-tuning the body after a significant injury. It's an investment in mental well-being, fostering resilience, adaptability, and a profound capacity for growth. Just as an injured athlete diligently follows a rehabilitation regimen, engaging with neuroplasticity involves intentional and targeted mental exercises.
If you’re interested in learning from an actual expert, check out ted talk by Dr. Kristen Mesenheimer.

Now with what we’ve learnt about Neuroplasticity, we understand that our brain can change, that we can train bad habits into good habits and that everyone is capable of this, how do we put it to work?
Well first i’d recommend having a quick watch of this video.
The first step towards moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset is having a fundamental understanding of your neuroplasticity. A growth mindset is the ability to view your mistakes and setbacks as an opportunity to improve and do it better the next time. When you have a growth mindset you can look forward to challenging tasks because you know that through practise and repetition you will improve.
Ask yourself this:

How do you react when you hit a wall?
How do you take responsibility when you’ve made a bad decision?
How do you implement feedback into your next step?

For me I plan to have an intentional attitude towards my learning. I plan to define my growth mindset by how I navigate the stepping stones that present themselves on my learning journey, I know some may be harder to reach and some may be easy to fall back from or I might simply hit a few deadends, I am committed to not giving up and I will strive to continue to progress improve, particularly with my creative skills, it was pretty awesome to be shown a video when researching this about mental vs physical training and there’s real research that backs the practise of these things. That your imagination is actually linked to your physical ability and your ability to be more imaginative can be developed the same way you can develop your physical body.