In the year 108 AD, a man named Epictetus informally taught how to live a good life. Among many other things, Epictetus covered the topic of habits.
Lucky for us, one of his students took notes while listening to his lectures — and captured some of Epictetus’s surprisingly accurate predictions about how we make and break habits. As translated in Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic:
“Every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking, and running by running . . . therefore, if you want to do something make a habit of it, if you don’t want to do that, don’t, but make a habit of something else instead.”
Today, almost 2,000 years later, science calls this neuroplasticity. It’s your brain’s ability to physically alter itself throughout your entire life. But it takes repeated, affirmative action to do so.
Let’s say you want to be a runner. Each time you run, a material called myelin forms around the neural connections associated with running in your brain. Myelin protects these connections and makes it easier for signals to travel along them faster. Think of it as the bumpers on a bowling alley — they make it more likely the ball hits its goal.
This process is cumulative, so with every additional run you complete, the layer of myelin gets thicker and thicker —…
