Nano practices are quick momentary habits that can change your life. I like to experiment with these lean brain-hacking techniques because they punch above their weight for how much time investment is required. Although I do not think they replace a daily formal meditation practice, they do assist us when integrating “on the cushion” insights into daily life, or making use of neuroplasticity to overcome unhelpful patterns of wiring in the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord). Or both.
But taking advantage of nano practices requires persistence at first, while we craft the habit.
How to craft a habit
(this is an aside — you can skip it)
One way to build a good habit is to craft a three-step cycle: trigger -> action -> reward. You choose a trigger (or sometimes our own habit-forming consciousness will choose one for us) and use it as a reminder to perform a certain action, that you then reward yourself for doing. Ideally the action will provide its own reward, but it doesn’t have to.
It takes persistence to start that cycle rolling, and you’ll have to deliberately notice the triggers and decide each time to follow through with the action part. But as we all know, habits build their own momentum — a good thing, in the case of nano practices. Eventually it will establish a virtuous cycle of habit: the more you do it the better it feels and the better it feels the more you do it. But unlike some habits, there’s no Breaking Bad-style drug addiction looming in your life if you take one of these practices on.
Once that cycle is established through persistence, it will form a virtuous spiral that has the potential to rewire the reward circuitry in your brain through neuroplasticity.
Depending on the results you are trying to achieve you may need to graduate from persistence into something more like relentlessness. For example, in February of 2016 I was suddenly and unwillingly cut out of three parallel careers by chronic whiplash pain 1. In July 2016 I cobbled together a home-based neuroplastics intervention based on my own reading and research (I kept a diary of it for 30 days). Although still not capable of full-time work, I’m a lot better off thanks to the habitual nano practice of visualising during pain spikes (which is ongoing and probably will be for the rest of my life). I can work to a “one hour on, one hour off” schedule for most afternoons, which is a huge win compared to where I was at.
But in order to shift the pain to that extent, I had to be more relentless than the pain for about three months before it started to become baked in 2.
Just remember, no matter how much effort it takes to begin with, soon you will not need to work at it. You will automatically ignite a flicker of intention with every little trigger and then engage the practice without question. Like letting out the clutch. What an investment those early efforts are!
Further Reading
One man who wrote a book on habits (literally) is Charles Duhigg, and The New York Times has kindly reviewed his work. He suffers from the usual “motivational talker” oversimplifications, but there is some useful stuff in there.
Although much of James Clear’s content on habits is taken from Charles Duhigg’s book, habits are His Thing and he does a good job of illustrating the repercussions of habit theory. Similar to Charles Duhigg, there is a lot more to habits than what he highlights, but it is very clearly explained for what it does cover (which for both authors is a great deal more than I am, tbf).
I am coping fine thanks, and not looking for sympathy 🙂 Empathy is OK, but do not pity the man who has more time to write than ever before!↩
{Look, another little clicky balloon}
Until I get around to writing an Introduction to Neuroplastics for Persistent Pain, the following diary update provides a basic starting point on the technique with some further reading links at the bottom: neuroplastic brain hacking technique for persistent pain.↩