“Okay the brain is plastic?” So what?
4 mindset shifts, backed by neuroplasticity, to help unlock consistency in your practice.
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s capacity to reorganise its structure, function, and connections throughout life in response to what you do. It’s not a single dramatic rewiring event; it’s ongoing, whether you’re intentional about it or not.
Here’s why that matters: it’s why your patterns aren’t fixed, and why practising yoga, breathwork, meditation, or similar practices actually changes you over time.
But understanding the mechanism isn’t enough on its own. What keeps you consistent is how you interpret what happens while you practise, especially the parts that feel hard or don’t feel like anything at all.
Here are 4 mindset shifts, grounded in how the brain actually changes, to help you stay consistent with your practice.
1. It’s the difference between “this is who I am” and “this is who I want to be”
Most people just accept. They experience their own stress response, their focus, their emotional reactivity, as fixed. This is just who I am. Plasticity gives you another set of options.
These patterns were built through repetition, which means they were built, perhaps long before you even had a choice. Maybe you learned them unconsciously from friends, family, or influential people during childhood.
But what about what you want? Who do you want to be?
Neural connections were built, not born, which means they can be rebuilt. If you haven’t already felt it — this is one of the most empowering things to grasp.
You have agency. You can change.
2. If it feels hard, it’s working
This reframes why practice feels hard, in a way that changes whether you stick with it or abandon it.
Let’s take your morning routine. You get up. Look at your phone. Head straight for the coffee machine. No water. You need an instant hit of energy before you even face the day. This is routine. This is habit. It is unconscious. This is a pattern wired in the brain.
The more repetitions over time, the stronger that wiring — and the harder it is to change.
That’s why it’s so hard to, instead of reaching for your phone first thing, try:
→ Taking a few breaths
→ Thinking of one small thing to be appreciative of
→ Or sitting on a comfy cushion to meditate for 5, 10 minutes
It’s hard because your existing wired pathway is your usual go-to route — not because the new one is somehow wrong.
Nothing’s gone wrong when a new pattern feels difficult. That difficulty isn’t a sign something’s wrong. It’s consistent with what we know about how habits are wired: the old pathway is well-worn from repetition, the new one isn’t yet, and repetition is what changes that balance over time.
Even just knowing it’s hard tells you something: you’re exactly where you need to be… on the cusp of change.
Understand this, and you’re less likely to quit at the hard part — because you know the hard part is what building a new pathway feels like, not a signal to stop.
3. “The After Is the Before for the Next During”
— Daniel Goleman & Richard Davidson, Altered Traits
Probably one of my favourite quotes of all time.
After refers to enduring changes from a practice that last beyond the practice itself — trait changes. Before means your condition at baseline, before you start the practice. During is what happens while you practice — temporary changes in state that pass once you stop. Though this quote is about meditation specifically, I think it applies to any practice you’re choosing to add, or replace, in your routine.
My interpretation: you may or may not feel an immediate change post-meditation. But slowly, gradually, change is happening. This is perhaps why people lose the motivation to meditate; there often isn’t the immediate feedback you get from, say, going for a run. You feel that endorphin rush right away. Meditation, by contrast, is a gradual build.
So this quote reminds me: what you’re building when you sit on the cushion is gradual, and it requires consistency for the trait change to land. But if you can remind yourself you’re practising for the next during, you start to notice it; focusing the mind quicker, getting less distracted, dropping in faster, finding that sense of calm and peace sooner.
If you expect fast, dramatic change and it doesn’t show up that way, you might conclude the practice “isn’t working.”
Understanding plasticity as a real but gradual, layered process means you know what to actually look for, and you don’t abandon something that was working, just slowly.
4. It’s the foundation for flourishing; for weathering life’s challenges, and for thriving through them
Life’s challenges show up in a hundred forms: grief, recovering from trauma, being overwhelmed, dysregulated, distracted. None of us are born equipped to handle these. And every generation faces a different mix of them; what we’re up against now (a world engineered to fracture your attention) is not what our parents or grandparents had to build resilience against.
But the tools to meet these challenges- attention, awareness, resilience, regulation are not fixed traits you either have or don’t. They’re skills. Which means they can be cultivated.
This is neuroplasticity doing its work: preparing the mind and body to be as well-equipped as possible to weather whatever storm comes. That’s one side of it: coping, weathering, getting through.
The other side is thriving. Living your best life. For me, that means being happy, content, at peace. Finding connection and belonging in community. Showing compassion to others, and to myself. Having meaning, purpose, vitality. Feeling the full depth and richness of what’s in front of me, without needing it to be more than it is. What about you?
Awareness, attention, insight, presence, regulation, connection, compassion, resilience, and purpose are the nine skills of flourishing I use in the flourishing framework.
The same mechanism that lets you rewire a habit is what lets you build these. Practice isn’t a yoga-only claim. It’s a “how humans actually get better at things” claim, and these nine skills are what that practice is actually building toward.
Hope you’ll stay tuned - let’s build these skills to flourish together.
Sophia
