How to Reroute Your Thoughts and Be Transformed
What is the most practical way to get rid of false or negative thoughts?
Science now confirms what the Bible has said for thousands of years. Reroute your thoughts and be transformed.
You look down as the your car dives over the lip of the gorge. The road is steep as you plunge toward the New River Gorge in West Virginia. You are 1600 feet from the bottom where the New River churns and foams over piles of rocks. You are over 100 stories from the bottom – taller than any building in the U.S.
Hairpin turns and switchbacks force you one way then another as you creep down into the Gorge. 7.5 miles later you emerge on the other side of the gorge. It is a beautiful, but dangerous drive. Impossible when the road is covered with ice and snow.
That used to be the only way to cross the New River for miles. But today, you can bypass this dangerous, curvy road by driving over a 3,000 foot (a little over ½ mile) suspension bridge while zooming down I-77 at 70 miles an hour. What used to take 20-25 minutes now takes 29 seconds.
What happened? The road was rerouted. A safer, bigger, faster highway was made and few travelers take the old dangerous road today.
This is what happens in our brains as we renew our minds. Old, twisted, harmful thoughts which used to be the dangerous road we followed are replaced with straight highways which will keep us safe and get us where we need to go faster and with much less effort.
We know from advances in neuroscience that our brains physically change as we change our thoughts and actions. It’s call plasticity.
Studies have revealed that the shape of the brain actually changes as we change our thoughts and actions. So we are literally rerouting the pathways of our thoughts as we renew our minds with God’s Word.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Romans 12:2 NIV
Every action begins with a thought. So changing the way we think changes who we are and what we do.
“For as he thinks within himself, so he is.” Proverbs 23:7 NASB.
Our brains aren’t capable of doing many things at the same time. Remember, your brain is keeping every part of your body working while sensing and responding to everything that is happening around you and dealing with your active mind at the same time. That requires a lot of “processing power.” So our brains create habits – default reactions to similar situations. When faced with a situation, our brains look for the established neural pathway that we have used in the past and plugs in that automatic response.
For example, when faced with stress or anxiety our brain would look for our most frequently used path when we are stressed out or anxious. If that pathway is grumbling or complaining to release our feelings of stress and frustration, then that is the path we will follow.
We don’t consciously make a decision. We think we do. But often, our brains follow the established pathway and give our default response.
In this podcast, we are rewiring our brains. For example, choosing to “give thanks” day after day. Each time we do, we add another layer to the neural pathway of that choice. Our goal is that the pathway of “thanksgiving” will become greater than our pathway of “grumbling, accusing and gossip.”
The problem is that neural pathways in our brain never go away. Grumbling will always be an option. But if you choose thanksgiving again and again, it will become the default pathway. It will become the highway which replaces the old, twisted path you used to follow.
In other words, your default response to stress, frustration, even anger, will become THANKSGIVING.
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