Should you Try Everything?

• How many times your friends told you that you have to try everything at least once?
• Do you believe you must try everything?

I personally remember when I was a teen that a friend of mine told me: “You must try everything to know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

For the first instance, this might sound like a good argument, but you might change your mind completely when you understand how the brain develops habits.

Contrary to common beliefs, your brain isn’t a dormant organ that doesn’t change its shape, but each new activity you do alters brain cells’ connection with new neural pathways.

Studies have found that each new habit we develop creates a new special neural pathway in the brain. As a result, this habit becomes automatic and hard to break. It’s like your brain becomes hard-wired to make that habit. It’s as if you added a new piece of hardware to your computer to force it to repeat a certain function all the time.

The shocking news about trying new things

It was found that when people stop making the habits they learned, the nerve pathways associated with these habits never get removed. In other words, once you develop a bad habit, you become permanently programmed to keep doing it for your lifetime.

This is why a smoker can return to smoking 5 or even 10 years after quitting. Of course, it becomes easier to resist the habit when some time passes, but still, its roots remain in your brain.

So what does this has to do with trying something new?
In fact, the neural pathway for a new habit can develop even if you did it once in your lifetime. In other words, when you try something new even once then, you are actually programming your mind and altering its structure to crave this habit if that thing you tried appealed to you.

This is why many people are stuck with alcoholism, smoking, drug abuse, and many other habits just because they tried them once in their lives.

How can bad habits be stopped?

Studies have found that people stop bad habits not because the neural pathways get removed but because they develop newer good habits with stronger neural pathways that counter the effect of the old ones.

If, for example, you developed the habit of drinking tea 5 times a day, then developing the habit of drinking green tea instead of tea can help you get rid of your bad habit.

This is also why one of the best ways to get over a bad habit is to replace it with a good one that is much more powerful. So the conclusion is, trying anything new will let you risk getting addicted to that thing for the rest of your life.