It’s that time of year again, as we watch an old year slip into a memory and prepare to greet a brand new year, pulsing with possibilities, each new day waiting like a blank page to be filled with the next chapter of our life. The promise of a fresh start, like new snow unsullied by the footprints of our past mistakes, gives us an opportunity to leave behind that which no longer serves us and to focus on goals that remain unaccomplished, and this is probably the reason why around 50% of Americans make New Year’s Resolutions. Yet for many of us, these resolutions are soon forgotten and seldom achieved; old habits are carried over to taint the new year and we soon become immersed in the quicksand of old beliefs, allowing old cycles to surface and be perpetuated once more.
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Habits are behaviors that are so deeply wired into our brains that we perform them automatically. They can be both good and bad: A habit can allow you to follow the same route to work every day without thinking about it, freeing your brain to think about other things. But we can develop plenty of bad habits too.

A new study has found that a small region of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, where most thought and planning occurs, controls which habits are switched on at a given time.
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