Join Center for Inspired Teaching in our campaign to make Curiosity the word of the year in 2025! Take the below Curiosity Challenge, share it with friends and family, and make every day a day full of curiosity.
Disrupt Your Routine
Change 3 things about your daily routine and see how these changes impact you.
This could look like drinking coffee at home rather than in the car (or being radical and switching to green tea!); taking a different route to work; closing your laptop (as soon as you finish reading this Challenge) and turning on music; reading a book instead of scrolling on your phone before bed. It could be switching out your usual evening TV show for a podcast or stretching instead of playing Candy Crush before bed.
Notice how these small shifts affect you:
What’s hard about the changes?
What’s refreshing?
Are there any effects beyond the immediate experience?
Do these changes impact anyone else besides you?
Did You Know?
Understanding how our brains form and reinforce habits can help us eliminate the bad ones and adopt the good ones.
New research from Trinity College in Dublin (from Dr Eike Buabang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Professor Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology) shows that “our habits are shaped by two brain systems – one that triggers automatic responses to familiar cues and another that enables goal-directed control. So for example, scrolling through social media when you are bored is the result of the automatic response system, and putting your phone away to focus on work is enabled by the goal-directed control brain system…Habits happen when automatic responses outweigh our ability to consciously control them. Good and bad habits are two sides of the same coin—both arise when automatic responses overpower goal-directed control. By understanding this dynamic, we can start to use it to our own advantage, to both make and break habits.” Learn how.
Learn more about the science of habit formation in this Healthline article medically reviewed by Debra Rose Wilson, and written by Stacey McLachlan.