Finding New Paths: On Habits, Neurons, and Rerouting Your Life

It’s 4:35 in the morning. I woke up at around three and couldn’t fall back asleep. And as I lay there, half-lost in thought, something hit me—an idea about habits, change, and how we move through the world.

Forming new habits is a lot like navigating a city.

We all have our routines. Our go-to paths. The way we travel to work, the roads we take, the turns we don't even think about anymore. We’ve taken these routes so many times that they’ve become second nature—easy. Efficient. Comfortable.

But what if someone told you there was a better route? One with fewer transfers on the train. One that shaved time off your commute or made the journey more peaceful. The catch? To take that new route, you’d have to walk down a back alley. Cross an unfamiliar bridge. Abandon the road you know.

That’s what building a new habit is. You’re not just adding something to your routine—you’re replacing a path you’ve worn down over time with one that’s less familiar. Less certain. And for a while, maybe even more difficult.

Because here’s the thing: you can’t just not go to work. You still have to get there. You still have to function. So you need a new path. One that gets you where you're going, but does it better.

There’s also a difference between adding new habits and replacing old ones. Creating something from scratch is one thing. But changing something preexisting—rerouting a well-worn neural pathway—is something else entirely. If you think about the brain and how it works—neurons, dendrites, pathways—then it starts to make sense.

Our habits are like neural highways.

The more we travel them, the more reinforced they become. They get stronger, faster, more automatic. The brain doesn’t have to work as hard. It likes that. It rewards efficiency.

But the downside? That reinforcement also makes habits hard to break. Especially the ones we've carried since we were young. They’re built into our wiring.

That’s why old habits die hard. They’re not just behaviors—they’re physical trails in the brain. And if we want to change them, we have to carve new paths. Slowly. Repeatedly. Intentionally.

Even if that new path is just a sketchy alleyway right now—even if it’s awkward or uncomfortable or uncertain—it can eventually become the better way. The smoother road. The one that gets you where you’re going without detours.

But only if you keep walking it.

So that’s what I’m trying to do: take the new path. Learn new routes to where I’m going. Let go of old ways of doing things that no longer serve me—or maybe never did. Because so many of our habits weren’t chosen. They were inherited, adopted, or stumbled into. And we kept them not because they helped us grow, but because they were comfortable. Familiar. Easy.

But comfort is not the same as alignment.

And sometimes, in chasing those momentary dopamine hits, we lose sight of the bigger things. The deeper things. The things that matter more.

So this is a reminder—to myself, and maybe to you—that it’s okay to change routes. Even if it’s awkward at first. Even if you get lost a little. Eventually, that new path becomes your path.

Somewhere better.