Do you enjoy hearing new ideas?

This is a recalibration and your brain will begin to automatically fuse your vision perfectly. According to Dr Loftus's controversial view, it is often associated with therapies based on the recovery of past memories. Quite an invention, habit. It helps one to drive a car without having to learn how to do it all over again every time. It helps one to avoid tooth decay because, no sooner is it installed than the need to brush one's teeth arises automatically. Ultimately, it can also help one live longer, since one can develop the habits of physical exercise, drinking a lot of water and keeping away from trouble. In preparing the habit module, several million years ago, evolution arranged it into the structures and functions of three existing systems: learning (conditioning in particular), memory (association mechanism), and reward (the dopaminergic spring of motivation). Naturally, everything has evolved over many centuries to give you an integrated, speedy service, compatible with your sapiens system version. Quite a curse, habit. In some cases, it prompts people to eat even without the stimulus of hunger, whenever they watch television. It forces people to smoke the cigarette they don't feel like immediately after a cup of coffee. Did I slack off and become a couch potato? In fact, I've probably never been as productive in my life. My point is, you don't need to be hard on yourself to become a top performer and achieve everything you desire. You don't need to rely on fear, shame or guilt. Neither do you need to belittle yourself, hoping you'll finally goad yourself into doing the things you want to do. Trying to rule by fear shows a lack of self-trust and a lack of understanding in the power of self-love. So stop ruling yourself by fear. Instead, use inspiration and self-compassion as your primary motivators. Develop trust in yourself and start talking to yourself as you would talk to your best friend or your loved one.

Then see how quickly things change in your life and for the better. Possible patterns you might see. Make sure that the center point is right through the paper cip. All the mind needs is a reference and it will automatically make the adjustments for you. Do this exercise for a few minutes only, but do it about ten times a day until you can easily place the center of the cross anywhere on the string. Look away and look back and still find the cross through the paperclip. Then you have completed the exercise and have perfect convergence. In my experience, which tallies with the findings, this adjustment takes place quite rapidly and is highly effective. Research suggests more than 85 percent efficacy. I often come across people with presbyopia (the need for reading glasses) where convergence is a big part of the problem. For one reason or another, the eyes develop difficulty in turning inward. It requires the compulsive purchase of unnecessary items whenever the mood is low. It's automatic - apparently conscious and yet totally unconscious. Habit gets anchored more or less rapidly but always in an incremental way, finally producing a kind of classic Pavlovian conditioning. At that point, all it takes is a specific go signal associated with something else - TV, coffee, emotional state - for a burning desire to obtain a reward to be triggered: a slice of cake, nicotine, or the umpteenth pair of shoes to be abandoned at the bottom of the wardrobe. When this desire becomes irrepressible, obsessive or indispensable, habits really become a curse. It's called addiction. There is addiction to exogenous substances (food, alcohol, nicotine and various drugs), which tickles the reward system, usually through pre-installed specialised receptors in the brain, such as cannabinoid and opiate receptors. In the case of the latter, addiction can be devastating because tolerance (the need to increase the dose), abstinence and relapse are very powerful. Few substances create as powerful an addiction as heroin and cocaine.

Those who quit smoking feel the physical need for nicotine but withdrawal symptoms don't last more than five or six days. Here is a practical exercise you can do. For the next seven days, refrain from criticizing yourself. Every time you talk to yourself in a negative way, stop and replace your criticisms with kind words such as, you're doing okay, you'll do better next time or you made a mistake, but it's okay. If you want, you can also put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it each time you notice you're being harsh on yourself. Criticizing yourself is a habit and, as with any other habit, you can break it and replace it with a better one. Using your action guide, complete the exercises below: Undertake a 7-day self-compassion challenge. Whenever you notice you start beating yourself up, change your self-talk. Tell yourself you're doing okay. Be kind to yourself. The outer eye muscle is held too tight. Perhaps it is because their mothers told them not to cross their eyes as a child. In fact, for proper reading your eyes need to turn in (converge) a few degrees. If not, your near point of clear vision will drift further and further away and you will develop presbyopia. Convergence can be corrected optically with prism elements. A prism bends the light towards the base of the prism and thereby corrects for the divergence. The disadvantage of prism therapy is that they quickly become very heavy. Also there are limitations to the range of vision divergence a prism can compensate for. Prisms are mostly used for treating strabismus.

Of course, the prism will do nothing for the underlying convergence problem. What makes it difficult to abandon cigarettes is hidden beneath the threshold of consciousness. But there is also addiction to specific behaviours, not all of them expected at the outset. Over the past 10,000 years, at a snail's pace to begin with, then at the sustained pace of present times, technological acceleration has been incredible: occurring over a period of time too brief to allow evolution to keep up. Consequently, shopping, television, video games, porn and gambling can on occasion get the upper hand over rationality. And with a non-negligible new detail: since the early 21st century, these are all accessible through the planet's digital network, with the result that compulsive shopping, auto-eroticism and hands of poker are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And far from prying eyes. Not all brains are equally inclined to turn any dopaminergic piece of entertainment into an impossible-to-resist obsession. Some people aren't remotely tempted by the possibility of overdoing it with snacks at any time of day, or with cigarettes or television. Many develop unwelcome habits here and there (nail biting, using Facearticle too much), bad behavioural traits (always getting angry, seeing only the negative side of things, doing no physical exercise) and perhaps even develop one or more addictions that are sometimes unmentionable. But there are some that can really lose their heads. You must turn yourself into a person who actually achieves his or her goals. Over time, this will boost your confidence and help you generate momentum. Consistency matters far more than intensity. Expert goal achievers aren't necessarily the hardest workers, but they are definitely the most consistent. To sum up, set small goals and then achieve them. Do what you say you will do. This will enhance your self-confidence and build your sense of self-trust and self-worth. Setting daily goals Achieving goals consistently is a wonderful way to build confidence and generate momentum.

But how do you do it? This exercise is designed for developing perfect convergence. Take a string and measure off 2 meters. Next, tie knots every 10 cm along the string. To make the knots stand out you can paint them with colored markers. Alternatively you can tie on colourful beads or small plastic rings. Colored paperclips would also do. To perform the exercise, tie one end of the string to a door handle or to the back of a chair. Take the free end of the string and put it on the tip of your nose. Keep the string straight and look down its length. You will see a cross centered over every knot you look at. Just take a short visit to Las Vegas and you'll see how gambling, nicotine, alcohol and sex go cheerfully hand in hand. There is also a genetic link between different addictions in their most acute forms. In these cases, it's advisable to seek the assistance of health institutions and voluntary organisations that deal with specific problems. Particularly when the user considers it to be serious. In spite of individual differences, the mechanism by which habits and addictions are formed is always more or less the same. Before going to bed or on waking up in the morning, you promise to yourself not to repeat this action, both yearned for and unwanted at the same time: to stop gulping down the drink that shortens life, overplaying the video game that wastes time, gorging on the snack that increases the waistline. It seems like the rational thing to do, right? And yet a little later, breaking the promise to yourself becomes totally rational: at least from the point of view of placating the reward system immediately. The self-improvement project is postponed until tomorrow.