quickest way possible to make healthy habit stick by using a concept called

habit stacking. That's what we're talking about today on the Shaline show. All right, let's go.

In 2007, researchers at Oxford University started looking at the brains of newborn babies,

and what they found was pretty dang interesting. What they found when comparing the brains of

newborn babies to the brains of adults was that adults had fewer, got this fewer neurons in

their brain than newborns did. Kind of interesting, huh? And that was very compelling for the researchers.

They wanted to figure out, like, why would babies have more neurons if obviously adults are

more skilled and smarter, et cetera? They can do more. And they wanted to know, okay, what was going

on in the brain? What they discovered is a concept that they now call synaptic pruning, okay?

And here's just a really layman's way of understanding synaptic pruning. It is our synapses.

Think of them as if you don't use it. You lose it. Our synapses are a fancy way of describing

the connection that happens between two neurons in your brain. So it's this basic idea that your

brain, if it doesn't need those connections, they kind of fade away. If they don't get used

frequently, they disappear, if you will. All right, so let me give you a more tactical example of this.

So let's say that the country, the world, is in the middle of a pandemic, and everyone goes into

lockdown. And you decide to every day of the pandemic to go roller skating. Now, you used to do it

as a kid, but you haven't done it in years and years and years. Well, what happens is when you

were a kid, you could do like shoot the duck and you could roller skate backwards. You could do all

these really cool things and you were very, very confident on your roller skates. But now you're an

adult and you're putting on your roller skates again. And while some of those synapses are there,

the connections that used to exist between them have either weekend or they fall in a way.

But you start roller skating every single day for like six months. And your brain begins to

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