Becoming Nose-Blind to Good Habits

Well, hello there!

All of a sudden, it’s two weeks into August. The nights are cooler (thankfully), but the days are still warm and the light is still lasting until well past the dinner hour (also, thankfully).

These positives can give us energy to get ready for the next phase of the year: the transition to autumn and the return to school.

I love this time of year, not only for the cooler nights but also for the opportunity for renewal, whether it’s new school supplies, new school clothing, or a new school attitude. It’s the 
new-year-in-the-middle-of-the-year, and it’s waaaay better than January 1st, as far as I’m concerned.

Right now, we’re buoyed and energised by the summer, and feelings of hopefulness and positive anticipation can be brought to the front of the line. This is important, because this can also be a time of year that is full of dread and nervousness about the new things that are just around the corner.

While many students are excitedly anticipating a return to routine, friends, and school life, just as many are getting nervous. Their past experiences of stress, challenges, and frustration are moulding the stories their brains are telling them. It’s these stories that we want to influence now.

One way to do this is to continue with the habit-building process we learned about in July’s blog. The two main steps then were to piggy-back the new action onto an already-established task, and to ensure that it was happening consistently and in the same location.

What’s the Next Step?
Step three goes further into the habituation process. Habituation can be thought of as the brain’s tendency to respond less and less to situations that it has encountered before. It’s an evolutionary mechanism that enables creatures to conserve energy for the times when it’s really needed. 

It’s like becoming “nose-blind”: you know, those room deodorizer commercials that talk about how we can’t smell the dogs in our house, or the scent we’ve just added, so they give you two vials in one package to alternate between? They’re capitalising on the habituation your brain is doing, when it no longer notices the new scent (or old, doggy scent) and selling the product that will solve this problem.

In our learners’ cases, the “problem” is making the shift back to school-related habits after the summer. We want them to become “nose-blind” to the routine of settling down at a specific time and location on a consistent basis and maximising the benefits of learning and review at home. So, we need to help them habituate this behaviour.


How Do I Make My Learner Nose-Blind to Good Habits?
The challenge comes from the brain’s tendency to benefit from breaking its positive experiences into chunks. This is to prolong happiness, and it does the opposite with negative experiences, where getting it over with leads to less distress.

If we can make the learning a positive experience, then chunking makes sense. Combine that with chunking as a well-known learning strategy on its own, and we have a great approach from both a psychological and learning perspective.

Now that the location and consistency of the routine are in place, let’s habituate our learners’ brains to this as a strategy by incorporating some exposure to learning materials. If they have access to textbooks already, spend the time reading ahead in any course. If no external resources are available, spend the time reviewing last year’s material.

• Practise some math questions for that 15-minute chunk

• Practise summarising a paragraph from last year’s biology notes for that 15-minute chunk

• Complete any summer reading assignments in these blocks of time

• Schedule a readiness session or two with me – we’ll take 30 minutes to plan + initiate the tasks and my coaching will give them the tips they’ll need to carry on independently in the fall

When your learner can habituate their brain to positive results from this strategy, their brain will be able to focus more of its efforts on learning new material come September. Instead of expending energy on organising a space, determining a space, deciding what to do, and all manner of behaviours that we naturally use to delay a task, they will maximise their learning and improve their results.

Please connect and schedule a readiness session or two with me!

Yours in learning,
L