Developing a Mantra

I have always thought mantras were exclusively for hippies and the idea of standing in front of a mirror and repeating wanky words to myself just made my eyes automatically roll until I did research for a show. Last year I devised and performed a one-woman show about why talking helps in terms of certain mental health conditions and how we can change our neural pathways by talking and thinking in a different way. One part of the show included a section on the power of a mantra.

Your brain is changing all the time, even as an adult. Synapses are the places where our brains communicate and pass instructions. When we are born we have 2,500 synapses per neuron. By age three, we have 15,000 synapses per neuron and by the time we are an average adult that figure has halved. Why? Because by then your brain knows the pathways you use most often, the ones that you need, and because it’s very efficient it just gets rid of all the others. But it retains the ability to make new connections. So if you start living your life a completely different way, your brain says right body we need lots of other things! Get rid of these ones! Make these ones!

This a phenomenon know as Neuroplasticy. Now as with all science, it's obviously a lot more complicated than that but that's the essential idea behind it. Read this article if you're aching for more information!

Now, if you stand in front of a mirror everyday and repeat a mantra that is making you say things that you've never said to yourself before, and you really invest in the words, mean them and start to believe them then your brain will start to believe it too and start building new pathways. Then, if you keep going and say your mantra whenever a bad thought comes into your head, your brain will realise you don't want the other thoughts and it will get rid of them for you. It's very efficient after all.

As I've said before, it is of course a lot more complicated than this and mantras alone won't help but they are a great way to get you thinking and talking differently to yourself and in the long-term, cause real change.

Developing a mantra can be tricky though. I looked through millions of websites and read mantra after mantra selecting a few that I thought might work but your connection to your mantra needs to be stronger than that in order to work. Think of when Professor Lupin was teaching Harry how to produce a patronus. He needed a really strong happy thought for it to work. He had a few others he could have chosen from but they would not have been strong enough for it to work and he would never have been able to produce his, quite frankly, awesome patronus.

I finally settled on this one from psychologist Vanessa Pawlowski.

It really taps into everything I want to be and feel right now. It might change after a while, once changes begin to happen and start looking at myself differently. I haven't stood in front of a mirror yet or said it out loud - I'm not quite there yet.. However, I have been saying it every time I have a negative thought about myself and I can already feel a difference. Negative moods aren't hanging around as long as they did before and I'm actually starting to notice good things when I look in the mirror. The secret now is to keep going after this initial positive week when I'm feeling all excited about change and new beginnings. This isn't something that's going to happen quickly, be easy and be entirely positive but as long as I carry on something will happen and I will change.