Three ways to open your mind and change your life, according to neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart.

Changing your mind is as easy, or as hard, as you want it to be. That’s the big takeaway from The Source, a manual for a new and improved you from neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart. Rather than thinking of your brain as an organ hardwired to work in a particular way, Dr Swart suggests it is far more adaptable and just one part of a larger entity, your nervous system. The relationship between your heart, mind and gut is a lot more complicated than you might imagine. What’s more, changing the way you think can have an impact beyond your brain or even your body. “The elasticity of our brain means that we have the ability to change our brain pathways, and therefore our lives, for a better tomorrow,” she writes.

This isn’t just a New Age manifesto built on hazy thought experiments. Dr Swart employs the latest scientific research to back up every claim. In fact, she turns the very idea on its head, by suggesting that, at its core, science should be open to new ways of thinking. “By definition, if you stand for science, you stand for being comfortable with failure and moving forward with an appetite for new learning and continuous improvement,” she says.

Here are three things you can do right now to open your mind and, by doing so, improve your life.

“The first step to unleashing the power of our brain is to stop taking it for granted,” writes Dr Swart. “In every millisecond, our brain’s 86 billion neurons (brain cells) are interpreting and responding to the glut of sensory feedback they receive from our body and environment, and processing and filing this information according to what the brain thinks it ‘means’.” That is a lot of information to take in and, in order to deal with daily life, the brain often falls into a pattern of working, a “feedback loop” or autopilot. This could be taking the same route to work every day, or it could be sticking to the same role in an interpersonal relationship.

“One of the simplest ways of clearing old patterns in order to create new neural pathways is to be more in the moment and more capable of focused attention,” says Dr Swart. We know what you’re thinking: meditation, yoga and other mindfulness techniques. Yes, but Dr Swart considers “mindful eating, mindful walking and paying full attention to people as we interact with them” to be just as important. Moreover, she cites evidence gleaned in the field showing that US Marines exposed to mindfulness training proved to be calmer during military exercises and were quicker to react to a threat.

“Losses have twice as powerful an effect on our brain as the equivalent gain, so we are more likely to go out of our way to avoid a potential loss than we are to try to gain a reward,” says Dr Swart. “Blame culture in business relies on this behavioural bias because people are too fearful to question poor decision-making and challenge the status quo.”

Rather than just favouring positive feedback over negative criticism, Dr Swart suggests reframing failure itself. “Charles Eames created his iconic chair as a side project, a spin-off following the honing of his innovative technique for moulding plywood for leg splints. Viagra was originally developed for the treatment of high blood pressure. These are major examples of discovery through experimentation and ‘failure’. Reassessing our own ‘failures’ and rebranding them as ‘not yets’ is a good way of rewriting our own story.”

Writing a journal is key to Dr Swart’s philosophies. This is, in part, to gather your thoughts and assess what has led you to this point, but it is also a tool for visualising your future success. The next step is an action board, which she describes as “a collage that represents everything you aspire to – the ultimate manifestation of priming your brain to design your life”. This isn’t a metaphor, by the way. What Dr Swart has in mind is something like a GCSE art project, so get out your scissors and glue stick.

The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words applies here. Dr Swart suggests rifling through magazines for images and symbols that best represent the future you want, letting your gut take the lead and avoiding words, which are less likely to stick in your subconscious. When it’s finished, display your board somewhere you will see it at least once every day, as a reminder of what you hope to achieve, not to mention your newfound crafting skills.

The Source (Vermilion) by Dr Tara Swart is out now

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