Power of Habit
I don’t have any morning rituals. My morning is very similar to other mornings of majority of people in the world. I wake up, make my bed, come to the bathroom, take toothbrush with my left hand, take toothpaste in my right hand, put paste on the toothbrush and wash my teeth. After I finish with the bathroom I take a breakfast, pull up my laptop and check my e-mail and social networks. If it’s a weekday, I prepare for school, and if it isn’t, I keep working on my scheduled projects (or if I have none I work on my side projects).
Remember how I wrote that I’m taking toothbrush with my left hand? Well, I’m right-handed. Few months ago I was reading about ambidextrous people (those who are able to use the right and left hands equally well). My father had this natural talent, and I was interested to know if it’s possible for us who had no luck to inherit such trait to get it via practice. I discovered it’s possible. From that day, I chose to do simple things I did every day with my right hand, with left hand. I have read that such habit can develop new neural connections and eventually allow person to use it’s non-dominant hand equally well as dominant one.
I was skeptical at first, but I thought I couldn’t lose anything if I tried. Weeks have passed and nothing special was happening. I was still very clumsy with my left hand. I had issues to write even simple words with it, not to talk about sentences. I was barely holding pencil in my hand, shaking it like schizophreniac. I remember how my professor of math in primary school told us in one occasion that he met very few left-handed person with well readable handwriting. After all, only about one percent of people are naturally ambidextrous. Why am I doing all of this?
Months have passed and I completely forgot about my goal. That month we had exams more often than ever before because we postponed them for October, forgetting that our last school year is much shorter. Somehow we managed to pass this period without bigger consequences. That morning was the same. I was thinking about yesterday’s test when I suddenly looked at my hands in the mirror. I’m holding my toothbrush with my left hand. I stopped. I started to pull it up and down just to be sure. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Who knows how long I’ve been brushing my teeth with left hand without even realizing it.
Point behind this article is to wash your teeth often. But you already knew that, right? We take many everyday things for granted. We may have saw our parents, friends or partners doing it and we don’t really understand why we do it nor how it affects our lives. I’m still not completelly ambidextrous. My left-handed writing still sucks, but it’s improving. I have no issues to hold things in my left hand anymore. If such small habit can make such important outcome and make you closer to the one percent of people on the Earth who were born with this, imagine what bigger things could do. Imagine what would happen if everyone of us changed such little habits in our lives!
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