How to Improve Despite Ingrained Motor Skill Habits
How to Improve Despite Ingrained Motor Skill Habits
A new article from Neuroscience, published on November 10, 2025, highlights the challenges many confront in slowing down and acquiring new movement patterns. It shares that motor learning involves not only developing new skills, but also learning how to transition smoothly between habitual patterns and new ones. All of our habits were developed at a time when they addressed a concern. We used them repeatedly until they became ingrained in our nervous system. By doing anything without being consciously aware, the study shows how we repeatedly and automatically activate these habits, even when the results are less efficient. We stopped exploring and comparing to discern if there was an easier way. We tend to do the habitual unless we can slow the process down, pay attention, and compare. The habitual patterns activate, it’s unconscious—time to wake up and learn how to pay attention to the little things.
The trial studies showed that even when a request was made to explore a movement differently, the volunteers continually activated their habitual movement patterns, which occurred quickly. The speed of the action indicates that when something happens quickly, it is a habit we developed over time. To change, it’s necessary to pause and consider other options that might be more advantageous than our older, hardwired patterns.
The lyrics and song from Simon and Garfunckle share how to “Slow down, you move too fast, ya got to make the morning last, just tripping down the cobblestones, looking for fun and feeling groovy…” A message to stop, take your time, smell the roses, and find other ways to do what you need and want to do instead of the hurry-up and push into resistance our culture has thrown us into. Lucas Nelson sings to go and grow a garden!
Our persistent motor habits fire quickly; they happen without thinking, so taking time to pause and think is the best way to find other choices. They compared and noticed that switching between recently learned motor skills is more difficult than switching between intuitive and new movements. It’s through the process of practicing and repeating training skills that enables an easier, more reliable ability to retrieve the latest skills and switch between older patterns and the new ones. It’s through comparisons and finding where something not as familiar often can be more efficient.
This is the focus we explore with The Feldenkrais Method®. We slow down the entire process, get curious, and play with comparisons, creating constraints and then releasing them, noticing how often the little things, like holding our breath, interfere with efficient and organic action. I invite you to join me for weekly Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes in the afternoons, as well as private sessions, which include both virtual and live, hands-on Functional Integration (FI) sessions. Each of the approaches we explore in Feldenkrais is designed to support and increase various ways to do so, allowing us to recognize that there are more beneficial ways to act beyond the habits we have developed. We’re simply creating more options, not taking anything away from you; instead, we’re offering you more choices moving forward, which means less wear and tear and greater ease and comfort.
“In the course of the lessons, the reader will find that the exercises suggested are in themselves simple, involving only easy movements. But they are intended to be carried out in such a way that those who do them will discover changes in themselves even after the first lesson.” Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais
I will be taking this week off to enjoy time at the beach and run my labs. I will return to my practice on Saturday, the 22nd, so I hope you’ll join me upon my return.
I hope I have earned the privilege of your time and attention this week, and I look forward to connecting with you soon.
Warmest,
Peggi
