Biting your nails, endlessly scrolling on your phone, constantly being late.
Bad habits.
We all have them.
But did you know there’s a secret weapon in your brain to help you end bad habits and
make new ones stick?
Habits are the things we do everyday without thinking about them.
You’d be surprised how many there are!
-And what we found is that about 43% of the time, people are repeating the behaviors they've
done in the past in that context.
And they're thinking about something other than what they're doing.
-And habits aren’t all bad!
From taking a shower to making your bed in the morning, we have hundreds of habits that
help get us through our day.
Because we can do them without thinking, habits free up our brains to do other things.
It’s a mental shortcut we’ve evolved to make us more efficient.
Put another way, habits are easy.
That’s why they're so hard to break.
One strategy for breaking a bad habit is to make it harder to do.
Psychologists call this increasing friction.
Like if you’re constantly checking your phone, turn it over so you can’t see the
screen, or put it in another room where it takes effort to get.
-These things don't stop you from using your phone if you have to have it, but they just
make it a little bit more difficult to do so.
-At the center of every habit is a neurological pattern with 3 parts.
First there’s a cue, or trigger, that tells your brain to go into auto-mode.
Then there's the behavior, which is what we normally think of as the habit.
The third step is the reward.
Rewards cause your brain to release dopamine, a feel-good chemical that helps you remember
the habit in the future.
Let’s say you walk by the coffee shop everyday on your way to work,
triggering another craving
for a cuppa joe and also lightening your bank account.
You can avoid this habit by changing the environmental cue.
Take a new route instead.
-If we can make these small modifications in our environment
to make the behaviors we want a little easier to repeat, and the
behaviors we don't want
a little bit harder to repeat, then we can really gain control of our behavior
in a way that is very effective.
-But what makes a habit so easy to form in the first place?
Functional MRI scans let researchers look into how brains respond to habitual and conscious
tasks.
The first time you do an action, brain activity in the prefrontal cortex
and hippocampus lights up.
This is where a lot of decision-making and planning happens.
But when tasks get repeated, activity moves into more rudimentary areas of the brain,
like the putamen and the basal ganglia.
-So that part of our brain works somewhat differently from our conscious thinking self.
And that's why it's possible to have both a commitment to lose weight and be healthy,
and then a habit to overeat at dinner and snack constantly.
These primitive areas use up less energy because a bunch of related actions get grouped together,
in an idea known as “chunking.”
This turns the behavior into a habit.
Think about when you first learned to drive a car.
There were so many things to remember!
You have to buckle your seatbelt, turn the key in the ignition, check the mirrors, put
the car in drive, and press the gas pedal.
But over time, you no longer have to think about all these separate tasks.
They all get chunked into a single unit of memory, which gets triggered by one environmental
cue: getting into your car.
That’s why it’s so easy to focus on something else when you’re driving. You can think
about where you’re going and what’s for dinner, all while paying attention to the
road too.
It can feel like we’re all hardwired, but here’s the secret.
When you consciously repeat new behaviors, you firm up the connections between the cue, behavior,
and reward and strengthen those neural pathways in your brain.
It’s called self-directed neuroplasticity, and you can use it to effectively rewire your
brain.
For example, if you want to adopt a new behavior, tie it to an existing cue!
Find something you already do, like brushing your teeth in the morning, and tie a new habit
to it, like actually flossing.
Or want to make exercise a habit, but find the treadmill so boring?
Add a reward to it!
Watch a guilty pleasure like bad reality TV while you run.
This way, you’re more likely to do it on the reg.
How we form habits is fascinating, but have you ever thought about how we form memories
and what happens when they start to fade?
Check out Maren’s video on how electricity is being used to improve memory.
Got a bad habit you’re trying to break or a new one you're trying to form?
Let us know in the comments below.
Make sure to subscribe and thanks for watching.