Bad habits

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 every day

without thinking about them you'd be

surprised how many there are

and what we found is that about 43

percent 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 three 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

every day on your way to work

triggering another craving for a cup of

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 that

part of our brain works somewhat

differently from our conscious thinking

self

and that's why it's

possible to have

both the 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

one 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.