How Forming Habits Happens in the Brain

Both good and bad habits can produce dopamine dumps in our brain. Bad habits are often easier and take less work but can deliver similar or higher amounts of dopamine to our brain. When we act on these bad habits, we create long-term potentiation in which we are training our brains to be more responsive to these things. The more we do them, the more we strengthen the connections between these neurons. Over time the desire for these neurons to release the neurotransmitters that give us pleasure grows to becomes so strong that these tiny little turd-buckets rule our lives. When this happens even small triggers like smells or taste or memories can excite the synapse, making us feel an inert need to act on that bad habit. Our brains, neurons, and synapses will ultimately end up where we have trained them to end up, and after a while they will lead us there too.

Not only do we need to create better habits and act on them repetitively until they also become myelinated. We also need to understand how we have trained our brains to respond to certain triggers or stimuli. All of these steps will begin the process of addressing how our brains have become wired by addiction, and how the reward system in our brain has been built around our addiction. We don’t need to be like those little rats ruled by the reward system in our brain.

Researchers call the myelinated axons in our brain white matter and the unmyelinated portions grey matter. Alcohol and heroin have been shown to very specifically affect white matter in the brain. Alcohol affects white matter throughout the brain and heroin affects it mostly in the limbic system or pleasure region. It’s hard for researchers to measure exactly how drugs affect the myelinated regions of the brain because our brains have close to 100,000 miles of myelin covered nerve fibers with 100 trillion neural connections and synapses. It’s not easy to measure but it is clear that drugs cause certain structures to deteriorate and can also cause the connections between various regions to die. Drugs affect our cognition, behavior, attitude, ability to work, or maintain healthy relationships, etc. (The Brain’s of Addicts (mentalhelp.net) While it’s clear that drugs affect our white matter, the big question then, is how does our white matter or myelination influence our use of drugs. What role does myelination play in addiction?

Research has found a few things for sure. A large portion of the pruning, myelination and rewiring of our brains happens during adolescence, from slightly before we become teenagers until our mid-twenties. (Pruning, Myelination, and the Remodeling Adolescent Brain | Psychology Today). Neural firing becomes roughly three thousand times quicker with myelination. The younger we are when we try drugs and the more, we do them, the more likely we are to become addicts, although anyone can become an addict. Even if they never try drugs until late in life. Another thing is that those whose parents tried drugs are biologically predisposed for addiction, the epigenetic switch for addiction can more easily be turned on in those whose parents tried drugs. Another thing is that those who grow up surrounded in an environment in which drug use is prevalent are more likely to become addicts. Addiction is not caused by nature or nurture but by both and so much more. It is neural pathways, brain and social patterns, habits, decisions made again and again, beliefs, actions, and more.

The most encouraging thing about the research is that our brains also respond to the healthy choices we make and that it may be possible to stop or reverse damage that has already been done.

It’s not only a process of changing our thoughts, beliefs, and actions, but also the nature of our cells. they will continue moving down the path that we created for them to move down long ago.

The problem with bad habits is that once we start, they take control. The more we feed our lusts and longings, the more hardwired they become. This pattern does not just pertain to drugs, but every lust of the flesh and every worldly pattern. In psychology, they call it myelination of the cells' axons and dendrites. Basically, when you use a certain neural pathway repetitively, your brain begins to ascribe importance to that pathway. The more you use it, the more infrastructure your brain begins to build around it. This is called myelination, and it is similar to building a subway station from one point to another. When future thoughts trigger that pathway, almost no energy needs to be exerted to transform those thoughts into actions. These myelinated pathways are like major tourist stops on the subway. Our brains seamlessly carry cargo loads of neurotransmitters to and from these locations without even needing to think about it.

In some instances, like driving, for example, this process is highly advantageous. A new driver is extremely nervous and cautious about every decision. However, after some time, that same driver can hop into their car, drive home from work, and almost be surprised to find that they somehow made it home without making a single conscious decision. What happens, though, when the shortcuts and tourist spots in our minds are things like lust, gluttony, addiction, anger, anxiety, depression, hatred, judgment, pride, or cynicism? Are we doomed to destroy our marriages with lust, our bodies with gluttony, our relationships with riveting emotions, and our lives with addictive tendencies? Are we simply without choice in the matter? Are we doomed to helplessly and begrudgingly watch ourselves make mistakes that we will regret or can these habits and pathways change over time?

The strange thing about myelination in the brain is that it never goes away once it's developed. We can stop using these neural pathways for years at a time, but they don't degenerate. Even when we stop using them for a long time their infrastructure will remain. They become like empty subway stations that can be easily started back up again. The good news is that we can create new neural pathways and use them regularly. These can serve as alternative routes and therefore sidestep the preexisting tourist stations and hotspots. The more we trigger a neural sequence the more important our brain deems that sequence. While neural pathways are much more frequently created in youth, we can still create new positive pathways later in life.

Synaptic plasticity refers to changes in the brain in which new synapses are developed or existing synapses are either strengthened or weakened. The more frequently we perform various thoughts, habits, or actions, the more these synapses will be effected. Long-term potentiation happens when we use a synapse more frequently; by doing this we make the postsynaptic nerve more excitable or easily triggered. When me maintain any habit for an extended period of time, we train our brain to become excited about that habit. There are some institutions that help people avoid drug use by teaching them to get high on their brains own chemistry without the deleterious effects of drugs. Instead of a chemical or artificial high, they focus on a natural high; a way of triggering our brains pleasure system through positive constructive acts.

Our brains are constantly working to maintain homeostasis or balance. Drugs throw the balance off. When we take drugs, we create an influx of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters released in the limbic system create euphoria. Yet our brains are constantly reacting and adapting to everything we do to them. If we use drugs to forcefully release extra dopamine into our brains, they will react by creating less dopamine receptors. We therefore need more of the drug in order to compensate for the missing receptors and accomplish the same feeling. Another strange effect is that because the drugs cause us to have less receptors our normal dopamine levels feel deficient. Our brains can of course readapt and return to a normal level of functioning if we abstain from drugs.