Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, we're talking all about habits.
In particular, we're going to discuss the biology of habit formation and the biology of how we break habits.
Habits are things that our nervous system learned, but not always consciously.
Sometimes we develop habits that we're not even aware of until they become a problem, or maybe they serve us well, who knows?
But the fact of the matter is that habits are a big part of who we are.
In fact, it's estimated that up to 70% of our waking behavior is made up of habitual behavior.
So if habits are largely learned consciously or unconsciously, we have to ask ourselves what is learning?
Well, learning is neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is simply the process by which our nervous system changes in response to experience.
But at the end of the day, neuroplasticity is about forming new neural circuits, new pathways by which certain habits are likely to occur and other ones are less likely to occur.
As many of you are well aware, there are popular books about habits and there's a whole psychological literature about habits.
And those two areas point to some very interesting aspects of habits that I think are worth mentioning.
First of all, is this notion of immediate goal-based habits versus identity-based habits.
Immediate, goal-based habits are going to be habits that are designed to bring you a specific outcome as you do them.
So each and every time you do them.
So maybe you're somebody that wants to get more of zone two cardio, for instance.
That would be an immediate goal-based habit.
If your goal is to get that cardio maybe four times a week.
Every time you do it, you could check off a little box and you'd say, okay, I did it.
You met the goal.
That is different than so-called identity-based habits, where there's a larger overarching theme to the habit, where you're trying to become quote unquote a fit person, or you're somebody who wants to be an athlete or something of that sort.
It's where you start to attach some sort of larger picture about yourself or what it means for you to do that habit.
Where you're, There's both the immediate goal right.
Complete the exercise, complete the session or whatever it is, check off that box, but that you're linking it to some sort of larger goal.
Another thing that you'll hear out there in the literature is that it takes 21 days to form a habit.
Some people say 18, some people say 21, some people say 30 days, some people say 60 days.
So which one is it?
Does it depend on the habit that one is trying to form or does it depend on the person that's trying to form the habit?
It turns out that there's excellent peer review data on this.
There's a study published in 2010, first author Lally, L-A-L-L-Y.
This study found that for the same habit to be formed, it can take anywhere from 18 days to as many as 254 days for different individuals to form that habit.
So for those of you listening, some of you might be thinking I can't believe that it would take some people 254 days to get into that habit.
But as I said, people are highly variable.
And if you can't form one habit easily, it doesn't mean that you can't form other habits easily.
The mystery of why certain people can form certain habits more easily than others probably has something to do with how well people manage what's called limbic friction.
Now, limbic friction is not a term that you're going to find in the formal neurobiological literature or even psychological literature.
It's frankly a term that I coined to encompass a number of different pieces of the psychology and neuroscience literature.
Limbic friction is a shorthand way that I use to describe the strain that's required in order to overcome one of two states within your body.
One state is one of anxiousness, where you're really anxious and therefore you can't calm down, you can't relax and therefore you can't engage in some particular activity or thought pattern that you would like.
The other state is one in which you're feeling too tired or lazy or not motivated.
Both of those states feeling too alert and too calm, if you will, relate to the function of the so-called autonomic nervous system, a set of neurons and hormones and chemicals in your brain and body that act as sort of a seesaw.
You're either alert or calm.
You're either asleep or stressed.
Those two states are not compatible with one another.
You've probably heard of wired and tired, but that's really once.
You've been very stressed for a long time, to the point where you're exhausted.
What does the autonomic nervous system have to do with any of this?
Well, limbic friction is a phrase that can be used to describe how much effort, how much activation energy you need in order to engage in a particular behavior.
A lot of habit formation has to do with being in the right state of mind and being able to control your state of body and mind.
So, as we march forward, what you're going to find is that this phrase or this term limbic friction is going to be a useful metric or way for you to touch in with yourself and address whether or not you are likely to be able to form a certain habit easily, or whether or not it's going to be very challenging.
And I'm going to teach you a way to measure your degree of limbic friction.
That is how much activation energy it will take in order for you to execute a new habit.
And I'm going to teach you how to measure your limbic friction and activation energy for how likely it is that you're going to be able to break a habit that you don't want to have.
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The other key concept for us to address that's really mainly found in the books and articles out there about habits is is this notion of what I call linchpin habits?
Linchpin habits are certain habits that make a lot of other habits easier to execute.
Now, the sorts of linchpin habits that I'm referring to are always going to be things that you enjoy doing.
I'll just give you an example from my life.
I happen to like exercise not all forms of exercise, but I happen to like resistance training and I happen to like running.
And for reasons that I'll get into a little bit later, I place those activities typically early in the day because of the neurochemistry and the various types of hormones, et cetera, that are associated with performing those activities.
But I really place those activities under the umbrella of what I call linchpin habits.
Why?
Because those particular habits are easy to execute because I enjoy them, but they also make a lot of other habits easier to execute.
Things like being alert for work, things like making sure that I get good sleep the night before, things like hydration, things like making sure that I eat the foods that are better for me than maybe some of the other foods that I would more reflexively reach to if I weren't doing that training.
So certain habits act as linchpins, meaning that they shift a lot of other things.
They can control and bias the likelihood that, in this case, you or me will perform other habits that are harder to access, that we have less of an affinity for.
So again, there's three concepts that we need to include here.
We've got identity-based versus goal-based habits.
We've got the concept that different habits take different periods of time to adopt, depending on the person and the habit.
And that there are these what I call linchpin habits, certain habits that make other habits easier to execute.
And those linchpin habits always, always, always are things that we enjoy doing.
So now I'd like to shift to thinking about a particular aspect of habits. and that's habit strength.
Habit strength is measured by two main criteria.
The first is how context dependent a given habit is.
So context dependence is if you go from one environment to the next, do you tend to do the same thing in the same way at the same time of day?
So, for instance, brushing your teeth first thing in the morning, maybe some of you do that before breakfast, maybe some of you do that later.
Maybe some of you, like me, don't even eat breakfast.
When I travel, I tend to brush my teeth at more or less the same time of day relative to when I wake up as I do when I'm at home.
So it's context independent.
So it's a very strong habit, right?
The other aspect of habit strength is how much limbic friction is required to perform that habit on a regular basis.
This is extremely important because if you are in the process of building habits and consolidating those habits, right then it's probably going to take more limbic friction to execute those habits.
So these two aspects context dependence, whether or not you're likely to do the thing, regardless of where you are on travel, at home, on vacation, with people around, not people around, et cetera and how much limbic friction is required to execute that habit will tell you whether or not that habit is deeply or just shallowly embedded within your nervous system.
The goal of any habit that we want to form is to get into what's called automaticity.
Automaticity is fancy language for the neural circuits can perform it automatically.
And that's the ultimate place to be.
So what I'd like to do is to take the scientific literature of how the nervous system learns and engages in neuroplasticity and apply that to habit formation, habit maintenance and, if so desired, how to break particular habits.
I'd like to give you a particular tool that's gleaned from the research psychology literature.
I should mention that I learned about this from an excellent review article that's available online.
It's called Psychology of Habit.
The authors are Wendy Wood and Dennis Runger.
This is published in Annual Review of Psychology.
They're talking about the various ways that habits form in the nervous system.
And they mention.
With each repetition of a habit, Small changes occur in the cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with procedural memory.
Procedural memory is holding in mind the specific sequence of things that need to happen in order for a particular outcome to occur.
Let's say I want to get into the habit of making myself or someone else in my household a cup of espresso every morning.
I would actually think through each of those steps walk into the kitchen, turn on the espresso machine, draw the espresso.
Walking through each of those steps from start to finish, It turns out just that simple mental exercise, done once, can shift people toward a much higher likelihood of performing that habit regularly, not just the first time but as they continue out into the days and weeks that follow.
So this procedural stepping through of the steps of the recipe, or the series of action steps that are involved in sitting down to study and writing for an hour, or generating exercise whatever it is the habit that you're trying to learn when you're doing that exercise, it sets in motion the same neurons that are going to be required for the execution of that habit.
And so when you actually show up to perform that habit, it's as if, the dominoes fall more easily.
It's a lower threshold, as we say, in order to get the habit to perform.
So for those of you that just want to be more habitual about certain things, be able to perform certain things more reflexively that you would like in your life, simply take the time, do it once, maybe twice, and just sit down, close your eyes if you like, and just step through the procedure of what it's going to take in order to perform that habit.
The psychology literature, as I mentioned, and also the neuroscience literature, strongly supports the fact that it is going to make it far easier for you to adopt and maintain that habit.
So now I'd like to discuss a second and what I think is perhaps the most powerful tool for being able to acquire and stick to new habits.
The tool that I'm referring to is something called task bracketing.
We have in our brain a set of neural circuits that fall under the umbrella term of the basal ganglia.
The basal ganglia are involved in action.
Execution meaning doing certain things and action suppression not doing certain things.
In the experimental realm these are referred to as go, meaning do or no, go don't do certain things.
So it turns out that there's an area of our basal ganglia called the dorsolateral striatum.
It's very important for the establishment of behaviors that are associated with a habit, but not necessarily the habit itself.
And beautiful studies in both animals and humans that record the electrical activity in the dorsolateral striatum find that the dorsolateral striatum is associated, meaning it becomes active at the beginning of a particular habit and at the very end and after a particular habit.
Hence the phrase task bracketing, it brackets the habit.
This is very important because task bracketing is what underlies whether or not a habit will be context dependent or not, whether or not it will be strong and likely to occur.
Even if we didn't get a good night's sleep the night before, even if we're feeling distracted, even if we are not feeling like doing something emotionally or if we are completely overwhelmed by other events, if the neural circuits for task bracketing are deeply embedded in us, meaning they are very robust around a particular habit, well then it's likely that we're going to go out for that zone two cardio, no matter what, that we're going to brush our teeth, no matter what.
In fact, brushing our teeth is a pretty good example, because for most people, even if you got a terrible night's sleep, even if everything in your life is going wrong, chances are unless you're very depressed if you're going to leave to work, or even if you're not that you're going to still carry out the behavior of brushing your teeth in the morning.
I would hope so actually, but you are probably less likely to perform particular habits that are not what you deem as necessary.
But if you think about it brushing your teeth exercise, eating particular foods, maybe engaging socially in particular ways you are the one that places any kind of value assessment on which ones are essential and which ones are negotiable.
So task bracketing sets a neural imprint, a kind of a fingerprint in your brain, of this thing has to happen at this particular time of day, so much so that it's reflexive.
And, as we'll talk about in a moment, there's a way that you can build up task bracketing so that, regardless of what it is you're trying to learn, there's a much higher probability that you're going to do that thing.
And when I say learn, let's say you're trying to acquire a habit that for you is really challenging.
Maybe it's that you're going to write for an hour a day on a book project that you've been thinking about, or you're going to work on mathematics, or you're going to do any sort of thing that for you there's a lot of limbic friction.
While it is important to think about the sequence of events that would be required in order to engage in that behavior, that procedural memory visualization exercise we talked about before that will help.
There is a way also that you can orient your nervous system toward this tax bracketing process, so that your nervous system is shifted or oriented towards the execution of a given habit.
So this is sort of like warming up your body to exercise.
When the dorsolateral striatum is engaged, your body and your brain are primed to execute a habit.
And then you get to consciously insert which habit you want to perform.
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So, in order to leverage the neural mechanisms of task bracketing, in order to increase the likelihood that you're going to perform a particular habit, I have to break it to you that one thing that you've probably heard over and over about habit formation is not true.
And what I'm referring to is this idea that if you are very specific about exactly when you're going to perform a particular habit, that you are more likely to perform that habit.
And while that is true in the short term, it is not true in the long term.
And the reason for that is that our nervous system tends to generate particular kinds of behaviors based not on time but on our state, meaning what level of activation is taking place in our brain and body, how much focus we happen to have, how fatigued we are, how energized we are.
So, while schedules are important, it's not the specific time of day per se that's going to allow you to get into a habit and form that habit and consolidate that habit.
It's the state that your brain and body are in that's important to anchor yourself to.
And so now I'm going to present a very straightforward but neurobiologically grounded program by which you can insert particular types of habits that you want to perform at particular phases of the day not times of day, but in particular phases of the day because it turns out that particular phases of the day are associated with particular biological underpinnings, chemicals and neural circuits and so forth.
It involves dividing the 24 hour days into what I call three phases.
The first is phase one, which is zero to eight hours after waking up approximately.
The second phase is the nine to 14, maybe 15 hours after you wake up.
And the third phase is 16 to 24 hours after waking up.
So we've taken the 24 hour cycle.
We've carved it up into three phases, phase one, phase two, and phase three.
Phase one, which again is zero to eight hours after waking, has a particular neurochemical signature.
Regardless of what you do, the neuromodulators norepinephrine as well as epinephrine, so that's noradrenaline and adrenaline, as well as the neuromodulator dopamine, tend to be elevated during that first zero to eight hours after waking.
In that first phase, your whole system is action and focus oriented.
And we know that when you are action and focus oriented, and because of the neurochemicals that are naturally released into your brain and body, that you will be more likely to overcome any limbic friction that stands in the way of performing particular habits.
So, as you list out or think about the various habits that you'd like to adopt in your life, Take the habits for which you know there's the highest degree of limbic friction.
They are the hardest for you to engage in.
They require the most activation energy and put those in this zero to eight hours after waking.
This will greatly facilitate your performance of those new habits.
By placing them in this broader window of zero to eight hours after waking.
What you're doing is you're creating task bracketing.
You're making it such that your nervous system will predict when you are going to lean in against limbic friction in order to perform particular types of habits.
Phase two, as I mentioned, is about again.
These aren't specifics, but about nine to 14 or 15 hours after waking.
During this phase of the day, because of the circadian shifts in our biology, dopamine and norepinephrine and cortisol are starting to taper down, just naturally, and a different neuromodulator serotonin, is starting to rise.
Serotonin is definitely going to be highest in this second half of the day and tends to lend itself to a more relaxed state of being.
There are certain things that we all can and should do during this phase two of each day that lend themselves to a state of mind and a state of body that is going to be beneficial for the generation and consolidation of certain types of habits.
What are those things?
First of all, as the day goes on, you should try, if you can, to start tapering the amount of really bright light that you're getting, unless it's sunlight.
Talked about this before on the podcast, but if you haven't heard, viewing the sun as it's at what we call low solar angle, so as it's headed toward the horizon but getting some sunlight in your eyes in the second half of the day can also be beneficial for a number of brain systems and psychological systems.
Things like heat and sauna, hot baths, hot showers.
Those are terrific things to do in the second half of the day.
They tend to support this serotonergic or high serotonin-like state and lend themselves to more calm and relaxation.
Basically, this phase two of the day is one in which you're alert, you are present, you are working, you are engaging socially, you're cooking dinner, probably paying attention to a number of things, but you should really be trying to taper off your stress level.
So how do you leverage phase two of the day for habit formation?
Well, given what we know about the neurochemistry of learning and memory, given what we know about task formation and its reliance on certain forms of neuroplasticity, the second half of the day is a terrific time to take on habits and things that you're already doing that require very little override of limbic friction.
So these might be things that you could categorize in common terms as kind of mellower activities.
It might be journaling.
It might be that you already are performing music, or I should say, practicing music regularly, or you're trying to learn a language, something that's a little bit challenging but doesn't require a ton of energy in order to override that limbic friction.
One of the hallmark features of those basal ganglia circuits for go and no go is that they are associated with certain neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin, acetylcholine and other neurochemicals.
And by placing particular habits at particular phases of the day, those neurochemical states start to be associated with the leaning in and the process of beginning and, as I mentioned, ending those particular habits.
And in doing so they shift the whole nervous system toward being able to predict that certain things are going to happen at particular times of day, that you're going to be leaning very hard against limbic friction early in the day in phase one, and that you're going to be doing things that require less conscious override of limbic friction in phase two.
And, in doing so, set up this task bracketing system, so that the individual habits that you're learning, or that you're trying to learn, have a much greater probability of being executed and consolidated, meaning that pretty soon they will just naturally become reflexive.
Phase three of the 24-hour schedule runs from about, 16 to 24 hours after waking.
During that period of time.
There are a few things that are going to support being in a state of mind, state of body, that are going to allow neuroplasticity to occur, that are going to allow the rewiring that you've triggered during the waking part of the day to actually take place.
Those things are very low to no light, meaning keeping your environment very dark or very, very dim.
I don't think it's necessary to sleep in a room that's complete blackness, but for most people, keeping the room dark and keeping the room temperature low is very beneficial for getting and staying in deep sleep.
A lot of people recommend putting a gap between your final bite of food and when you go to sleep at night.
Some people will say that gap should be four hours.
Other people say two hours.
If you're me, I generally have something I don't know, two hours or 90 minutes of going to sleep, but it's not a big meal, but that's just me.
And I fall asleep and stay asleep fine with that.
What if you wake up?
The way I've cast phase three is that you're supposed to be in this deep slumber.
You're not supposed to wake up at all.
You're supposed to be in low light and your brain is rewiring and those habits are getting consolidated, et cetera.
Well, if you're like me, you probably get up once in the middle of the night, perfectly normal.
But a lot of people have trouble falling back asleep.
Very important if you get up in the middle of the night to use a minimum of light in order to navigate your surroundings just as much as you need in order to safely do so.
Because light inhibits the hormone melatonin, can make it very hard to fall back asleep if you inhibit melatonin.
Again, neuroplasticity is the basis of habit formation, and neuroplasticity and the rewiring of neural circuits happens in these states of deep sleep.
So if you're not obeying This phase three, if you're not giving phase three the materials it needs and you're not avoiding the certain things like caffeine and bright light and stress during phase three, you're simply not going to be able to build those habits that you've been working so hard to trigger in phase one and phase two of the day.
I fully acknowledge that many of the things that I've listed out here are things that I've encouraged people to do in previous episodes of the podcast and elsewhere.
But really this is about habit formation.
And the whole reason for placing particular types of behaviors at particular phases of the day is to set a framework for that task bracketing
Again, task bracketing and those circuits of the basal ganglia indicate that it's not just the neural circuits that are engaged by the task itself, but the neural circuits that are engaged before and after that task execution.
That's what gets consolidated.
So when you do things at particular phases of the day under particular conditions of neurochemistry, what you're doing is you're giving the brain a very predictable set of sequences that, during sleep, it can start to put into your hard drive, if you will.
It can really program it into your nervous system so that within a short period of time hopefully within 18 or maybe even six days or, who knows, maybe even fewer days you'll find that executing those behaviors is very, very straightforward for you and that you won't have to feel so much limbic friction or override so much limbic friction.
Some of you are probably asking okay, if I perform a particular habit during phase one and then I do other habits during phase two and I eventually get to the point where I'm engaging in those habits in a in a pretty effortless way?
Do I keep them in the same phase of the day?
And the good news is the literature says it doesn't matter.
And in fact, moving that particular habit around somewhat randomly can actually be beneficial to you, because actually moving it from one time of day to the other is that context independence that we really are seeking.
By being able to do the same thing that we want to do, regardless of time of day or circumstances.
That's how we know that we've achieved a real habit formation.
That's how we know that the habit has been moved into certain components of our neural circuitry that just allow us to do it what seems like reflexively.
Although earlier I pointed out that these aren't reflexes in the traditional sense.
The reason for that is that this brain area, the hippocampus that many of you know is associated with learning and memory, is not actually where memories are stored.
The hippocampus is where memories are formed.
It's where procedures like I talked about before procedural memory of how you're going to execute a particular sequence where that's maintained.
So that whole process of really leaning into something that's hard, then it becoming easier and then eventually that thing becoming more or less reflexive, involves a migration of the information in the brain, And once it's migrated out to a different location in the brain, at that point it's achieved context independence.
It doesn't have to be bracketed by your caffeine and your lunch.
It doesn't have to occur immediately after your afternoon NSDR, but before your four o'clock meeting on Zoom or something of that sort.
So all this is to say that once something has become reflexive, you should play with it a little bit about time of day.
If you want to keep it in the same phase of day, great.
But if you one day decide you're going to exercise in the afternoon, next day you decide you're going to exercise in the morning and that's the habit that you're concerned with.
That's terrific.
If you're able to do that, that means that it's truly achieved context independence.
It means that you have officially formed that habit.
And as I mentioned earlier, much earlier, at the beginning of the episode, the strength of a habit is dictated by how much limbic friction that was one and how much context dependence there is.
So when it doesn't take much activation energy to get into the execution of that habit and you can do it in any context, well then, you have formed a habit.
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Way back at the beginning of the episode, I promised you that I would deliver two programs that are geared towards habit formation.
And I promised that I would give you ways in which you could gauge whether or not certain habits had moved from high effort what I call high limbic friction to reflexive.
In researching this episode, I found a tremendous number of different systems for habit formation.
I want to spell out a particular system that I think could be very useful to most, if not all, people.
That's rooted in the biology of habit formation, rooted in the psychology of habit formation and that is entirely compatible with that phase one, phase two, phase three type program that I talked about earlier but encompasses a bit of a longer timescale and really arrives at a kind of a system, if you will, for how to build in habits.
And so this is, at least for sake of this example, a 21-day system.
I picked 21 days because that seems to be the average or most typical system for engaging neuroplasticity as it relates to the formation of new habits.
So basically, what this involves is you set out to perform six new habits per day across the course of 21 days.
The idea is you write down six things that you would like to do every day for 21 days.
However, the expectation is that you'll only complete four to five of those each day, okay?
So built into this is a kind of permission to fail, but it's not failure, because it turns out that this approach to forming habits is based not so much on the specific habits that you're trying to form, but the habit of performing habits right.
It's the habit of doing a certain number of things per day So you set out to perform six.
Now, another reason for not necessarily performing all six is that some activities probably shouldn't be performed each day.
For instance, in my case, if I were to weight train or even run every day.
I'm of the sort, or my biology is of the sort, that I don't recover so well.
So I wouldn't want to do resistance training every day, but I might want to do it four days a week, for instance.
So by having six things in that list, I could shuffle out that particular activity on particular days of the week and simply do four or five other activities.
If you miss a day, meaning you don't perform four to five things, there is no punishment.
And in fact it's important that you don't actually try and do what in the literature is called a habit slip compensation, which is just fancy psychological language, for if you screw up and you don't get all four or five in one day, you don't do eight the next day in order to compensate.
After 21 days, you stop engaging in this 21 day deliberate, four to five things per day type schedule.
And you simply go into autopilot.
You ask yourself how many of those particular habits that I was deliberately trying to learn in the previous 21 days are automatically incorporated into my schedule.
How many of them am I naturally doing?
In other words, every 21 days, you don't update and start adding new habits.
You're simply going to assess how well, how deeply, you've rewired your nervous system to be able to perform those six habits of the previous 21 days.
Many people are trying to cram so many new behaviors into their nervous system that they don't stand a chance of learning all those behaviors.
What you may find is that you kept up two of those things very consistently throughout the 21 days.
And perhaps there was one of them that you did sporadically and that there were three others that frankly, you didn't manage to execute.
You may also be one of these people, one of these mutants that sets out to do six new things per day for 21 days and performs every single one of them.
Terrific, more power to you.
In that case, for the following 21 days, let's see whether or not you can continue to perform those very same six things every day for 21 days.
And then and only then would you want to add more habits in.
So you could repeat this 21-day process.
You know, 21 days of new habit, 21 days of testing those new habits as, whether or not they're reflexive or not,
The idea is that this isn't something that you're doing all year long.
It's that you, perhaps starting the new year, or regardless of when you're listening to this you set out to make that 21-day really the stimulus period in which the habits get wired in.
And then the following month and maybe even the following months or years periods of 21 days are really that kind of thermometer or the test bed of how well you've embedded those particular habits.
And if indeed you want to continue to add new habits, or you find that certain habits that you weren't able to embed in your nervous system and make reflexive, you want to then bring those in fantastic.
But it's only once you've achieved all those six habits as reflexive that you would move forward.
And the fact that habit slips, missing of particular habits and not doing all six is kind of built into the system, I think, makes it a very reasonable one.
It's very adaptable to the real world.
And I think it's one that, provided you obey the phase one, phase two, phase three type system that we talked about earlier.
If you do that, I think there's a very high probability that the habits that you try and form will achieve this context dependence and that it will take progressively less and less limbic friction to perform them.
Thus far, we've almost exclusively been discussing how to form habits.
But what about breaking habits?
Certainly many people out there would like to break habits that they feel don't serve them well.
One of the challenges in breaking habits is that many habits occur very, very quickly.
And so there isn't an opportunity to intervene until the habit has already been initiated and, in some cases, completed.
So it turns out that the key to generating long-term depression in these pathways is actually to take the period immediately following the bad habit execution.
And, in that moment, capture the sequence of events not that led to the bad habit execution, but actually to take advantage of the fact that the neurons that were responsible for generating that bad habit were active a moment ago and to actually engage in a replacement behavior immediately afterward.
So let's give it an example.
Let's say you find yourself you're trying to do focused work.
You pick up your phone.
You're disappointing yourself for picking up your phone.
You could, of course, just put it down and re-engage in the work behavior.
But if you were good at that, then you probably wouldn't have done it in the first place.
And so what turns out to be very effective is to go engage in some other positive habit.
This has two major effects.
The first one is you start to link in time the execution of a bad behavior to this other good behavior.
In other words, you start to create a kind of a double habit that starts with a bad habit and then ends with a good habit.
So as I mentioned before, this might seem counterintuitive.
You might think, why would I want to reward the execution of a bad habit with a good habit?
I don't want to reward myself for the bad habit.
But really what you're trying to do is you're trying to change the nature of the neural circuits that are firing so that you can rewrite the script for that bad habit.
And so, when people have applied this kind of approach, it removes the need to have constant, conscious awareness of one's own behavior prior to that behavior, which is very, very difficult to achieve.
Rather, what they find is that they are able to engage in remapping of the neural circuits associated with bad habits in ways that are very, very straightforward, right.
Because you can always identify when you've done the thing you don't want to do and then tack on to that something additional.
That's positive.
The nature of that positive thing is important.
You don't want it to be something that's very hard to execute.
You want it to be something that's positive and fairly easy to execute, so that you're not struggling all the time to insert this on top of this bad behavior, whatever that bad behavior might happen to be.
And of course, I want to acknowledge that breaking bad habits is really hard.
So today we've covered a lot about the biology and psychology of habit formation and habit breaking.
My hope is that today you've learned both the biological mechanisms and the practical tools by which you can start to establish habits that, for you, you deem adaptive, healthy and that are going to support you in your goals.
And that you can start to dismantle some of the habits that you find to be unhealthy or maladaptive for you and for your goals.
And once again, I want to thank you for going on this journey of exploring the neuroscience and the psychology of habit formation and habit breaking.
I hope it supports you in your goals.
And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
