Hey there, Brainiacs! It’s a new year, and with the turn of the calendar comes the tradition
of New Year’s resolutions - where we all resolve to eat better, drink less, exercise
more, and feel better after the holidays leave us a bit tired and bloated. But why is it
so hard to stick to those resolutions? Why do we have such a hard time breaking bad habits
and building new ones?
It seems like it should be easy. I should be able to just...decide that I want to eat
fewer sugary snacks and start eating more healthy whole grains. I...want to, so I can...right?
The reality is a little more complicated. Habits are a critical part of our daily lives,
and they’re deeply etched into our neural circuitry. Each time we repeat a habitual
action, the pattern is carved just a little bit deeper, and gets a little bit harder to
break. Which isn’t to say that breaking bad habits is impossible - it just requires
some focused effort.
When we’re talking about “habits” in the behavioral sense, we’re talking about
learned, repeated behavioral patterns, like the way you tie your shoes, or drive a car,
or type on a keyboard. These are behaviors that become automatic, and are not necessarily
tied to an outcome or goal, but rather tied to a situation or location. What that means
is, you don’t eat all those cookies at Christmas because you’re trying to sate your hunger;
you eat them because there’s a plate of cookies in front of you, and that’s what
you do with cookies...because it’s what you’ve always done with cookies. Habits
are a kind of memory called “implicit” memory; while “explicit” memories are
your memories of places, things, and events, habits fall under “implicit” memories,
which are unconscious, and don’t require you to “think” about the action while
you’re doing it. These two different kinds of memories are stored differently in the
brain - explicit memories are recalled using the hippocampus, while implicit memories require
the basal ganglia.
The basal ganglia is a group of subcortical structures located deep inside the brain that
are critically important for motor control, motor learning, behaviors, and emotions. Habits,
in particular, are thought to be processed by a part of the region called
the dorsal striatum. The dorsal striatum receives signals in the form of the neurotransmitters
glutamate and dopamine, and acts as a major input to the rest of the basal ganglia, acting
as a critical part of the reward learning system.
When you develop a habit, you activate a particular kind of learning called “stimulus-response”,
which is how your brain learns the relationship between a particular action and the subsequent
outcome. For this to work, you need a trigger, a behavior, and a reward. For example, if
you feel hungry (the trigger), that will make you seek out a cookie and eat it (the behavior),
making you feel full (the reward). Essentially, habits hijack this existing system in your
brain, by helping you connect certain behaviors with specific rewards.
Every time you engage in a behavior that leads to a certain outcome, like eating a cookie
causing you to feel full, the neural circuit that processes that information becomes more
strongly connected. And over time, that circuit fast-tracks the information about the relationship
between the cookie and your feelings. This is sometimes framed as “cells that fire
together, wire together” - meaning that when your neurons are repeatedly activated
together, the connections between them become more ingrained. Eventually, you’re not even
thinking about the motivation behind the action - you’re just performing the action because
something triggered the now-automatic behavior.
Our habits often coincide with goal-directed behaviors. They’re often useful. Like you
know exactly where to reach to turn on the light when you’re heading into your kitchen
in the middle of the night, because you don't want to stub your toe. It’s important for our brains
to create these sorts of “shortcuts” to process information or we’d get overwhelmed
by things pretty quickly. Imagine if you had to consciously think through every step of
tying your shoe, every single time you did it. Or if you had to think carefully about
the relationship between the gas pedal and the brake pedal every time you got into the
car. We build habits to make things faster, and to free up the rest of our brains to process
other information.
The downside of that, of course, is that once those circuits get ingrained in our brains,
it’s hard to break those habits. Our minds process these behaviors unconsciously, and
it takes a lot of concentrated effort and time to undo those connections and build new
ones.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic system to erase those old synapses. But, there are some
tricks to break those bad habits!
The first is to start forcing yourself to think about the behavior every time you do
it. When you go to scroll through Twitter, consciously consider what you’re doing.
Think about why you’re doing it, and what purpose it serves. Think about how scrolling
through Twitter makes you feel, and whether or not it’s actually beneficial. Think about
whether or not this is actually what you want to be doing right now, or if you’re procrastinating,
or just bored. This helps your brain know whether or not what you’re doing is actually
rewarding.
It also helps to remove the trigger that starts an action. So if you’re trying to spend
less time on Twitter because your life is consumed by it, try deleting the app from
your phone, or blocking it on your computer. This makes it way more difficult for you to
fall down the rabbit hole and become completely consumed by toxic people who tweet idiotic
drama.
(Alie? Is this a personal thing?) No.
Finally, replace the habit with something else - preferably a good habit you’re trying
to build! So when you’re feeling the impulse to sit on your couch and scroll through Twitter,
you could sit down and write out a few lines in a journal instead - or go for a walk around
the block - or use Instagram instead. Wait, no. Find something that distracts you from
whatever you were planning on doing, and gives you some other kind of reward.
If you’re trying to build good new habits, there are some tricks for that too! First,
start small - don’t try to make a ton of changes all at once. Trying to shake up your
whole life will make it hard to succeed - but if you make small, incremental changes, it
will get easier with each step. So instead of saying “I want to stop eating junk food,
go to the gym every day, and start meditating every night”, start with something like
“I’m going to get rid of all the cookies and chips in the house, so when I want to
snack, I’ll eat something better for me.”
It also helps if you can make yourself accountable, and connect it with a community. When I started
to exercise regularly, I found that going to fitness classes was the best way to get
motivated - I had a buddy who went with me, so we’d encourage each other to attend on
the days we didn’t feel like going, and I got to enjoy the time with my teacher and
classmates each day. Now I like working out so much that I can motivate myself to work
out without a class!
Finally, be patient, and try to automate the process. It can take weeks to make a new habit
automatic, so don’t get discouraged if you’re still struggling to ditch the sugary snacks
after a month or so. And you can connect the new habit with an existing habit - like taking
the stairs instead of the elevator any time you have to go up a few floors in a building.
So yes, we humans are creatures of habit. And those habits give our /super/ powerful
brains the space to think about even more complex and important things. But luckily,
with enough willpower and patience, that same brain gives us the ability to swap bad habits...for
good.
What habits are you trying to break or build up this year? Let me know in the comments
below. Thanks for watching this episode of Neuro Transmissions. Until our next transmission,
I’m Alie Astrocyte. Over and out.