How to Trick Your Brain Into Breaking Bad Habits

One strategy for breaking a bad habit is to make it harder to do. Psychologists call this increasing friction. 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.

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.

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. These primitive areas use up less energy because a bunch of related actions get grouped together, an idea known as “chunking.” This turns the behavior into a habit.

Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits?

In the modern era, habits have become a significant area of scientific inquiry. Psychologists have explored the genesis of habitual behavior and its impact on health and happiness. William James, echoing Aristotle, wrote, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual . . . bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny.”

Distinctive brain pattern helps habits form

MIT neuroscientists have now found that certain neurons in the brain are responsible for marking the beginning and end of these chunked units of behavior. These neurons, located in a brain region highly involved in habit formation, fire at the outset of a learned routine, go quiet while it is carried out, then fire again once the routine has ended.

What Does It Really Take to Build a New Habit?

“There’s no such thing as 21 days to start a new habit,” Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, told me. “The amount of time it takes will vary from person to person.” Developing a pleasurable habit, like eating chocolate for breakfast, for instance, may take a day, while trying to exercise at 5 pm each evening may take much longer.

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