Health
3 science-backed ways to make habits stick
Changing your habits can feel close to impossible, but that’s probably because everything you’ve been taught about behaviour change is false. Here’s how to make habits stick, according to neuroscience.
By Sabrina Rogers-Anderson
Whether you’ve been trying to create a new habit, moderate an existing one or kick a bad one to the kerb, chances are you’ve been going about it all wrong.
Our society teaches us from a young age that we’re somehow weak if we can’t change our ways through sheer self-control, but neuroscience shows that willpower has nothing to do with lasting habit change.
Neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, Brown University professor and New York Times bestselling author Dr Jud Brewer, MD, PhD, has been studying habit change for more than 20 years. Here’s what he’s discovered.
Understanding the habit loop
“We all learn habits through a simple process of cue, routine and reward,” says Dr Jud. “The cue is what triggers the habit, the routine is the cycle of behaviours involved in the habit, and the reward is the outcome that makes us repeat the cycle again.”
Habits tend to get a bad name, but forming them is crucial for our everyday functioning. “If we didn't have habits, we'd have to relearn everything every day and we'd be exhausted before we even finished breakfast,” explains Dr Jud.
“There's a strong evolutionary origin to habit formation. It helped our ancestors find food and remember where it was, as well as learn where danger was and avoid it. These processes are known as positive and negative reinforcement.”
The problem arises when the habit loop causes us to repeat unwanted behaviours, such as scrolling on social media when we’re bored or having a glass of wine to unwind after work.
“I used to pour my first drink every day at 4pm and I’d drink until I went to bed,” says Sue. “I tried for years to cut back, like I’d try to not drink from Monday to Wednesday, but I was always white-knuckling it until I was ‘allowed’ to have a drink. It wasn’t until I addressed the reasons behind my drinking and made conscious efforts to disrupt my habits that I managed to give it up. I haven’t had a drink in 3 years and life has never been better.”
Why willpower is a fallacy when it comes to habit change
According to Dr Jud, Sue’s story is a common one and it highlights a widely held yet deeply misguided belief about habit change.
“We all think that self-control is the key because we’ve been taught that societally,” he explains. “But when you look at the neuroscience formulas for behaviour change and forming habits, they don't include a variable for willpower.
Photo by Pero Živković: https://www.pexels.com/photo/elderly-men-hiking-in-woods-5549133/
“It all comes down to how rewarding something is. I had a patient who had been smoking their whole life and had never been able to quit. When they were about to become a grandparent, their child said they couldn’t be around their grandchild if they were smoking. Suddenly, they managed to quit. It’s easy to look at that situation and think they did it through willpower, but boy was there a strong reward dangling at the end of that.”
The willpower myth can be extremely detrimental to people’s sense of self-worth when they inevitably “fail” to change their ways through self-control.
“It really saddens me because it makes people feel like there's something wrong with them or that they're broken,” says Dr Jud. “It’s also really frustrating because there are entire industries built around this [myth]. For example, the diet industry will say, ‘You haven’t succeeded, so you need to sign up to our program for another year.’ But these industries aren't teaching people how their brains really work.”
3 ways to make habits stick
Now that you know what doesn’t work, let’s take a deep dive into 3 neuroscience-backed ways to change your habits for good.
1. Get curious about your behaviour
Instead of expending energy pointlessly trying to develop willpower, Dr Jud asks his patients to pay attention to their behaviour and notice how rewarding or unrewarding it is.
“We did a study with our Eat Right Now app to see how quickly the reward value of overeating dropped in someone’s reward hierarchy just by having them pay attention as they overate,” says Dr Jud. “It only took 10 to 15 times of somebody overeating for that reward value to drop below zero.
“It's all about bringing curiosity to the process. If somebody's worrying or has a craving, they can get curious. ‘What does this craving feel like?’ as opposed to, ‘Oh no, here’s this craving, I have to fight it.’”
2. Get out of your head
Put your hand up if you have a tendency to obsess about the habits you want to change. While you’re certainly not alone, overthinking can be counterproductive.
“Our feeling body is much stronger than our thinking brain,” explains Dr Jud. “Instead of thinking, ‘I shouldn't do this’, we should try to feel into our experience. ‘What did I get from this last time? Did it really give me X, Y or Z?’ Memory helps change our behavior because we predict future behaviour based on how rewarding it was in the past.
“If we only focus on the highlight reel of our memories, it’ll be hard to change our behaviour. But if we look at the whole movie and how rewarding our behaviour really is overall, it makes it easier to change our habits.”
3. Find the bigger, better offer
“For years, I’d start a fitness program and give up within weeks because it felt too hard,” says Marie. “It wasn’t until I pushed through those initial weeks of discomfort at the gym that I started to feel good after my workouts. Within 3 months, I was going to the gym 4 days a week and now I go 6 days. I can’t believe I ever hated exercise – it’s my happy place!”
According to Dr Jud, reinforcement learning is a 3-step process: the first is recognising an unhelpful habit, the second is becoming disenchanted with it and the third is finding what he calls the “bigger, better offer”.
“When the reinforcement learning process is underway, we’re helping our brain realise, ‘Oh, it actually feels pretty good to exercise,’” he says. “I have a treadmill under my desk and I now find it really hard to sit through a meeting. It feels so much better to be in motion.
“We can actually form new habits relatively quickly. It comes down to realising how much bigger and better the new habit is compared to our old one.”
An old dog can learn new tricks
It’s never too late to change your habits, but the key to success is understanding that willpower isn’t the way to get there.
Instead of fighting your cravings or urges, slow down and get curious about them. Question your behaviours and how rewarding they actually are. Replace them with new habits and notice how much more rewarding those become over time.
The road to habit change isn’t linear and setbacks are to be expected, so be kind and patient with yourself as you navigate the process.
Feature image: iStock/PeopleImages
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