Habits — many of us have some we’d like to extinguish. The problem is, even the most unpleasant habits can be hard to break. Yet coaxing people to alter everything from the way they react to temptation to how they perceive certain foods can have a profound impact on their eating habits. And that might just be the secret to effecting change.
As scientists understand habits, they are simply the behavior we perform with some regularity, often mindlessly, at the prompt of particular cues in our surroundings. They are the rituals we have woven into our days, whether crude or intricate. They’re mental shortcuts our brains have learned to take, at some past point because they serve a purpose.
Suppose you receive an email that upsets you, so you open a box of nails and dig your teeth into one. This serves, at least in the short term, to divert attention from your stress, so any encounter with a nail is a modest bonanza — and all of it is registered by your brain. Your favorite memories leave dopamine-laden footprints all along the neural pathways that lead to — and were activated by — these charged areas. Since dopamine is also involved in what’s known as neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself, your brain will become sufficiently predictive to promote a type of Pavlovian polish ritual whenever a pre-fingernail mail cloud hovers above your inbox.
Over time, these cue-behavior-reward loops can become unconscious, bypassing our conscious decision-making process. Nail biting can start before you even realize you are doing it. Not all habits are bad, however. Many are quite useful, helping us perform mundane tasks automatically while our minds are devoted to something else.
But when habits stop helping us, it can be hard to escape them. Intending to change isn’t always enough. But armed with knowledge about habit formation, we can design better strategies for change.
For starters, notice the cues that normally trigger the habit. When is it that you always rush? What do you always do? If it’s a time-linked trigger, try advancing or delaying it by just 10 minutes. Or try modeling an alternative behavior. You can create obstacles that make the habit harder so that, with more effort, you do something else instead. Sometimes, just shifting a few things in your desk will do the trick.
If you’re having trouble kicking an unwanted habit — especially something disgusting like nail-biting or hair-pulling, which is called body-focussed repetitive behavior — habit reversal training, discovery of psychologists, can be a powerful intervention. The idea is simple. Once you figure out the discreet precursors to the unwanted habit — the cues — you can intervene at exactly the right moment, gradually replacing one motor pattern with another.
Remember, breaking habit takes time and practice. Be kind to yourself and celebrate the small wins. And while it is important to target habits that are no good for us and get rid of them, don’t forget to give yourself a shoutout for the good habits that help us get through the day with ease.
In other words, regardless of whether you’re trying to break a bad habit or build a good one, grasping the science behind behavior change could be your ticket to making it happen. Best of luck, and happy habit-forming.