Bad Habits, Good Habits, How To Break Your Bad Habit

Bad Habits, Good Habits, How To Break Your Bad Habit 

We all have habits we like to break whether, it's biting your fingernails, smoking or eating late at night but why are these habits so hard to break perhaps you think your day is made up of deliberate conscious decisions but in reality, a university study found that 45% of your everyday behaviors are actions that you repeat every day and tend to do in the same location. These are your habits.

Habits are attributed to one of the most primitive structures in your brain The Basal Ganglia, the same region that helps control processes such as breathing and swallowing In an MIT experiment, a mouse sits behind a gate of a T-shaped maze where to its left is a piece of chocolate . When the door clicks, the mouse explores the maze sniffing and scratching up the walls First it explores the right and then to the left, eventually finding the chocolate. A scan of the basal ganglia shows it's working curiously throughout the whole process. However after a week of training, the mouse runs immediately towards the chocolate once the gate clicks. At this point there is very little brain activity once the gate clicks and the brain doesn't fire back up again until it reaches the chocolate Our brain seek to minimize effort and space and this kind of automatic brain behavior is referred to as CHUNKING, CHUNKING aims at creating a New Habit Pattern in cells of the brain.

It's like a task you do every day that you no longer really have to think about brushing your teeth or backing out of your driveway skills that were once difficult to master but now become automatic. This process is a 3 STEP LOOP Step 1 is the CUE which for the mouse is click of the gate Step 2 is ROUTINE run through the base and Step 3 is the REWARD, in this case chocolate. The CUE and REWARD eventually intertwine creating ANTICIPATION and CRAVINGS another central part of habits Because we go into automatic mode during routines our brain stops fully participating in decision-making Our habits will automatically unfold every time there is a cue These habits can be so entrenched that the rewards doesn't even have to be good.

A study of habitual popcorn eaters found that they were minimally impacted by hunger or how much they liked the food and they ate the same amount of popcorn regardless of whether it was stale or fresh Our habits often overrule what we know is good for us for example, a study of America's TAKE 5 campaign to encourage citizens to eat 5 fruits & vegetables a day found the programme was effective in educating the public but an assessment found that it did not change American Intake where only 11% met the goal. It changed people's intentions but not their habits so what are you to do? Charles Duhigg author of THE POWER OF HABIT gives an example of buying a cookie everyday around 3:15 pm at work The CUE is 3 o'clock but the Reward is a bit more complicated as a cookie can be bundle of many rewards it could be a relief from hunger or an energy boost to satiate your craving for something sweet or it could be a nice break from work or even an opportunity to talk to people Duhigg wanted to break his cookie habit and after some trial and error discovered that what he really craved was socialization that came from buying the cookie So around 3 he would getup and find someone to gossip with for 10 minutes instead By using the same CUE and the same REWARD of Socialization he was able to break the Cookie habit But what about the habits that you don't always notice like biting your nails Psychologists suggest that first you think about WHEN you bite your nails Are you Nervous? or Bored? In the case of boredom, Nailbiting offers a PHYSICAL STIMULATION.

So, next you need to mark down every time in your day you feel bored and have the compulsion to bite your nails Maybe that's 5 times a day maybe its 28 But then you want to implement a COMPETING RESPONSE Whenever you feel the desire to bite, you immediately put your hands in your pockets Next find a substitute that provides a quick physical stimulation like rubbing your arm or tapping your knuckles on the desk This allows for one habit to be replaced by another with similar REWARD but also uses the same CUE so when you are ready to take on a bad habit, just remember figure out what your body is actually craving, use the same cue and reward that serves the correct purpose and be patient to build that new habit.