The Habits that Inhabit Us
What are habits exactly? And why are they so hard to change once established? Understanding the formation of habits can help us better understanding how to work with them and how to adapt ourselves from bad to good habits.
Disclaimer: I’m not a physician, psychologist, neuroscientist or biologist. Rather, I’m an individual interested in habits and how they work. In seeking to understand habits better I want to learn how to better manage my own habits, specifically the bad ones. This post is a very simplified explanation of a highly complex subject encompassing neuroscience, psychology, physiology, environment and biology. Here I’m sharing my interpretation of what I’ve learned about habits as it might be useful to you too. In no way does this post make any claim to be medical advice nor should it be considered such.
Okay. With that, let’s dive in.
Along with our actions we perceive the world through our habits. They structure the way we think and are a big part of who we are. It’s important then to consciously develop helpful, healthy habits in managing our experience of the world in the way that we want. But that’s hard. Change is hard. The reform of the ‘self’ is hard. We’re constantly under the weight of our habits especially our bad habits, many of which are unconsciously formed and leave us having to contend with their consequences and impact.
Specifically, by ‘bad’ habits I mean those repeating, autonomous, near-reflexive actions that we know have negative impact and consequences on our health, performance or relationships but we find ourselves doing them anyway. Like reaching for the phone as soon as we wake up. Or eating sugary snacks before bed. Or failing to hold our tongue for the sake of making a point. Here’s what I’ve learned so far about habits —
In forming a habit something happens, there’s a neurophysiological process that takes place. When we first encounter something novel a large part of our brain becomes (metabolically) active in attempting to understand and handle it. It takes a large amount of brain capacity, time and energy to orientate ourselves and interact with this new occurrence as there’s no specialised system within us to deal with it yet.
Our brains however are highly adaptable. This is known as neuroplasticity — our ability to learn. And our brains are keenly reward focused. This is experienced through the activity of the dopaminergic system. In other words, we’re curious, we like learning new ways especially when the new behaviours bring us rewards.
Encountering the occurrence again and getting to practice with it, it becomes less novel, more familiar. The reward pay-off is the feeling of satisfaction and gratification we get from mastering something and achieving an outcome. This produces the dopamine hit which encourages us to keep doing it as it’s pleasurable.
An example of this I can think of was when on holiday recently and trying to make my morning coffee using an unfamiliar machine. At first I had to concentrate and pay close attention. I had to plan the process and make lots of decisions relating to the amount of beans, the temperature of the water, the pressure and volume of the extraction and the amount of time required. All of these data take considerable monitoring and processing. The result (hopefully) being a good tasting caffeine drink. Over the subsequent days with repetition less and less parts of my brain needed to be involved. The handling of the occurrence is ceded over from the front parts of the brain towards the back, the basal ganglia. During this time in the learning is when the dopaminergic system reinforces the process by strengthening the behaviour with reward: Not only now is it a tasty caffeine drink, I’m now also getting a dopamine hit too from literally doing the process. The ritualised morning coffee making has become an established habit.
A new habit is formed. We create these routines as small machine-like processes that are automatised. This is highly efficient requiring far less cognitive load and energy, and is linked to our reward system so it’s lasting and frees us up to think about and even do other things in parallel. Like checking my phone while making the coffee, hmmm. This small machine-like automatised process animates us into handling the occurrence - making coffee in this case - in a very specific way. This shapes our perceptions of the occurrence and occurrences like it.
All good so far as far as habits go.
Where habits become counter-productive or ‘bad’ is when the circumstances or the environment around us change. The habit is fixed and narrowly specific. If it doesn’t fit the situation, time or environment anymore it’s counter to what we really want. It’s now a bad habit. We know it’s a bad habit when we experience the negative consequences of our the behaviours played out. Our health, our performance or the quality of our relationships are impacted negatively. But we continue to do them anyway. Why? Remember that dopamine hit we get from acting out the ritualised set of behaviours? Well we still get it, regardless of the consequence of the behaviours associated it the habit. Every time.
And that’s not all. What’s worse is when we realise that the habit no longer serves us and we want to stop it or kill it off, the part of our nervous system that’s been enjoying the dopamine hit isn’t particularly happy about that. It responds and resists the habit being killed off. And it resists strongly proportional to the level of reward gratification at stake. Just try and intervene when you’re in the throws of an impulsive bad habit being played out and you’ll know how hard or next to impossible it is to stop it. This is even when the rest of your brain’s telling you there’ll be consequences later. It’s almost like being under a trance or spell.
The dopaminergic system associated with immediate pleasurable reward is extremely strong, flooding our brain with dopamine creating the urge to repeat the behaviour and shutting down other parts of our brain so it can continue and get its way. This ability to shut down our brain so the behaviour can implement autonomously is why going to battle against our bad habits has such a depressingly high failure rate. It literally causes pain to kill it — no more dopamine. So give yourself a break if you’re repeatedly failing to kick a bad habit!
What to do?
Back to the neuroplasticity of our brains. The ability of the brain to alter itself - its structure and function - in response to new experiences and new environments means we can create new pathways and neural connections and weaken connections to old habits. In effect we can build a new machine-like process to shut down the old one. Like before over time these new and consciously chosen health, performance and relationship promoting behaviours become new habits as the brain gradually rewires itself through consistent practice and reinforcement.
The trick is in encouraging the neuroplasticity of our brains as much as we can so we are better equipped to create new habits with the direct effect of replacing those old bad ones. Lifestyle choices such as meditation, optimised sleep patterns, a balanced exposure to sunlight and regular exercise are all helpful as they positively influence neuroplasticity making it easier for us to create new habits.
If we see and relate to habits in this way we can have self-authority over them, authorship in designing sets of new, small habits which are in better alignment with our values and intended goals.
Make a habit of tending to our habits.
I’m learning we never really get rid of our old, bad habits. They are always there as a part of us. Sometimes rearing their ugly heads again when we’re tired or stressed. But they don’t have to have their way always. By integrating some or all of these lifestyle practices (as habits themselves) we can help ourselves create the foundation for cultivating new behaviours as repeated patterns that become new habits, replacing those old bad ones.
In this very simplistic way of knowing how the formation of habits works it helps me have a better understanding how to work with and adapt them. It’s a constant work in progress!
Sources:
The Neuroscience of Habit Formation
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378681505_The_Neuroscience_of_Habit_Formation
Jordan Peterson — How Habits are Formed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUnlKgmxwYQ
Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3505409/
Andrew Huberman — How Habits are Formed
https://positivepsychology.com/how-habits-are-formed/
James Clear — Atomic Habits