The Science Of Making & Breaking Habits

Key Takeaways

• “A lot of habit formation has to do with being in the right state of mind and being able to control your body and mind.” ­– Dr. Andrew Huberman

• Habits take different lengths of time to adapt depending on the person and the habit – a habit might take one person 18 days and another person 200+ days

• The goal of building habits is to overcome limbic friction (level of energy needed to engage in a habit) and enter it automaticity

• Leverage natural rhythms of brain & body hormones to make it more likely that you will engage or maintain habits

• In the first 0-8 hours after waking, your brain and body are more action and focus oriented – you can more easily overcome things with high limbic friction

• In the 9-15 hours after waking, leverage high serotonin and keep stress low by engaging in habits that don’t require a lot of limbic overrides

• A test of whether you’ve truly formed a habit is if you can perform that habit or behavior at any point in the day without thinking too much about it – e.g., exercise whenever you can fit it in

• The strength of a habit is dictated by how much limbic friction there is and how much context dependence there is

• Breaking a bad habit is more than just rewarding yourself if you don’t do it or punishing yourself if you do it – you want to change the neural circuitry involved

• To break a habit: bring conscious awareness to the fact that you participated in the habit you are trying to break – at that moment, capture the events and engage in positive replacement behavior immediately after

What Is A Habit?

• Habits involve learning something by our nervous system, consciously or unconsciously (unlike hardwired reflexes)

• “What we do habitually make up much of what we do entirely.” – Dr. Andrew Huberman

• Neuroplasticity underlies forming new pathways under which some new habits are likely to occur and others are less likely to occur

• For a comprehensive article on habits, check out Psychology of Habit by Wood & Rünger

Types Of Habits, Limbic Friction & Habit Strength

• Goal-based habits: designed to give you a specific outcome each time (e.g., the goal of 45-60 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week)

• Identity-based habits: attaching a larger picture of yourself and what it means to do that habit (e.g., I want to become an athlete)

• There’s an individual component to habit-forming – the same habit might take one person 18 days to form and another person 200+ days to form

• You might be able to form one habit easily but not another

• To build a new habit you have to overcome limbic friction: how much conscious override of your current state you have to have to execute the habit

• Limbic friction describes the strain required to overcome anxiety and lack of motivation or fatigue related to building the new habit

• It requires a varying degree of activation energy to overcome limbic friction and build a habit

• We are habitual organisms and carry things out the same way once the habit has formed

• Habit strength is measured by two criteria: (1) how context-dependent a given habit is (i.e., whether you are likely to do the habit regardless of where you are); (2) how much limbic friction is required to execute a given habit (i.e., how much energy is needed to overcome action)

• The goal of any habit is automaticity – circuits perform automatically

• It can be beneficial to move habits to different times of the day to develop context independence; this will allow the habit to become automatic

How Visualization Helps Build Habits

• Episodic memory: memory of particular events that happened

• Procedural memory: holding in mind a sequence of things that need to happen for an outcome to occur (like following a recipe)

• Procedural memory is an important component to overcoming limbic friction in building a new habit

• Tip: visualize the series of steps needed to adopt a specific habit – think through each step it takes to go for a run

• Visualizing the steps allows you to prepare and shift to a particular mindset that allows the anxiety involved in limbic friction to come down & increase the likelihood of the habit

Task Bracketing

• Basal ganglia are involved in the action (doing) and inaction (not doing) of certain things

• Task bracketing sets a neural imprint in your brain that a certain thing has to take place at a certain point during the day, so much so that it becomes reflexive

• Circuits in our brain are devoted to framing events just before and just after the habit

• Task bracketing underlies whether a habit will be context-dependent and strongly likely to occur regardless of external circumstances (e.g., zone 2 cardio even if you slept poorly)

• You can orient the nervous system to task bracketing so the nervous system is primed to execute the habit

• Attaching a habit to a specific time of day may be helpful in the short term but not the long term – it’s the state your brain and body are in that is important to anchor yourself to

How To Use Task Bracketing: Phases Of The Day

• To build new habits & behaviors, leverage your body’s natural brain and body rhythms

• Phases of the day will invoke a shift in mood and mindset that are more conducive to building and keeping habits

• Phase 1: 0-8 hours after waking up

• This phase comes with a more alert state which can be heightened by sunlight viewing, caffeine delaying, fasting, etc.

• Norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine are elevated during this phase

• Healthy cortisol is also elevated in the brain and bloodstream

• This is when you want to take on new habits and behaviors that are challenging for you – you are naturally more readily able to engage in activities with a high degree of limbic friction

• Phase 2: 9-15 hours after waking up

• Levels of dopamine, epinephrine, and cortisol start to come down

• Serotonin starts to rise and lends itself to a relaxed state of being – can be enhanced with a warm bath, yoga nidra, ashwagandha

• Taper the amount of bright light (unless it’s sunlight) & start dimming house lights a bit

• This is when you want to taper stress level and take on habits and things you are already doing that don’t require a lot of override of limbic friction – e.g., journaling, music

• Phase 3: 16-24 hours after waking up

• Keep environment very dark or dim & room temperature low

• The body needs to drop in temperature to fall asleep & stay asleep

• If you wake up in the middle of the night, use as little light as possible

• Deep sleep is critical to wiring neural circuits required for building habits

Reward-Prediction Error

• This system predicts whether rewards are going to come

• Definition of reward-prediction error: if you expect a reward and that reward comes, a particular behavior associated with generating that reward is more likely to occur again

• Reward-prediction error is associated with dopamine

• Paradox of reward-prediction error: the amount of reward (dopamine) is greater if the reward is unexpected

• The reward-prediction error can reinforce or accelerate certain habits

• When we think a reward is going to come, the dopamine release starts in anticipation

• Reward-prediction error governs all aspects of learning and effort because dopamine changes the system

• Tip: think about events that precede and follow the habit you are trying to build positive association and trigger anticipatory dopamine release and increase the likelihood of executing that habit