How You Can Make, Break, Or Change Habits — What Role Does the Brain Play?
A bit of patience and understanding — and a lot of practice — is what is needed to make, break, or change habits.
How do you put on your shirt every day?
Right arm first? The left one? Or the head?
It might be challenging to recall. However, your body remembers. It remembers the process well enough for your brain to no longer focus on it. As a result, you repeat the act the same way every day without giving it a moment’s thought.
In a nutshell, habits are automatic actions that one performs subconsciously because of constant repetition.
They can range from something as simple as how one brushes their teeth to something as complicated as driving a car. One will never need to think about what they are doing. Their mind will silently guide them; their body will follow.
That is what habits make us do.
The question remains, how are they formed?
The Formation of Habits
Despite the subconscious nature of habits, their formation involves a lot of conscious intent. A reason needs to be present for one to exhibit a behavior.
Let us take leg shaking in stressful situations as an example.
The first step towards this habit formation includes a signal from the brain to initiate a physical response. The motivation is to gain relief from a received stimulus. For leg shaking, usually, this stimulus is stress.
The body takes the cue; the leg starts to shake. Such a motion helps to dissipate anxiety the same way as exercise does. As a result, the arousal diminishes.
The mind analyzes the situation and approves of it as a stress-reducing strategy. The next time one experiences stress, they also crave the reversal of it. Hence, they repeat the leg shaking, experience lowered stress levels, and soon it becomes a game.
Over time, the mind learns, and the process becomes automatic. Now, whenever the brain sends down a cue related to stress, the leg shakes to make one feel better. Goal achieved.
How Association and Repetition Strengthen Habits
Habits form when one learns to associate a reward with a behavior. Around this time, such goal-oriented behaviors remain more a matter of choice. A person knows that shaking their leg will help them ease their anxiety, so they do it.
Learning such behaviors requires new neural connections in the brain to form. The more one indulges in the behavior, the stronger the neural connections get.
With such a repetition, it gets easy for the brain to decide which cue requires which response. The response process becomes efficient; less effort goes into activating the behavior that soon embeds itself into memory.
Once the brain reaches this level of neuroplasticity, the behavior becomes automatic on similar cues. As a result, the habit strengthens. Enough to make one unaware of when they are engaging in it.
When Do You Need to Change Your Habits?
Habits can either be adaptive or maladaptive. In short, they can either make you or break you.
In case it is the latter, changes become mandatory.
For example, two individuals may form different habits to the same cue. While one learns to go for a walk when stressed, another might resort to binge eating. While one goes silent when angry, another might grind their teeth till it hurts.
The latter of both situations ends up hurting the individual engaging in the habitual behavior. If that happens, it is time to make some changes.
That includes breaking older habits to make space for new ones.
How to Change Habits?
Awareness is the most essential factor in this process. One should know the association between the habit cue, reward, and behavior they are facing. Once pinpointed, it becomes easier to disrupt the pattern.
Let us break down all three for habitual binge eating:
● Know your cue (emotional discomfort because of stress)
● Know your reward (emotional regulation through food)
● Know your behavior (eating till you feel better)
The next step involves restricting the behavior by making it difficult to do; not stock up on your favorite foods. This restriction makes it tough to reach the reward. Over time, the connection between the cue and reward breaks, and so does the habit.
The process gets simpler if one incorporates adaptive behaviors into it. That happens through the replacement of behaviors.
For that, one needs to know which action will work best. And a lot of factors can help decide, including one’s personality. After all, whatever one feels the most comfortable with, will be the easiest thing to do.
For example, a person with an extroverted personality might talk to a friend to ease their stress instead of binge eating. This way, they will be able to reach their reward and also cultivate healthier habits.
After that, it is a matter of repetition to make new neural connections more powerful than the older ones. Using the process of habit stacking can really help here.
So, Which Habit Will You Change?
Roughly, it takes anywhere around 20 to 40 days to build, break, or change a habit. The important part is that one remains committed to doing so.
After all, the brain will do whatever it learns. And the best way to learn is through a lot of practice.
You know what they say, practice makes perfect!
Author Bio — Rabbiya Abid, BrainManager Team
With a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Rabbiya Abid brings her love for the discipline to curate content that aligns with fulfilling the crucial needs of self-growth. She believes that everyone can reach the potential they desire — all they need is a little help. Rabbiya uses her extensive background in content writing, research, and personal experience to do her part in providing that help.
Rabbiya is inquisitive about the many perils of the human mind and always strives to find answers that could help cultivate mindfulness and harmony for anyone in distress. All while trying to find the most efficient (and fun) ways to make life better for others.
