The 3 Reasons Why You Can’t Break a Bad Habit
And how to do just that (backed by science)
Everyone wants to be the best version of themselves. There isn’t a person on the planet who wouldn’t mind improving themselves even just slightly, whether shaving a few pounds off or just remembering to floss every day.
No matter how desperate we can be to break a bad habit, sometimes it feels like there’s Kryptonite preventing us from achieving our goals.
And usually we can’t even pinpoint why we’re failing.
A routine we’re all familiar with…
One day in a sudden spark of passion, you become dead set on achieving one thing, for example waking up earlier.
This moment of passion turns into a three hour Google search to figure out how to miraculously transform yourself into a morning person.
After blazing through 12 different self-help articles while simultaneously eliminating BS quick-fix tactics, you gather together all the actionable tips that you’ve decided are useful.
But little do we know that we’ve just fallen into To-Do of Passion trap…
“Alright I got this. Piece of cake, time to sleep on it and tomorrow will be the day.”
You go to bed feeling confident that you’ve got the precise blueprint locked and loaded ready for tomorrow.
The next morning you wake up and get ready for another day. You go through your routine, running around whether you’re a student, or 9-to-5 working man/woman, freelancer, entrepreneur, etc.
At the end of the day, you get home and you’re pooped. The world almost got the best of you today but you stuck it out like a champ and now you just want to kick back, throw on some Netflix, wait for your Seamless order from your favorite Thai spot, crack open a cold one or pour a glass of wine, and just chill.
It’s a scenario we’ve all experienced before and we all know how it ends. In our efforts to de-stress, we fall into established comfort routines.
We may or may not have forgotten the bulleted list of things we set out to accomplish, it probably looked something like:
But in that moment of bliss and reprieve from your hectic day, you’re thinking to yourself, “Damn this feels too good right now. I’m just so tired from such a long day. Tomorrow. I’ll do all that tomorrow”.
Illusory fatigue is when the perception of fatigue impacts your performance in tasks that require self-control. Thanks to this concept, all of those cheesy Instagram quote pictures with, “Think and ye shall become”, actually have a pretty solid argument now.
So when you think you’re tired, your ability to force yourself to abide by new routines or habits is nilch. You’ll end up skipping it altogether or only nailing a few of the bullets and probably halfheartedly.
So how do we avoid this pit of passion created by illusory fatigue?
Avoiding the Pit of Passion
It’s a common issue for all of us when we’re trying to build a new habit or break a bad one. The initial spark of passion created when the desire first erupted only burns so long.
The solution is learning the science behind habit formation, the elements that underpin both good and bad habits, and using this understanding to approach habit formation in a pragmatic way that ensures long term habit change.
Reason #1: You’re literally addicted to your bad habit
Habits require little to no conscious thought. This allows us to react to the lion hiding in the bush that’s preparing to pounce (just kidding, that was our cavemen ancestors). Habits help our brains conserve mental effort for more important functions.
Habits are formed through the repetition of actions. A neural pathway is a connection that’s used to transfer information between different parts of your brain and nervous system. Every time you repeat an action, you’re strengthening the neural pathway for that action.
“As people keep taking the same route through a forest, they wear out a path in it. And the more people who take this path, the more deeply it is worn and the easier it becomes to follow.” — Bruno Dubuc (McGill University)
The more you repeat a routine, the stronger your neural pathway for that certain action, memory, or piece of information is, and the longer your brain will store and recall it. But that doesn’t mean the habit is a good thing! (wasn’t a good thing for the guy up there)
Dopamine Rewards & Habit Reinforcement
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in different brain functions like motivation, reward, and addiction. It’s released as a reward when you do something that your brain thinks is necessary behavior. It’s what tells your brain, “Damn that shit was dope,” in response to things you enjoy.
When you’re working on a paper that’s due the next day but every 10 minutes you grab your phone and instinctively open Facebook as if your hand is possessed, it’s dopamine that keeps you scurrying back to your Timeline regardless of that looming deadline.
The enjoyment of stalking friends, watching puppy videos, reading troll comments, or just getting lost in endless scrolling is always a better decision when it comes to your brain’s debate between a behavior it would rather not do (like writing your paper) and a behavior it rewards you for doing (like stalking your ex, tsk tsk).
The combination of habit repetition and dopamine released as a reward is what creates good and bad habits. The only issue is that your brain isn’t always good at figuring out if a habit is good for you or detrimental to your life. Addictions to amphetamines and other stimulants like cocaine and meth are a result of constant dopamine influxes which reinforces the habit of drug use.
Reason #2: You’re using your habit system and not your goal system
Endocannabinoids are neurochemicals that do an array of different things. They’re more commonly talked about in regards to a super dank plant but what we’re interested in is their role as brakes on the goal-directed circuit of your brain.
There’s a part of your brain just behind your eyes and lower forehead called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).
This bad boy is responsible for, in part, the relaying of goal-directed information in your brain. It’s the general with marching orders at the front lines demanding the rest of your body to do things.
In this study, researchers used flashing lights to stir up activity in the OFC of mice. The more activity in your OFC, the more goal oriented action you’ll engage in.
Now here’s the kicker, when there’s less activity in your OFC, you not only engage less in goal-oriented action but you also revert to previously formed habits.
People with bad habits (or in more severe cases, drug addiction or OCD) have trouble switching between the habit-system and their goal-directed system.
Thankfully we can strengthen your ability to choose the goal-directed system rather than reverting to the habit system. It all lies within your self-control muscles.
Reason #3: Your self-control muscles are weak
Your self-control muscles are weak. But you’re probably thinking, “WTF is a self-control muscle?”
Social psychologist Roy Baumeister was the first to propose this theory and he called it ego depletion. In his experiments, he tempted people with chocolate and forced them to resist their temptation for that chocolatey goodness.
Then he gave them super frustrating puzzles to solve and he found that because of the ego depletion experienced during the chocolate-dangling part of the experiment, they performed badly on the puzzle problems.
What this shows us is self-control is a limited resource that can be drained when used. From the moment you wake up you’re using your self-control muscle. Turning off your alarm is usually the first thing you force yourself to do, going to the bathroom to brush your teeth is typically the next, and so on and so forth.
Every decision and action no matter how big or small requires some sense of self-control.
Your self-control muscles get tired as the day goes on. All the little decisions you made in the morning get piled onto the fatigue from your commute, all of which get lumped into your fatigue from the ensuing work day.
By the time you’re done for the day, you feel like you have no willpower left and your self-control muscle is pooped.
One way to strengthen your self-control muscle is to exercise your self-control.
Training Your Self-Control Muscle
Step one is to lie to yourself. Remember when we mentioned illusory fatigue earlier above? It works in the opposite direction too because your perception of your fatigue is what correlates to your performance— keyword being perception.
When you tell yourself that you’re not tired, you’ll do better if even just incrementally than if you told yourself that you are tired.
Simply put you have to lie to yourself and then force yourself to do what you set out to do.
You’re probably waiting for the part where I say, “Just kidding! Here’s the easy thing to day!”… You smart thing, you.
Here’s the awesome caveat, training your self-control muscle doesn’t require you to do the actual habit you’re trying to form.
“OMG hacks, cheat codes bro. What really?”
It just has to be somewhat related to your primary habit goal.
Let me help you stop all that head scratching with the concept of base habits, habits that are tangentially related to your goal habit but require significantly lower levels of self-control exertion.
Let’s say you’re trying to exercise more. But there’s one issue, you’ve never lifted a weight a day in your life and you’ve yet to get over that stop-staring-at-me-feeling.
A good base habit is putting on your sneakers and going for a walk around the block.
The habit itself is tangentially related to exercising:
- The gear up
- The exiting of your abode
- The exertion of physical activity
The only difference is that the amount of willpower and self-control to execute this base habit is significantly lower than if you were to go to the gym.
Ideally you’ll want to eventually work up to building a weightlifting routine, incorporating cardio, and more but what we’re more concerned about is developing a solid base of strength for your self-control muscle first.
The premise behind strengthening your self-control muscles is the act of opting to do something that’s related to your goal habit and precisely the opposite of the habit you’re trying to break.
Once you’ve strengthened your willpower and self-control muscles relative to physical activity, you can graduate to a higher level of willpower exertion with a much bigger capacity to achieve your goal habit.
At the same time the practice of committing to a routine until it becomes habit, no matter how easy the habit may be, strengthens your neural pathways and establishes a dopamine relationship with the activity too.
Yo, you got this.
Breaking bad habits don’t have to be a sucky experience time and time again. You don’t have to constantly revert back to your old ways or spend any more time staring in the mirror saying, “God, why must you fail all the time?!”
Remember the several simple steps that are crucial to habit formation:
- Dopamine will get ya, we just have to break that chemical reliance…
- By choosing our goal-system instead of our habit system…
- And by training our self-control muscles with base habits…
- That are tangentially related to our goal habits and precisely the opposite of our bad habits.
One thing we have to remember is to be compassionate to ourselves. The lack of compassion combined with a sense of perfectionism really plagues our society nowadays (technology has a lot to do with it but that’s a conversation for another time) even though no one is or ever will be perfect.
Just keep in mind that breaking a bad habit or developing a new one takes time so be patient with yourself and don’t beat yourself up about it.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments or through email.
I’d appreciate it if you hit the 💚 button, you’re the best.
Sources:
Clarkson, J. J., E. R. Hirt, D. Austin Chapman, and L. Jia. “The Impact of Illusory Fatigue on Executive Control: Do Perceptions of Depletion Impair Working Memory Capacity?” Social Psychological and Personality Science 2.3 (2010): 231–38. Web.
Dubuc, Bruno. “THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM.” THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. McGill University, n.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
Gremel, Christina M., Jessica H. Chancey, Brady K. Atwood, Guoxiang Luo, Rachael Neve, Charu Ramakrishnan, Karl Deisseroth, David M. Lovinger, and Rui M. Costa. “Endocannabinoid Modulation of Orbitostriatal Circuits Gates Habit Formation.” Neuron 90.6 (2016): 1312–324. Web.
Mead, Nicole L., Jessica L. Alquist, and Roy F. Baumeister. “Ego Depletion and the Limited Resource Model of Self-Control.” Self Control in Society, Mind, and Brain (2010): 375–88. Web.
O’Hare, Justin K., Kristen K. Ade, Tatyana Sukharnikova, Stephen D. Van Hooser, Mark L. Palmeri, Henry H. Yin, and Nicole Calakos. “Pathway-Specific Striatal Substrates for Habitual Behavior.” Neuron 89.3 (2016): 472–79. Web.
“Understanding Drug Abuse and Addiction.” DrugFacts. National Institute on Drug Abuse, n.d. Web. 15 July 2016.
