In this episode of his podcast, Dr Andrew Huberman presents us with a novel and most importantly science backed version of the habit building model, the 21 Day Habit Building system.
Huberman emphasised two main characteristics of Habits — Limbic Friction and Habit strength, and how this determines and categorises the sort of habits that we have. Limbic friction describes the strain required to overcome anxiety and lack of motivation or fatigue in building the new habit. Although hardly a novel idea, this is the first time I’ve seen someone address this in habit formation literature/content. The eventual goal of which is to achieve deep and sticky automaticity. A habit that doesn't waver in any sort of environment, essentially the goal is to be addicted to your habit.
A few concepts that help were discussed within the podcast, such as task bracketing, reward prediction error as well as visualisation. Please do go give it a listen here if interested in learning about it in detail, as well as the science behind each — they are fascinating. The most important takeaway for me from all this was the utilisation of Task Bracketing. According to his research in how the body and brain’s rhythms, the day is broken up into 3 phases. Phase 1 is 0–8 hours after waking up , (i.e. if you wake up at 7 am , the first phase is 7am — 3pm), phase 2 is 9–15 hours and phase 3 is 16–24 hours after waking. These are broken up according to the body’s production of dopamine and serotonin. The indications for how to use each phase…
