Changing habit is tough, or is it?
Also, how can being curious help?
A few years back, I graduated from my b-school with a mind broadened by knowledge and body by extra weight. I was over my acceptable weight threshold by about 6 kgs. Reducing that much weight didn’t seem herculean, seeing how much people around me and those on my digital feed were able to do.
But 1 year later, I was still at about the same weight, even though getting back to a healthy body was my sole mission. One of the reasons was that I had a high-stress job, and I was a stress eater. A deadly combination, right? Then you would think the solution should simple: replace the junk-binging cravings with something healthy, binge if can’t control but in moderation, monitor your calories, etc.
Allow me to explain why for certain habits, this process won’t simply pan out. And then I’ll give you a better way which worked for me.
If you ever have tried to adopt a good habit or break a bad one, you would know the classic habit-loop structure:
Let me explain this with coffee-drinking habit:
1. The Cue /Trigger/Craving: This is the initiation of the habit loop where any external or internal stimuli nudges you to take action. In the case of coffee, the cue can be:
-Feeling sleepy
-Time of the day you usually drink coffee
-Stress at work making you think of a coffee break
-Taking a phone call in the pantry and smelling freshly brewed coffee
2. The Routine/Action: You take the action prompted by the trigger, which in our case would be drinking coffee.
3. The Reward: Your brain receives a reward for taking the desired action. In our example, the reward can be feeling alert or de-stressed after taking the much-needed coffee break. Our brain forms an association between the action and the reward. Stronger the association, stronger is the habit.
This habit-loop structure was famously proposed by Charles Duhigg, in his best-selling book ‘The Power of Habit’.
If you want to break the habit loop, you need to change the cue or the action or the reward.
In our coffee example, cues which we can change could be: choose a different time of the day to drink coffee or not take phone calls in the pantry.
Change in routine can be reasoning with yourself not to reach out for coffee.
Change is reward can be drinking a green tea instead of coffee, setting up a new reward for beating coffee urge 3 times or imagining how less coffee will keep your blood pressure in check.
This rationale would work sometimes but fail for most hardened habits. I will come back to this in a bit.
Habits are usually a good thing. Forming a habit itself is our mind’s natural way to optimize our limited cognitive resources.
For example, when you are driving to work on your usual route, you don’t have to wonder which turn to take. The route becomes a habit. Habits help us do the same task with lesser effort and therefore allows us to take up other tasks in the parallel, such as listening to a TED talk while driving home.
Anatomy of the habit, some facts:
The part of our brain which is responsible for habit-making behaviours is called Basal Ganglia. It also enables the development of emotions, memories and pattern recognition. Decisions, on the other hand, are made in a different part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC).
PFC is also the part of the brain involved in planning, reasoning and general cognitive abilities. If, for example, you are trying to avoid chocolate, this is the part of the brain which will be reasoning out why. From an evolutionary standpoint, PFC is also the youngest and, in some sense, fickle. If we are tired, stressed, hungry, angry or in any other mental state which is taxing to our reasoning and will power, this would be the first cortical region to go offline.
If you are in a pleasant mental state, PFC will help you disrupt the habit loop. But unfortunately, when you need PFC the most, it will snooze.
Are you now starting to see where the fault lines are in the ‘break the habit-loop’ method?
If you are in a pleasant mental state, your PFC will help you disrupt the habit loop. But unfortunately, when you need PFC the most, it will snooze. It is like having a therapist, but only for happy times.
What accentuates this bad news is that most of the addictive habits, such as smoking, junk food, substance abuse etc., increase the level of neurotransmitter dopamine (and a slew of other pleasure hormones). So, while your will power and reasoning are flagging because PFC has taken a break, your sub-conscious is strongly remembering the association between the action and reward, thanks to dopamine.
Charles’ method may be successful in many cases, but it is based on the faulty assumption that we would be able to reason with ourselves most of the time. This is classic psychology which is idealistic and doesn’t put inefficiencies of human behaviour in the equation.
So, if NFC is not that reliable yet as we would want it to be, how do we deal with habit change? The answer may surprise you- it is by being curious.
‘Wonder is beginning of wisdom’- Socrates
…..and also it leads us down to newer paths and to better health :)
I was about to give up on the whole ‘feeling fit’ shebang when I luckily came across a TED talk** by Dr Judson Brewer, a renowned psychiatrist and addiction expert (I noted that he had good academic credentials- associated with Yale, MIT and Brown University, and well, resume matters!). Dr Judson has deep expertise in Mindfulness Training, and how we can use it to make deeper, more permanent changes in our lives.
What he says is simply this: rather than forcing yourself to not do the action, be curious of how you feel when you do it.
How I understood: the mind is a willful and stubborn child. Telling it not to do something is a sure-shot way of reminding it what can be done. Let it do what it wants, but as it gets the object of desire, sit by its side and whisper to the little devil’s ear ‘So, how do you feel about it?’
So, this is what I did- when I snacked, I felt better instantaneously. But after about 10 minutes, I would zone into how it is making me feel. The snack lying in my tummy, making me feel heavy. The extra oil making me feel gaseous.
And at that moment when the little devil was curled up by the wall, feeling remorseful, I reminded it how much better we felt when we had an avocado-boiled egg sandwich instead. It took me 10–12 attempts, and I naturally started seeking better substitutes.
As I slowly and surely pivoted towards healthier food habits, I started exercising better. It helped to know that while my mind has a mind of its own, I have managed to open a communication channel with it.
I have tried mindfulness for positive reinforcements too, and more so in the last two months of dealing with COVID uncertainties. There have been days when I was not able to find a good enough reason to leave my bed in the morning. While I let myself be, I slowly reach out for the memory of running by the lake in the pleasant breeze, seeing my running mates, and watching lotuses in bloom, and how all that made me feel.
One or two days go by, and I get back to my running routine. The days which start with a run are always more productive for me. I’m happier, more hopeful and able to move ahead with pending tasks. I try to remember this as a reward of going for a morning run, and use it later.
So, if you have battled habits for a long time, give this simple technique a try.
Don’t force yourself to control the cravings, but remember how it makes you feel
Not to mention, mindfulness has proven to be twice as effective as gold standard treatment* in breaking smoking habits!
Be mindful. Be curious. Start the change.
Further reads:
· In Journal of Family Medicine- Mindfulness: An Emerging Treatment for Smoking and other Addictions?
· Time- 5 Science-Approved Ways to Break a Bad Habit
References:
* Mindfulness Training for smoking cessation: results from a randomized controlled trial
** If you want to know more about Mindfulness training, see this TED Talk to get started- A simple way to break a bad habit by Dr Judson Brewer
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