Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials,

[music] where we revisit past episodes

for the most potent and actionable

science-based tools for mental health,

physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor

of neurobiology and opthalmology at

Stanford School of Medicine. Today we're

talking all about habits. In particular,

we're going to discuss the biology of

habit formation and the biology of how

we break habits. Habits are things that

our nervous system learned, but not

always consciously. Sometimes we develop

habits that we're not even aware of

until they become a problem or maybe

they serve us well. Who knows? But the

fact of the matter is that habits are a

big part of who we are. In fact, it's

estimated that up to 70% of our waking

behavior is made up of habitual

behavior. So if habits are largely

learned consciously or unconsciously, we

have to ask ourselves what is learning?

Well, learning is neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is simply the process by

which our nervous system changes in

response to experience. But at the end

of the day, neuroplasticity is about

forming new neural circuits, new

pathways by which certain habits are

likely to occur and other ones are less

likely to occur. As many of you are well

aware, there are popular books about

habits and there's a whole psychological

literature about habits. And those two

areas point to some very interesting

aspects of habits that I think are worth

mentioning. First of all is this notion

of immediate goal-based habits versus

identitybased habits. Immediate

goal-based habits are going to be habits

that are designed to bring you a

specific outcome as you do them. So each

and every time you do them. So maybe

you're somebody that wants to get more

of zone 2 cardio for instance. That

would be an immediate goal-based habit.

If your goal is to get that cardio maybe

four times a week, every time you do it,

you could check off a little box and

you'd say, "Okay, I did it. You meet you

met the goal." That is different than

so-called identity based habits where

there's a larger overarching theme to

the habit where you're trying to become

quote unquote a fit person or you're

somebody who wants to be uh an athlete

or something of that sort. It's where

you start to attach some sort of larger

picture about yourself or what it means

for you to do that habit where there's

both the immediate goal, right? Complete

the exercise, complete the the session

or whatever it is. um check off that

box, but that you're linking it to some

sort of larger goal. Another thing that

you'll hear out there in the literature

is that it takes 21 days to form a

habit. Some people say 18, some people

say 21, some people say 30 days, some

people say 60 days. So, which one is it?

Does it depend on the habit that one is

trying to form or does it depend on the

person that's trying to form the habit?

Well, it turns out that there's

excellent peer-reviewed data on this.

There's a study published in 2010 first

author Lai Ly.

This study found that for the same habit

to be formed, it can take anywhere from

18 days to as many as 254 days for

different individuals to form that

habit. So for those of you listening,

some of you might be thinking, I can't

believe that it would take some people

254 days to get into that habit. But as

I said, people are highly variable. And

if you can't form one habit easily, it

doesn't mean that you can't form other

habits easily.

The mystery of why certain people can

form certain habits more easily than

others probably has something to do with

how well people manage what's called

limbic friction. Now limbic friction is

not a term that you're going to find in

the formal neurobiological literature or

even psychological literature. It's

frankly a term that I coined to

encompass a number of different pieces

of the psychology and neuroscience

literature. Limbic friction is a

shorthand way that I use to describe the

strain that's required in order to

overcome one of two states within your

body. One state is one of anxiousness

where you're really anxious and

therefore you can't calm down. You can't

relax and therefore you can't engage in

some particular activity or thought

pattern that you would like. The other

state is one in which you're feeling too

tired or lazy or not motivated. Both of

those states, feeling too alert and too

calm, if you will, relate to the

function of the so-called autonomic

nervous system, a set of neurons and

hormones and chemicals in your brain and

body that act as sort of a seessaw.

You're either alert or calm. You're

either asleep or stressed. Those two

states are not compatible with one

another. You've probably heard of wired

and tired, but that's really once you've

been very stressed for a long time to

the point where you're exhausted. What

does the autonomic nervous system have

to do with any of this? Well, limbic

friction is a phrase that can be used to

describe how much effort, how much

activation energy you need in order to

engage in a particular behavior. A lot

of habit formation has to do with being

in the right state of mind and being

able to control your state of body and

mind. So, as we march forward, what

you're going to find is that this phrase

or this term limbic friction is going to

be a useful metric or way for you to

touch in with yourself and address

whether or not you are likely to be able

to form a certain habit easily or

whether or not it's going to be very

challenging. And I'm going to teach you

a way to measure your degree of limbic

friction. That is, how much activation

energy it will take in order for you to

execute a new habit. And I'm going to

teach you how to measure your limbic

friction and activation energy for how

likely it is that you're going to be

able to break a habit that you don't

want to have. The other key concept for

us to address that's really mainly found

in the books and articles out there

about habits is this notion of what I

call lynchpin habits. Lynchpin habits

are certain habits that make a lot of

other habits easier to execute. Now, the

sorts of lynchpin habits that I'm

referring to are always going to be

things that you enjoy doing. I'll just

give you an example from my life. I

happen to like exercise. Not all forms

of exercise, but I happen to like

resistance training and I happen to like

running. And for reasons that I'll get

into a little bit later, I place those

activities typically early in the day

because of the neurochemistry and the

various types of hormones etc that are

associated with performing those

activities. But I really place those

activities under the umbrella of what I

call lynchpin habits. Why? because those

particular habits are easy to execute

because I enjoy them. But they also make

a lot of other habits easier to execute.

Things like being alert for work, things

like making sure that I get good sleep

the night before, things like hydration,

things like making sure that I eat the

foods that are better for me than maybe

some of the other foods that I would

more reflexively reach to if I weren't

doing that training. So certain habits

act as lynchpins, meaning that they

shift a lot of other things. they can

control and bias the likelihood that in

this case you or me will perform other

habits that are harder to access that we

have less of an affinity for. So again,

there's three concepts that we need to

include here. We've got identity based

versus goal-based habits. We've got the

concept that different habits take

different periods of time to adopt

depending on the person and the habit.

And that there are these what I call

lynchpin habits. Certain habits that

make other habits easier to execute. And

those lynchpin habits always, always,

always are things that we enjoy doing.

So now I'd like to shift to thinking

about a particular aspect of habits and

that's habit strength. Habit strength is

measured by two main criteria. The first

is how context dependent a given habit

is. So context dependence is

if you go from one environment to the

next, do you tend to do the same thing

in the same way at the same time of day?

So for instance, brushing your teeth

first thing in the morning. Maybe some

of you do that before breakfast. Maybe

some of you do that later. Maybe some of

you like me don't even eat breakfast.

But when I travel, I tend to brush my

teeth at more or less the same time of

day relative to when I wake up as I do

when I'm at home. So it's context

independent. So it's a very strong

habit, right? The other aspect of habit

strength is how much limbic friction is

required to perform that habit on a

regular basis. This is extremely

important because if you are in the

process of building habits and

consolidating those habits then it's

probably going to take more limbic

friction to execute those habits. So

these two aspects context dependence

whether or not you're likely to do the

thing regardless of where you are right

on travel at home on vacation with

people around not people around etc. and

how much limbic friction is required to

execute that habit will tell you whether

or not that habit is deeply or just

shallowly embedded within your nervous

system. The goal of any habit that we

want to form is to get into what's

called automaticity. Automaticity is

fancy language for the neural circuits

can perform it automatically and that's

the ultimate place to be. So what I'd

like to do is to take the scientific

literature of how the nervous system

learns and engages in neuroplasticity

and apply that to habit formation, habit

maintenance, and if so desired, how to

break particular habits. I'd like to

give you a particular tool that's

gleaned from the research psychology

literature. Should mention that I

learned about this from an excellent

review article that's available online.

It's called Psychology of Habit. The

authors are Wendy Wood and Dennis

Runger. This is published in annual

review of psychology. They're talking

about the various ways that habits form

in the nervous system. And they mention

with each repetition of a habit, small

changes occur in the cognitive and

neural mechanisms associated with

procedural memory. Procedural memory is

holding in mind the specific sequence of

things that need to happen in order for

a particular outcome to occur. Let's say

I want to get into the habit of making

myself or someone else in my household a

cup of espresso every morning. I would

actually think through each of those

steps, walk into the kitchen, turn on

the espresso machine, draw the espresso,

walking through each of those steps from

start to finish. And turns out just that

simple mental exercise done once can

shift people toward a much higher

likelihood of performing that habit

regularly, not just the first time, but

as they continue out into the days and

weeks that follow. So this procedural

stepping through of the steps of the

recipe or the series of action steps

that are involved in sitting down to

study and writing for an hour or

generating exercise, whatever it is, the

habit that you're trying to learn, when

you're doing that exercise, it sets in

motion the same neurons that are going

to be required for the execution of that

habit. And so when you actually show up

to perform that habit, it's as if the

dominoes fall more easily. It's it's a

um lower threshold as we say in order to

get the habit to perform. So for those

of you that just want to be more

habitual about certain things, be able

to perform certain things more

reflexively that you would like in your

life, simply take the time, do it once,

maybe twice, and just sit down, close

your eyes if you like, and just step

through the procedure of what it's going

to take in order to perform that habit.

The psychology literature as I mentioned

and also the neuroscience literature

strongly supports the fact that it is

going to make it far easier for you to

adopt and maintain that habit. So now

I'd like to discuss a second and what I

think is perhaps the most powerful tool

for being able to acquire and stick to

new habits. The tool that I'm referring

to is something called task bracketing.

We have in our brain a set of neural

circuits that fall under the umbrella

term of the basil ganglia. The basil

ganglia are involved in action execution

meaning doing certain things and action

suppression not doing certain things. In

the experimental realm these are

referred to as go meaning do or no go

don't do certain things. So it turns out

that there's an area of our basil

ganglia called the dorsalateral

striatum. It's very important for the

establishment of behaviors that are

associated with a habit but not

necessarily the habit itself. And

beautiful studies in both animals and

humans that record the electrical

activity in the dorsal striatum find

that the dorsal strriatam is associated

meaning it becomes active at the

beginning of a particular habit and at

the very end and after a particular

habit. Hence the phrase task bracketing.

It brackets the habit. Now, this is very

important because task bracketing is

what underlies whether or not a habit

will be context dependent or not.

Whether or not it will be strong and

likely to occur even if we didn't get a

good night's sleep the night before,

even if we're feeling distracted, even

if we are not feeling like doing

something emotionally or if we are, you

know, completely overwhelmed by other

events. If the neural circuits for task

bracketing are deeply embedded in us,

meaning they are very robust around a

particular habit, well then it's likely

that we're going to go out for that zone

2 cardio no matter what. That we're

going to brush our teeth no matter what.

In fact, brushing our teeth is a pretty

good example because for most people,

even if you got a terrible night's

sleep, even if everything in your life

is going wrong, chances are, unless

you're very depressed, if you're going

to leave to work, or even if you're not,

that you're going to still carry out the

behavior of brushing your teeth in the

morning. I would hope so, actually. But

you are probably less likely to perform

particular habits that are not what you

deem as necessary. But if you think

about it, brushing your teeth, exercise,

eating particular foods, maybe engaging

socially in particular ways,

you are the one that places any kind of

value assessment on which ones are

essential and which ones are negotiable.

So task bracketing sets a a neural

imprint, a kind of a fingerprint in your

brain of this thing has to happen at

this particular time of day. So much so

that it's reflexive. And as we'll talk

about in a moment, there's a way that

you can build up task bracketing so that

regardless of what it is you're trying

to learn, there's a much higher

probability that you're going to do that

thing. And when I say learn, meaning

let's say you're trying to acquire a

habit that for you is really

challenging. Maybe it's um that you're

going to write for an hour a day on a

book project that you've been thinking

about or you're going to work on

mathematics or you're going to do any

sort of thing that for you there's a lot

of limbic friction.

While it is important to think about the

sequence of events that would be

required in order to engage in that

behavior, that procedural memory uh

visualization exercise we talked about

before, that will help. There is a way

also that you can orient your nervous

system toward this tax bracketing

process so that your nervous system is

shifted or oriented towards the

execution of a given habit. So this is

sort of like warming up your body to

exercise. When the dorsal striatum is

engaged, your body and your brain are

primed to execute a habit. And then you

get to consciously insert which habit

you want to perform. So in order to

leverage the neural mechanisms of task

bracketing in order to increase the

likelihood that you're going to perform

a particular habit, I have to break it

to you that one thing that you've

probably heard over and over about habit

formation is not true. And what I'm

referring to is this idea that if you

are very specific about exactly when

you're going to perform a particular

habit that you are more likely to

perform that habit. And while that is

true in the short term, it is not true

in the long term. And the reason for

that is that our nervous system tends to

generate particular kinds of behaviors

based not on time but on our state.

Meaning what level of activation is

taking place in our brain and body. how

much focus we happen to have, how

fatigued we are, how energized we are.

So, while schedules are important, it's

not the specific time of day per se

that's going to allow you to get into a

habit and form that habit and

consolidate that habit. Rather, it's the

state that your brain and body are in

that's important to anchor yourself to.

And so now I'm going to present a very

straightforward but neurobiologically

grounded program by which you can insert

particular types of habits that you want

to perform at particular phases of the

day. Not times of day but in particular

phases of the day because it turns out

that particular phases of the day are

associated with particular biological

underpinnings chemicals and neural

circuits and so forth. It involves

dividing the 24-hour days into what I

call three phases. The first is phase

one which is 0 to 8 hours after waking

up approximately. The second phase is

the 9 to 14 maybe 15 hours after you

wake up. And the third phase is 16 to 24

hours after waking up. So we've taken

the 24-hour cycle, we've carved it up

into three phases, phase 1, phase 2, and

phase three.

Phase one, which again is 0 to 8 hours

after waking, has a particular

neurochemical signature. Regardless of

what you do, the neurom modulators

norepinephrine as well as epinephrine,

so that's noradrenaline and adrenaline

as well as the neurom modulator dopamine

tend to be elevated during that first 0

to 8 hours after waking. Right? In that

first phase, your whole system is action

and focus oriented. And we know that

when you are action and focus oriented

and because of the neurochemicals

that are naturally released into your

brain and body that you will be more

likely to overcome any limbic friction

that stands in the way of performing

particular habits. So as you list out or

think about the various habits that

you'd like to adopt in your life,

take the habits for which you know

there's the highest degree of limbic

friction. They are the hardest for you

to engage in. they require the most

activation energy and put those in this

zero to eight hours after waking. This

will greatly facilitate your performance

of those new habits by placing them in

this broader window of of 0 to 8 hours

after waking. What you're doing is

you're creating task bracketing. You're

making it such that your nervous system

will predict when you are going to lean

in against limbic friction in order to

perform particular types of habits.

Phase two, as I mentioned, is about,

again, these aren't specifics, but about

9 to 14 or 15 hours after waking. During

this phase of the day, because of the

circadian shifts in our biology,

dopamine and norepinephrine and cortisol

are starting to taper down just

naturally, and a different neurom

modulator, serotonin, is starting to

rise. Serotonin is definitely going to

be highest in this second half of the

day and tends to lend itself to a more

relaxed state of being. There are

certain things that we all can and

should do during this phase two of each

day that lend themselves to a state of

mind and a state of body that is going

to be beneficial for the generation and

consolidation of certain types of

habits. What are those things? First of

all, as the day goes on, you should try

if you can to start tapering the amount

of really bright light that you're

getting, unless it's sunlight. Talked

about this before on the podcast, but if

you haven't heard, viewing the sun as

it's at what we call low solar angle, so

as it's headed toward the horizon, but

getting some sunlight in your eyes in

the second half of the day can also be

beneficial for a number of brain systems

and psychological systems. Things like

heat and sauna, hot baths, hot showers,

those are terrific things to do in the

second half of the day. They tend to

support this serotonergic or high

serotonin-like state and lend themselves

to more calm and relaxation. Basically,

this phase two of the day is one in

which you're alert, you are present, you

are working, you are engaging socially,

you're cooking dinner, probably paying

attention to a number of things, but you

should really be trying to taper off

your stress level. So, how do you

leverage phase two of the day for habit

formation? Well, given what we know

about the neurochemistry of learning and

memory, given what we know about task

formation and its reliance on certain

forms of neuroplasticity, this second

half of the day is a terrific time to

take on habits and things that you're

already doing that require very little

override of limbic friction. So, these

might be things that you could

categorize uh in common terms as kind of

mellower activities. It might be

journaling. It might be uh that you

already are performing music or I should

say practicing music regularly. You're

trying to learn a language. Something

that's a little bit challenging but

doesn't require a ton of energy in order

to override that limbic friction. One of

the hallmark features of those basil

ganglia circuits for go and no go is

that they are associated with certain

neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin

acetylcholine and other neurochemicals.

And by placing particular habits at

particular phases of the day, those

neurochemical states start to be

associated with the leaning in and the

process of beginning and as I mentioned

ending those particular habits. And in

doing so, they shift the whole nervous

system toward being able to predict that

certain things are going to happen at

particular times of day. That you're

going to be leaning very hard against

limbic friction early in the day in

phase one. and that you're going to be

doing things that require less conscious

override of limbic friction in phase

two. And in doing so, set up this task

bracketing system so that the individual

habits that you're learning or that

you're trying to learn have a much

greater probability of being executed

and consolidated, meaning that pretty

soon they will just naturally become

reflexive. Phase three of the 24-hour

schedule runs from about 16 to 24 hours

after waking. During that period of

time, there are a few things that are

going to support being in a state of

mind, state of body that are going to

allow neuroplasticity to occur, that are

going to allow the rewiring that you've

triggered during the waking part of the

day to actually take place. Those things

are very low to no light, meaning

keeping your environment very dark or

very, very dim. I don't think it's

necessary to sleep in a room that's

complete blackness, but for most people,

keeping the room dark and keeping the

room temperature low is very beneficial

for getting and staying in deep sleep. A

lot of people recommend putting a gap

between your final bite of food and when

you go to sleep at night. Some people

will say that gap should be four hours,

other people say two hours. If you're

me, I generally have something, I don't

know, within two hours or 90 minutes of

going to sleep, but it's not a big meal.

But that's just me and I fall asleep and

stay asleep fine with that. What if you

wake up? The way I've cast phase three

is that you're supposed to be in this

deep slumber. You're not supposed to

wake up at all. You're supposed to be in

low light and your brain is rewiring and

those habits are getting consolidated,

etc. Well, if you're like me, you

probably get up once in the middle of

the night. Perfectly normal, but a lot

of people have trouble falling back

asleep. Very important if you get up in

the middle of the night to use a minimum

of light in order to navigate your

surroundings. just as much as you need

in order to safely do so because light

inhibits the hormone melatonin. Can make

it very hard to fall back asleep if you

inhibit melatonin. Again,

neuroplasticity is the basis of habit

formation and neuroplasticity and the

rewiring of neural circuits happens in

these states of deep sleep. So, if

you're not obeying this phase three, if

you're not giving phase three the

materials it needs and you're and you're

not avoiding the certain things like

caffeine and bright light and stress

during phase three, you're simply not

going to be able to build those habits

that you've been working so hard to

trigger in phase one and phase two of

the day. I fully acknowledge that many

of the things that I've listed out here

are things that I've encouraged people

to do in previous episodes of the

podcast and elsewhere,

but really this is about habit

formation. And the whole reason for

placing particular types of behaviors at

particular phases of the day is to set a

framework for that task bracketing.

Again, task bracketing and those

circuits of the basil ganglia indicate

that it's not just the neural circuits

that are engaged by the task. itself but

the neural circuits that are engaged

before and after that task execution

that's what gets consolidated. So when

you do things at particular phases of

the day under particular conditions of

neurochemistry what you're doing is

you're giving the brain a very

predictable set of sequences that during

sleep it can start to put into your hard

drive if you will. can really program it

into your nervous system so that within

a short period of time hopefully within

18 or maybe even six days or who knows

maybe even fewer days you'll find that

executing those behaviors is very very

straightforward for you and that you

won't have to feel so much limbic

friction or override so much limbic

friction some of you are probably asking

okay if I perform a particular habit

during phase one and then I do other

habits during phase two and I eventually

get to the point where I'm engaging in

those habits in a pretty effortless way.

Do I keep them in the same phase of the

day? And the good news is the literature

says it doesn't matter. And in fact,

moving that particular habit around

somewhat randomly can actually be

beneficial to you because actually

moving it from one time of day to the

other is that context independence that

we're we really are seeking by being

able to do the same thing that we want

to do regardless of time of day or

circumstances. That's how we know that

we've achieved a real habit formation.

That's how we know that the habit has

been moved into certain components of

our neural circuitry that just allow us

to do it what seems like reflexively.

Although earlier I pointed out that

these aren't reflexes in the traditional

sense. The reason for that is that this

brain area the hippocampus that many of

you know is associated with learning and

memory is not actually where memories

are stored. The hippocampus is where

memories are formed. It's where

procedures like I talked about before

procedural memory of how you're going to

execute a particular sequence where

that's maintained. So that whole process

of really leaning into something that's

hard then it becoming easier and then

eventually that thing becoming more or

less reflexive involves a migration of

the information in the brain and once

it's migrated out to a different

location in the brain at that point it's

achieved context independence. It

doesn't have to be bracketed by uh you

know your caffeine and your lunch. It

doesn't have to occur uh immediately

after your afternoon NSDR but before

your uh 4:00 meeting on Zoom or

something of that sort. So all this is

to say that once something has become

reflexive,

you should play with it a little bit

about time of day. If you want to keep

it in the same phase of day, great. But

if you one day decide you're going to

exercise in the afternoon, the next day

you decide you're gonna exercise in the

morning and that's the habit that you're

concerned with, that's terrific. If

you're able to do that, that means that

it's truly achieved context

independence. It means that you have

officially formed that habit. And as I

mentioned earlier, much earlier at the

beginning of the episode, the strength

of a habit is dictated by how much

limbic friction, that was one, and how

much context dependence there is. So

when it doesn't take much activation

energy to get into the execution of that

habit and you can do it in any context,

well then you have formed a habit. Way

back at the beginning of the episode, I

promised you that I would deliver two

programs that are geared towards habit

formation. And I promised that I would

give you ways in which you could gauge

whether or not certain habits had moved

from high effort, what I call high

limbic friction to reflexive. In

researching this episode, I found a

tremendous number of different systems

for habit formation. I want to spell out

a particular system that I think could

be very useful to most if not all people

that's rooted in the biology of habit

formation, rooted in the psychology of

habit formation, and that is entirely

compatible with that phase 1, phase 2,

phase three type program that I talked

about earlier, but encompasses a bit of

a longer time scale and really arrives

at a kind of a system, if you will, for

how to build in habits. And so this is

at least for sake of this example a

21-day system. I picked 21 days because

that seems to be the average or most

typical system for engaging

neuroplasticity as it relates to the

formation of new habits. So basically

what this involves is you set out to

perform six new habits per day across

the course of 21 days. The idea is you

write down six things that you would

like to do every day for 21 days.

However, the expectation

is that you'll only complete four to

five of those each day. Okay? So, built

into this is a kind of permission to

fail, but it's not failure. Because it

turns out that this approach to forming

habits is based not so much on the

specific habits that you're trying to

form, but the habit of performing

habits, right? It's the habit of doing a

certain number of things per day. So you

set out to perform six. Now another

reason for not necessarily performing

all six is that some activities probably

shouldn't be performed each day. For

instance, in my case, if I were to

weight train or even run every day, I'm

of the sort or my biology is of the sort

that I don't recover so well. So I

wouldn't want to do resistance training

every day, but I might want to do it

four days a week, for instance. So by

having six things in that list, I could

shuffle out that particular activity on

particular days of the week and simply

do four or five other activities. If you

miss a day, meaning you don't perform

four to five things, there is no

punishment. And in fact, it's important

that you don't actually try and do what

in the literature is called a habit slip

compensation, which is just fancy

psychological language for if you screw

up and you don't get all four or five in

one day, you don't do eight the next day

in order to compensate. After 21 days,

you stop engaging in this 21-day

deliberate four to five things per day

type schedule and you simply go into

autopilot. You ask yourself, how many of

those particular habits that I was

deliberately trying to learn in the

previous 21 days are automatically

incorporated into my schedule? How many

of them am I naturally doing? In other

words, every 21 days, you don't update

and start adding new habits. You're

simply going to assess how well, how

deeply you've rewired your nervous

system to be able to perform those six

habits of the previous 21 days. Many

people are trying to cram so many new

behaviors into their nervous system that

they don't stand a chance of learning

all those behaviors. What you may find

is that you kept up two of those things

very consistently throughout the 21

days. And perhaps there was one of them

that you did sporadically and that there

were three others that frankly you

didn't manage to execute. You may also

be one of these people, one of these

mutants that sets out to do six new

things per day for 21 days and performs

every single one of them. Terrific. More

power to you. In that case, for the

following 21 days, let's see whether or

not you can continue to perform those

very same six things every day for 21

days. And then, and only then would you

want to add more habits in. So, you

could repeat this 21-day process, you

know, 21 days of of new habit, 21 days

of testing those new habits as whether

or not they're reflexive or not. The

idea is that this isn't something that

you're doing all year long. It's that

you perhaps starting the new year or

regardless of when you're listening to

this, you set out to make that 21day

really the stimulus period in which the

habits get wired in. And then the

following month and maybe even the

following months or periods of 21 days

are really the kind of thermometer or

the test bed of how well you've embedded

those particular habits. And if indeed

you want to continue to add new habits

or you find that certain habits that you

weren't able to embed in your nervous

system and make reflexive, you want to

then bring those in. Fantastic. But it's

only once you've achieved all those six

habits as reflexive that you would move

forward. And the fact that habit slips,

missing of particular habits and not

doing all six is kind of built into the

system, I think makes it a very

reasonable one. It's very uh adaptable

to the real world. And I think it's one

that provided you obey the phase 1,

phase 2, phase three type system that we

talked about earlier, if you do that, I

think there's a very high probability

that the habits that you try and form

will achieve this context dependence and

that it will take progressively less and

less limbic friction to perform them.

Thus far, we've almost exclusively been

discussing how to form habits. But what

about breaking habits? Certainly, many

people out there would like to break

habits that they feel don't serve them

well. One of the challenges in breaking

habits is that many habits occur very

very quickly and so there isn't an

opportunity to intervene until the habit

has already been initiated and in some

cases completed. So it turns out that

the key to generating long-term

depression in these pathways is actually

to take the period immediately following

the bad habit execution and in that

moment capture the sequence of events

not that led to the bad habit execution

but actually to take advantage of the

fact that the neurons that were

responsible for generating that bad

habit were were active a moment ago and

to actually engage in a replacement

behavior immediately afterward. So,

let's give it an example. Let's say you

find yourself um you're trying to do

focused work. You pick up your phone,

you're disappointing yourself for for

picking up your phone. You could, of

course, just put it down or you and

re-engage in the work behavior. But if

you were good at that, then you probably

wouldn't have done it in the first

place. And so, what turns out to be very

effective is to go engage in some other

positive habit. This has two major

effects. The first one is you start to

link in time the execution of a bad

behavior to this other good behavior. In

other words, you start to create a kind

of a double habit that starts with a bad

habit and then ends with a good habit.

So, as I mentioned before, this might

seem counterintuitive. You might think,

why would I want to reward the execution

of a bad habit with a good habit? I

don't want to reward myself for the bad

habit. But really what you're trying to

do is you're trying to change the nature

of the neural circuits that are firing

so that you can rewrite the script for

that bad habit. And so when people have

applied this kind of approach, it

removes the need to have constant

conscious awareness of one's own

behavior prior to that behavior which is

very very difficult to achieve. Rather,

what they find is that they are able to

engage in remapping of the neural

circuits associated with bad habits in

ways that are very very straightforward,

right? Because you can always identify

when you've done the thing you don't

want to do and then tack on to that

something additional that's positive.

Now, the nature of that positive thing

is important. You don't want it to be

something that's very hard to execute.

You want it to be something that's

positive and fairly easy to execute so

that you're not struggling all the time

to insert this on top of this bad

behavior, whatever that bad behavior

might happen to be. And of course, I

want to acknowledge that breaking bad

habits is really hard. So today, we've

covered a lot about the biology and

psychology of habit formation and habit

breaking. My hope is that today you've

learned both the biological mechanisms

and the practical tools by which you can

start to establish habits that for you

you deem adaptive healthy and that are

going to support you and your goals and

that you can start to dismantle some of

the habits that you find to be unhealthy

or maladaptive for you and for your

goals. And once again I want to thank

you for going on this journey of

exploring the neuroscience and the

psychology of habit formation and habit

breaking. I hope it supports you in your

goals. And last, but certainly not

least, thank you for your interest in

science.

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