How to Break a Habit

Judson Brewer discusses in this video research that he has been doing in methodologies used to help people break habits. It really epitomizes intentionality and the awareness that is necessary to be intentional.

He was learning to meditate and was told to focus on his breathing. When his mind started to wander he was instructed to focus back on his breathing. Simple right? Well, he had a lot of trouble with it. It was really hard. He realized that the reason it was so hard was that he was fighting against one of the strongest brain processes that we have. Positive reinforcement. When we get distracted there is a pleasure response from shifting attention and focusing on the distraction.

More clearly this pattern is demonstrated with food. It is a cycle of positive reinforcement. We see food that looks good, we eat the food, and we feel good. The feel good is not just because the food is good, but because our brains dump endorphins making us happy. We co-opt this process when we are stressed in order to cheer ourselves up. Get stressed, eat good food, feel happy. It's great. Except of course that it usually ends up being something we really shouldn't be doing. It's a bad habit.

So what Brewer did was instead of trying to drop it cold turkey, or push the whole thing away, he leaned into it, as it were. He thought, what if you got curious? So instead of just trying to not eat the cookie, you really examined the whole process. How does your body feel when you started wanting the cookie? Where were you? What were you thinking about? When you are eating the cookie what is happening? Being mindful of the whole process.

He worked with smokers using this method, called mindfulness training, to see how it affected their ability to quit smoking. He found that the people using this method were able to successfully quit smoking at over twice the rate of the rate attained by gold standard smoking therapy.

So what is happening here? Why does this work? The smokers who participated in the study knew that the habit was bad. Their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that does reasoned thought, was working and telling them smoking was bad. However, when we are under stress the prefrontal cortex shuts down. It's why the worst version of ourselves shows up. We yell, we smoke, we over eat, we lose some of the protection of reason against bad behavior.

What happened when his subjects got curious about smoking was they studied what was happening. The became disenchanted on a visceral level with their behavior. That meant that what had been an intellectual understanding of their bad habit reached a deeper level. It meant that when cognitive shutdown happened because of stress they had a deeper emotional aversion that carried them through.

The reason for this change goes back to the positive reinforcement cycle from before. Our brains love being curious. It is naturally rewarding and gives the same dopamine jump that eating the cookie did. It enables us to break up the craving into what they are which is a collection of body sensations. This makes it easier to deal with. It slays the dragon of the amorphous craving monster. Over time it can enable us to step away from the poor patterns we are in as demonstrated by the smokers in his study.

So lean in, get curious, and be mindful of what you are doing and why.