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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.

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I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology 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 identity based 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 two 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 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 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 session, or whatever it is, 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? It turns out that there's excellent peer reviewed data on this. There's a study published in 2010, first author Lally L A L L Y. 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 the 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 seesaw. 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 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. 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For instance, the Pod 5 has a feature called autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjusts the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It'll even elevate your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you would like to try Eight Sleep, go to Eight Sleep.comhuberman to get $450 off the Pod 5 Ultra. This is part of Eight Sleep's extended holiday sale which go now until December 31, 2025. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's Eight Sleep.comhuberman to save up to $450 now through December 31, 2025. 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 linchpin habits. Linchpin habits are certain habits that make a lot of other habits easier to execute. Now, the sorts of linchpin 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, et cetera, that are associated with performing those activities. But I really place those activities under the umbrella of what I call linchpin 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 as linchpins, 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 linchpin habits, certain habits that make other habits easier to execute. And those linchpin 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, et cetera, 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. I 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 a 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 basal ganglia. The basal 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 basal ganglia called the dorsolateral 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 dorsolateral striatum find that the dorsolateral striatum 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. 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, 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 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 that you're going to write for an hour a day on a book project that you've been thinking about, or you, 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 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 of a given habit. So this is sort of like warming up your body to exercise. When the dorsolateral 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. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors. Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium and potassium in the correct amounts, but no sugar, proper Hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element dissolved in water makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. 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Again, that's drinkelement.com huberman to claim a free sample pack. 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 a 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 zero to eight hours after waking up, approximately. The second phase is the nine 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 one, phase two, and phase three. Phase one, which again is zero to eight hours after waking, has a particular neurochemical signature. Regardless of what you do. The neuromodulators norepinephrine as well as epinephrine, so that's noradrenaline and adrenaline, as well as the neuromodulator dopamine, tend to be elevated during that first zero to eight hours after waking. 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.