Lessons - Breaking Free From Bad Habits | Dr. Jud Brewer - Neuroscience of Addiction Expert

Summary

Success Story Podcast Summary: Lessons - Breaking Free From Bad Habits | Dr. Jud Brewer

In this compelling episode of the Success Story Podcast, hosted by Scott D. Clary from Success Story Media, Dr. Jud Brewer, a renowned neuroscience expert on addiction, delves deep into the science behind habits and addictions. Released on March 25, 2025, this episode offers invaluable insights into understanding and overcoming detrimental behaviors that hinder personal and professional growth.

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1. Understanding Habits and Addiction

Defining Habit and Addiction:

Dr. Jud Brewer begins by establishing clear definitions to differentiate between habits and addictions. He articulates:

“Habit is something that we do automatically. You know, that's a simple operational definition that generally holds pretty well.” ([01:52])

He emphasizes that habits are automatic behaviors that conserve our brain’s energy, preventing the need to relearn tasks daily. In contrast, addiction lies at the far end of the habit spectrum:

“Addiction is continued use despite adverse consequences.” ([01:52])

This distinction is crucial as it highlights that while habits are generally benign and designed for efficiency, addictions carry negative repercussions that persist despite their harmful effects.

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2. The Transition from Habit to Addiction

From Healthy Habits to Unhealthy Addictions:

The conversation shifts to explore how seemingly innocuous habits can morph into addictions, particularly using food consumption as a primary example. Dr. Brewer explains:

“Our brains learn to do behaviors based on how rewarding they are.” ([04:48])

He illustrates how early-life experiences, such as associating sugary treats with celebrations, can lead to eating in the absence of physiological hunger. This behavior is reinforced through both positive reinforcement (celebratory eating) and negative reinforcement (emotional consolation), setting the stage for habitual overeating.

Key Insights:

• Positive Reinforcement: Associating certain foods with positive emotions, like celebrations, encourages repeated behavior.

• Negative Reinforcement: Using food to alleviate negative emotions (e.g., boredom, sadness) creates a pattern of emotional eating.

Dr. Brewer underscores the evolutionary basis of these reinforcement mechanisms, noting their deep-rooted presence even in simple organisms like sea slugs, highlighting the fundamental nature of this behavioral pattern.

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3. Hedonic Hunger and Emotional Eating

Defining Hedonic Hunger:

Dr. Brewer introduces the concept of hedonic hunger, clarifying its relation to emotional eating:

“Hedonic hunger relates to what you were talking about, which is we're eating due to an emotion, whether it's a positive emotion or a negative emotion, rather than direct physiologic hunger itself.” ([10:13])

He distinguishes hedonic hunger from homeostatic hunger (physiological need for food), emphasizing that emotional eating bypasses the body’s actual energy needs, leading to overeating without genuine hunger.

Implications of Emotional Eating:

By turning food into a mechanism for emotional regulation, individuals detach eating from its primary survival function, risking overconsumption and its associated health consequences. Dr. Brewer notes:

“...we're emotionally eating rather than eating because we're at a caloric deficit.” ([12:51])

This behavioral shift is pivotal in understanding how healthy habits can escalate into harmful addictions.

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4. Strategies to Reverse the Progression into Addiction

Three-Step Approach to Overcoming Addictions:

Dr. Brewer outlines a pragmatic three-step strategy to dismantle harmful habits and prevent their evolution into addictions:

1. Recognition of the Habit:

   • Awareness: Understanding and identifying the habitual behavior is foundational.
   • Application to Eating: Recognizing when one is eating out of emotion rather than hunger is crucial.

   “The first step is just recognizing that we're doing something and that it is a habit.” ([12:14])

2. Evaluating the Reward Value:

   • Assessing Outcomes: Paying attention to the actual consequences of the behavior helps reframe its perceived rewards.
   • Practical Example: Using an app like “ERight Now,” individuals can track their eating behaviors to see that overeating often leads to negative feelings, thereby diminishing its reward value.

   “What am I getting from this behavior?” ([12:51])

3. Disenchantment with the Behavior:

   • Updating Reward Value: After recognizing the negative outcomes, the behavior loses its appeal.
   • Psychological Shift: This disenchantment naturally reduces the propensity to engage in the habit.

   “Ancient Buddhist psychologists describe this as disenchantment.” ([12:51])

Broader Applications:

While the discussion primarily centers on eating habits, Dr. Brewer emphasizes that this approach is universally applicable to various addictions, including work addiction commonly seen in high-achieving individuals like Olympic athletes and business leaders. These individuals may find themselves trapped in cycles of overwork, leading to adverse personal and professional consequences.

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Conclusion

This episode of the Success Story Podcast offers a thorough exploration of the intricate mechanisms that govern habits and their potential descent into addictions. Dr. Jud Brewer provides a clear, actionable framework for individuals seeking to break free from detrimental patterns, emphasizing the importance of awareness and cognitive restructuring. By understanding the underlying neuroscience and applying practical strategies, listeners are empowered to transform negative behaviors into healthier, more fulfilling habits.

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Notable Quotes:

• “Habit is something that we do automatically.” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([01:52])
• “Addiction is continued use despite adverse consequences.” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([01:52])
• “Our brains learn to do behaviors based on how rewarding they are.” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([04:48])
• “Hedonic hunger relates to we're eating due to an emotion, whether it's a positive emotion or a negative emotion, rather than direct physiologic hunger itself.” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([10:13])
• “The first step is just recognizing that we're doing something and that it is a habit.” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([12:14])
• “What am I getting from this behavior?” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([12:51])
• “Ancient Buddhist psychologists describe this as disenchantment.” — Dr. Jud Brewer ([12:51])

This episode serves as a valuable resource for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone striving to cultivate better habits while avoiding the pitfalls of addiction.

Transcript

[Host]

I just want to take a second and thank Cornbread Hemp for supporting today's episode. Now, Cornbread Hemp CBD gummies have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit. I don't use them every day, just when I want to unwind after those extra busy weeks, but they're perfect for those moments when you want to take the edge off and just find your balance, really just shut off from work. And what makes them special is how Cornbread handcrafts them. They only use a flower of USDA organic hemp plants. That's the best part. For the purest, most potent experience. No fillers, no artificial fluff, just clean full spectrum goodness in delicious watermelon, berry and peach flavor. I keep them in my nightstand for those moments when I just need a little extra help relaxing. And I love how transparent they are too. Every batch is third party lab tested so you know exactly what you're getting. And they put together a special offer for all success story podcast listeners. All listeners can save 30% off their first order. Just head to cornbread hemp.com/success and use code success at checkout. That's cornbread hemp.com success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing gummies. In this lessons episode, uncover the science behind habits and addictions. Learn why automatic behaviors form to conserve energy and how reinforcement learning sets the stage for unhealthy addictions. Understand how paying attention to the true rewards of a behavior can transform negative patterns into opportunities for healthier changes.

[Co-host]

And, and I actually, I want to describe. So for people listening, what is the actual, like clinical definition of a habit? Because I think that setting the baseline so people understand what we're actually speaking about. Because I think people also, I mean, I don't want to jump too deep in before they even understand how you understand a habit.

[Expert Guest]

Yeah, I'll actually give you a twofer. Let's, let's define habit and let's define addiction as well so that we can differentiate those two. So habit is basically something that we do automatically. You know, that's a simple operational definition that generally holds pretty well. And habits are set up so that we can learn things and then have the energy the next day to not have to relearn that and learn something new. So most habits are extremely helpful. And it's a, it's an efficiency process for our brain. You know, imagine waking up every morning and having to relearn everything from walking to making breakfast. You know, we'd be exhausted before we had even relearned how to make coffee. So that's, you know, habit is automatic behavior, something that we, we see a cue and that cues this process, this automated process to just do the thing. In contrast, addiction, I think of habit along a spectrum and at the far end of that spectrum is addiction. And the definition of addiction I learned in residency was continued use despite adverse consequences. And the reason I bring that forward as well is that often people think and they describe their addictions in terms of a habit. I'm in the habit of smoking, I in the habit of overeating or whatever. But if you look at that definition, continued use despite adverse consequences, we can see how, you know, they're the obvious ones like smoking, which aren't helpful for survival. But then the ones that are not so obvious where it overlaps between the survival mechanisms like eating, we all have to eat to survive. And doing that same behavior despite adverse consequences. Where we, for example, overeating and clinical obesity has been linked to anti survival, you know, a lot of, a lot of negative health consequences from not being in an ideal weight. So that's how I think of habit, and then that's how I think of its relationship. We can be in a habit of doing something where we're continuing to do it despite adverse consequences. So addiction, it can even fall into that addiction spectrum as well. Does that make sense?

[Co-host]

It does. And I, I'm. It's very interesting because some things seem to be more black and white. So I think that Most people in 2024 would agree that smoking is more of an addiction than a habit. But I'm curious about food in particular. And maybe we can just extrapolate to other habits that maybe turn into addictions. And what is that bridge that we cross when we're not aware? Because I think that's where people predominantly get into trouble. I don't think people wake up and are like, hey, I want to be clinically obese or just out of shape or eat more than I really need. Like, people don't go in to life thinking that. But that's the output after 5, 10 years. So how does that happen in the brain? We turn a habit into an addiction.

[Expert Guest]

Yes. Well, let's use eating as an example. Yeah, the, our brains learn to do behaviors based on how rewarding they are. And often we'll set up these habits early in life. So for example, if we, you know, we're five years old and we go to a birthday party, you know, our parents aren't sending us to that birthday party saying, you know, why don't you go and get some nutritious food at this, you know, this is going to substitute for lunch. No, they're sending us, probably trying to have us eat some. A healthy, you know, meal before we go so we don't overindulge on the cake and ice cream. But the point there is that we're already starting to learn to associate ice cream, cake, you know, things like that with celebrations, with connection with people and all that. And you can see as we go through life, we start to learn to eat in the absence of hunger. So we set up these habitual behaviors, you know, celebrations that we're. We're overindulging in ways that are not aligned with our physiology. Our brain and our body aren't saying, hey, you know, you're hungry, Go eat that cake. Typically not right at a. At an office party or whatever. It's like, oh, here's a celebration. Here's some cake. It looks good. And so we just go into the habit mode of eating. So these habits get set up in the way that we are. We are doing the thing because it's now associated not with a survival strategy like I need calories now, but with something else. And if that something else is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it to the point where it is habitual. So with eating, it could be celebrations. It could also be consolations where we learn, you know, we're bored one day and we go into the. We're rummaging around the kitchen just looking for something we eat, you know, and that boredom gap is filled with some typically, some type of a comfort food. And so we learn, oh, if I'm bored, if I'm sad, if I'm mad, if I'm lonely, all these things we learned that food becomes this consolation mechanism that can make us feel less bad. And it's rewarding enough that it gets set up as a habit. So we've got these two reinforcement learning processes. One is called positive reinforcement, where it's all the celebratory stuff. It's like, ooh, you know, just had a good meal. Go have some dessert. And the other is this negative reinforcement loop where it says, oh, you feel bad, make yourself feel better.

[Co-host]

And.

[Expert Guest]

And this is just using food as an example. Almost every habit falls into the same category where if we're. If we're continuing the pleasant, the behavior gets reinforced through positive reinforcement. If we're making the unpleasant go away or avoiding it, we're reinforcing that habit through negative reinforcement. And this, you know, honestly, this process. Not that sea slugs eat birthday cake, but this has been shown. You know, Eric Gandel got the Nobel prize back in the year 2000, showing that this is a very evolutionarily conserved process all the way back to the most basic of nervous system.

[Host]

I just want to take a second and thank Cornbread Hemp for supporting today's episode. Now, Cornbread Hemp CBD gummies have been this really nice addition to my wellness toolkit. I don't use them every day, just when I want to unwind after those extra busy weeks, but they're perfect for those moments when you want to take the edge off and just find your balance. Really just shut off from work. And what makes them special is how cornbread hemp crafts them. They only use a flour of USDA organic hemp implants. That's the best part. For the purest, most potent experience. No fillers, no artificial fluff, just clean full spectrum goodness in delicious watermelon, berry and peach flavor. I keep them in my nightstand for those moments when I just need a little extra help relaxing. And I love how transparent they are too. Every batch is third party lab tested so you know exactly what you're getting. And they put together a special offer for all success story podcast listeners. All listeners can save 30% off their first order. Just head to cornbread hemp.com success and use code success at checkout. That's cornbreadhemp.com success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing gummies.

[Co-host]

Well, because I think that, I mean there's again, your work helps a wide spectrum of people. But I think that the people that I really want to tap into, especially.

[Host]

With the audience listen to this show.

[Co-host]

People that overwork and get addicted to work and then it actually has averse impacts even though it starts off as just a very, a very healthy habit, right? You're motivated, you're, you're putting in the hours, you're waking up every morning and you're going to the office or you're building your thing. But then there's like you just mentioned, people lose track of, of that habit turning into some, some addiction. And I think that's really where a lot of people look back and they're like, what, what have I become? And that's really, that's really a scary, that's a very scary space and a very scary place to find yourself in. And I want to, we'll talk about sort of how to overcome that. But I, I still want to stick.

[Host]

On hung like hunger and food and.

[Co-host]

Eating, because you speak about hedonic hunger. And I want to speak about that. I want to understand it, how it relates to emotional eating, because that's a very big. So this is. If we're looking at the spectrum of. Or the sort of the journey of the person that has all these reinforcement mechanisms that eventually turn into an addiction, where does hedonic hunger fit into that journey?

[Expert Guest]

Yeah, it's a great question. So scientists. We scientists. I'll let you in on a secret. We make up new terms so that we can sound smart. Okay? So relatively recently, a scientist came up with a term called hedonic hunger, which, interestingly, is a misnomer. So. So hedonic is about, you know, emotion, basically, you know, pleasure. Yeah, pleasure. Right. And so we're eating. It's a misnomer because it's. It's about emotional eating. And so it's not about hunger itself. It's not physiologic hunger. That's called homeostatic hunger. But this idonic hunger basically relates to what you were talking about, which is we're eating due to an emotion, whether it's a positive emotion or a negative emotion, rather than direct physiologic hunger itself. And that's where these habits come into play, because then it bypasses our physiologic mechanisms that are putting on the brakes and saying, hey, you're not actually hungry. Why are you putting stuff in your.

[Co-host]

In your mouth that turns into the emotional eating? So help me understand. Help me understand. What is the. What is the strategy to start to reverse this process once you've developed this addition? And we'll use food as an example. But then I know you work with. You work with Olympic athletes, you work with business leaders. I want to start to unpack other addictions. I want to even understand what an Olympic athlete is addicted to or what a business leader is addicted to. I can speak from experience. It's probably working too much. And. And maybe, you know, I see a lot of people that have been very successful. They have broken families and divorces, and I think that's probably the end result of addiction. But you tell me, so how do we start to reverse, you know, this. This progression into addiction, what we found.

[Expert Guest]

Over the last couple of decades? And it. And it spans every habit and addiction that we've studied. So we've studied alcohol, cocaine, you know, smoking, eating, anxiety, you know, all of these.

[Co-host]

And the.

[Expert Guest]

The basic. There seems to be a. You can break it down into three steps. The first is just understanding how habits form if we don't know how our mind works, there's no way that we can work with it. And so that's the first, the simplest, and the most basic piece to start with. So, you know, you can break it down to, you know, what's the behavior and what's the result of the behavior. We can also map out what's cueing the behavior, what's triggering it, but that's actually the least important part of the equation. So that's the first step, is just recognizing that we're doing something and that it is a habit. Does that make sense?

[Host]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Expert Guest]

Yeah. So with eating, it's not that, you know, we're eating because we're hungry. That's not a habit. That's helpful. But it's that we're reaching for food when we're bored, lonely, sad, celebrating. You know, as we talked about earlier, often because of emotions, we're emotionally eating rather than eating because we're at a caloric deficit. So being able to recognize the behavior then helps us shift into this second step, which really highlights the how our brains learn to differentiate behaviors, which is all about how rewarding a behavior is. So I have people start paying attention to the result of the behavior. And it's interesting. This goes all the way back to ancient Buddhist psychology, where they talk about cause and effect. If you look at modern psychology, this is really about reinforcement learning, which highlights that if a behavior, a cause is rewarding effect, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop doing it. So the key here with a habit is we've already established a reward value of a behavior to the point where it's automatic. And so we're not even paying attention to the how rewarding it is. So, for example, if we have learned to overeat or stress eat a long time ago, we're just going to do that automatically, and we're not going to be asking ourselves, hey, you know what? What am I getting from this? So that's really what the second step is all about, is asking this simple question, what am I getting from this? And for example, my lab did a study with an app that we developed called E right now, where we help people pay attention to the results of eating. And we found that within 10 to 15 times of somebody paying attention when they're overeating, for example, that reward value dropped below zero, meaning that they were updating the reward value to the present day. Like, what are they getting from overeating? Typically, it doesn't feel good, they feel bloated, they feel lethargic, they're, they feel guilty. All these things that are not rewarding, they're anti rewarding almost. You can think of it as punishing is not the best term for it, but is psychologists like to use that term. So there. When people see very clearly that something is not rewarding, it makes it much easier to stop doing the behavior. Ancient Buddhist psychologists describe this as disenchantment. We become disenchanted with the behavior. So it's actually pretty straightforward. And you can, we could talk, you know, if you want, we can talk for a long time about the brain mechanisms. But there. That's not actually as pragmatically important as understanding the psychological process, which is, you know, asking ourselves this question, what am I getting from this behavior? So if it's overeating, asking what am I getting when I overeat? How's it feel in my body? And letting our body tell us the answer, which typically is, ugh, this doesn't feel very good. And that's enough it typically pretty quickly to start shifting that behavior.