Transcript
Rob Dial (0:00)
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Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com dial that's LinkedIn.com dial to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob. Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button. Subscribe so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week for the past 10 years to help you learn, grow and improve yourself. So if that's something that you want to do, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Let's learn and grow together. Today I'm going to be talking about the science of making and breaking habits and my goal for today is to give you the shortest but most in depth episode. So by the end of this you really understand exactly what it takes in order to make and break habits neurologically inside of your brain. I don't want to just skim the surface and say something like set an alarm and hope for the best. I'm going to crack into the brain. I want to dissect the science behind your habits. I want to, you know, give you a no BS map of exactly how to do it in your brain. I want to give you a neurologically informed game plan of how to actually change your habits, to change your life. And we're going to talk about how to do that action by action, habit by habit. And I want to be real with you for a second. You don't need more motivation in order to create habits, more motivation to go and take action and do something. What you really need is more understanding, more structure, and a system to actually put in place to break the habits that are holding you back and to create the habits that are needed for you to change your life and to actually work. Work with your brain, not against it. I feel like if you know how your brain works in the mechanisms that trigger and happen in your brain to make a habit or to break a habit, it makes it way easier to create them because you understand what's actually happening versus shooting in the dark. And so when you look at a habit, like what, scientifically speaking, what is a habit? A habit is just basically a neural shortcut. It's a behavior loop that is stored in a part of your brain that's called the basal ganglia. It's a region that is responsible for your routines, for your patterns, and for all of your repetitive behaviors. And when a behavior is repeated enough times, it eventually becomes automatic, meaning that your brain can offload the energy and attention that is required to do something that you've never done before. Do something that is not stored as a habit. Habits are very simply your brain's way of saving energy. Now, why does that matter? Because your brain is always looking to automate. It doesn't care if a habit is good. It doesn't care if a habit is bad. It cares if it is efficient. Because the most energy consuming organ in your body is your brain. It only weighs about 2% of your body weight, but it takes up 20% of your energy throughout the day. And critical thinking uses a lot of of energy. So it wants to store stuff as habits. It actually wants you to store as habits. You know, if you look at a chess player, on average, a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day playing chess. They barely move their Bodies are sitting the entire time. The average person burns about 1500-2000 calories. They burn 6000 just because of the way that they're thinking. And so habits save energy in your brain. And so how are habits made, how are habits created? It's very simple. There's a guy named Charles Duhigg who found this. There's basically a three step process to a habit. It's the cue, it's the routine, and it's the reward. And this is coming from research and behavioral neuroscience, all of this. So the cue is the first part of it. It is the thing that triggers. It's a signal or some sort of context in your life that prompts a behavior. So that's the first thing. It's, you feel a certain way, you think a certain thing, you're in a certain location. It could be a time, a place, an emotion, a thought, a preceding event in some sort of way. So you have a cue, which is the trigger, you have the routine, which is the behavior. That's basically the action that you take that you're wanting to turn into a habit if you're trying to create them, or the one that you're trying to break if you're trying to break a habit. So that's the routine. And then the reward is the payoff for your brain, the feeling or benefit that your brain receives from doing the routine. And it closes the loop of the cue, routine, reward, it closes the loop and now your brain is done with it. And so let me give you some context, let me make it, you know, real. I'll give you some examples in your life, right? Cue. Maybe you feel anxious, you have anxiety, you start to feel the feelings of like, shortness of breath, your heart's starting to race, maybe you're starting to sweat a little bit, you feel anxious in some sort of way. Who knows why you're thinking of something, something happened before you feel anxious. That's the cue routine. You take out your phone and you scroll on Instagram. The reward, you feel temporarily distracted and your brain says, okay, this is awesome. I'm going to do this every time we're anxious because you're not thinking about the thing that's making you anxious. So that's the cue, the routine, and the reward. I think this is one of the main reasons why so many people are addicted to social media in their phones is because they're trying to distract themselves from all of the anxiety that they have in their own lives. What's another example? Let's say that you, your Cue is you come home from work and you're stressed out about work. And maybe you're. Or maybe you're stressed out at parenting. And at 6pm you're like, Ah, okay, it's been a stressful day. I'm gonna pour a glass of wine. Okay? So the routine is pouring a glass of wine or two or three. That's the routine and the reward that your brain and your body feel. Temporary relief, numbing, not thinking about anything that you were thinking about. Your nervous system gets a little bit of a shift. You go from sympathetic activation in your sympathetic nervous system, which is the one that's fight or flight, to parasympathetic, which is I can finally breathe, right? So people say I want to take an edge off. My question always is, why is there an edge? And so your brain, over time, starts to associate alcohol with relief, eventually craves the shortcut, even on low stress days. So maybe you did have a stressful day. Maybe it's Saturday. Ah, you know what, it'd be nice just to relax a little bit. Oh, boom. Now you go to a glass of wine again. What's another example? Maybe if you have like midday junk food cravings. So maybe your, your cue is between 2 and 3 o' clock on average you have an energy dip. So that's your cue. Your routine is you grab sugar or some sort of like a cookie or soda or candy bar. The reward is that your blood sugar spikes. It gives you temporary energy, it gives you a dopamine boost. And so over time, your body starts to learn, okay, low energy, I need to go to get a sugar fix. And eventually your body starts to anticipate that reward before the energy crash even starts to happen. And let me give you one more example so we could kind of get this right. One of the things that I've seen with a lot of people that's not really talked about a whole lot is, is is like spending money and buying stuff online or just shopping online in period. And so the cue could be you're bored, you've had a long day, you're exhausted, you have this emotional emptiness. You have a job that you don't love and a boss that you hate. And you're, you know, thinking about, well, I can't be doing this for the rest of my life. I don't even enjoy any part of this. So you feel empty inside in some sort of way. That's the cue. Your routine is you go online or you just go walk around Target just because that's your routine. And so you buy something, the reward is the dopamine rush of novelty, of short term emotional lift. And so shopping becomes emotional self soothing. And your brain wires consumption to mean comfort in some sort of way. And the loop repeats and this neural pathway gets stronger, literally. And I'll explain to you how it actually gets stronger. I hate when people use the word literal, when they're not actually saying when it's not actually literally. But this is an actual literal example, right? This is how it works your brain. How it works on habits is this is there's a thing that's in your brain called myelin. And myelin is really important. When you repeat a habit over and over again, you myelinate that neural pathway. Myelin is an electrical insulation around your brain wires, basically, if you want to think about it that way, just to make it easy to understand. It's the same way that if you look at your phone charger, right, and you plug in your phone, the phone charger might be white, but that is just the rubber that's on the outside. On the inside of that is a copper wire. And the copper wire is actually where the electrical signal is sent from your wall to your phone. The wire, the white that's on the outside of the wire, the rubber, insulates the electrical signal, which allows the electrical signal to send more efficiently. The myelin in your brain that you build from doing something over and over again is the equivalent of that white little wire. And so over time, the more you do something, the more myelin that you build around that actual wire in your brain and the more myelin that you build, the faster the signals work, the more efficiently they work and the more automatic the behavior becomes. It means that every repetition that you have towards something good or bad, any action, strengthens that behavior on a biological level. And so when you look at that, okay, now we kind of understand how the brain works. How do we tactically, step by step, actually start to break habits? And then I'm going to talk about how to, I'm sorry, how to build habits first. And then I'm going to talk about how to break habits second. Okay, so the first thing is we know that the cue is the most important part of this. And so if you're trying to make a habit, you need to make your cue extremely obvious. You need to see it, you need to hear it, you need to smell it. It needs to be in your vicinity in some sort of way. If your brain can't find the trigger, it won't run the routine. And so here's what most people really miss when they look at habits. Your brain doesn't respond to your intention of I want to do this. Your brain responds to context. That means if you don't clearly anchor a habit to something that is real in your life, it really won't know when to fire. And so it's not really going to work. And so when you look at the science behind it, the basal ganglia in your brain and the hippocampus work together to recognize patterns in time, location, emotional states, thoughts, preceding actions, all of that. And your brain takes like, these mental snapshots of where and when certain actions occur. And then if your habit isn't tied to a specific cue, it kind of floats around in like, maybe someday land. And we will be right back.