Why Habits are So Hard to Break and What to Do About It

At the end of the year, I start to think about looking back and looking ahead. Like many people, I also consider what I’d like to do differently in the next year. Some of you may be thinking about quitting smoking, adding an exercise program, cutting down on email or Blackberry, or some other form of self improvement. Yet, changing is tough. Help may come from studies of how the our mammalian brains acquire habits.

Imagine a mouse in a cage. The mouse has a little bar to press. When the mouse presses the little bar, a treat drops out. Naturally, the mouse presses the bar again. Every time a treat shows up the mouse gets a reward and the mouse’s brain squirts out a chemical called dopamine.

However, dopamine not only rewards behavior, it also elicits the very behavior it rewards. That means that dopamine provides motivation to do something and rewards the doing. (For a full rundown of the research, see this article in Nature.) Dopamine is the root of habit.

Now imagine yourself sitting in front of your computer. You check your email by clicking with your mouse. You’ve got mail! Getting mail makes you feel good somehow: someone needs your input, it gives you something to do, it relieves boredom or allows you to put off something you didn’t want to do (like exercise, say). Your brain gives you a nice dopamine rush. So, you click your mouse again. More mail. More dopamine. Poof! You have a habit. If you are one of those people who cannot put down your Blackberry, you now understand why. But what you do about it?

Pay attention to yourself. Yes, change may be a simple as quietly observing your own impulse (that is, the first surge of dopamine that tells you to do something) and then disobeying the impulse. If you think that’s oversimplifying, consider the research of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz. Schwartz has demonstrated that the brains of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) become physically altered when they simply pay attention to their impulses and then do something different instead. The entire program of habit breaking, step by step, is presented here.

With this simple program, you may have greater success in breaking old, destructive habits. The next task will be to add in new, healthier ones. Next week’s post will tackle that subject. In the meantime, Happy New Year!