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The Neuroscience of Habit Formation: How to Build Lasting Healthy Behaviours
The Neuroscience of Habit Formation: How to Build Lasting Healthy Behaviours
Discover how to build lasting healthy habits using neuroscience. Learn 4 proven strategies: self-regulation, consistent tasks, rewards, and friction. Transform your behavior with brain-based techniques
The Neuroscience of Habit Formation: How to Build Lasting Healthy Behaviors
Formed habits drive our behavior and can influence everything we do. Daily routines, personal desires, and long-term goals usually form based on habits developed over time. Lasting habits don't form without the brain playing a major role in such a process. The brain also performs vital functions when we aim to drop bad habits in favor of desired, healthier alternatives.
Understanding the neuroscience behind habit formation is vital if you desire a sure path to form healthy, long-lasting behaviors.
The Science Behind Forming Habits
Studies like Chen et al., (2020) describe the habit loop as a major factor behind the creation of behaviors we build over time. The habit loop has three parts:
a cue (anything that encourages your brain to start a habit),
harmony (a pleasing feeling when your action to perform a habit matches the cue), and
routine (the habit becomes easier to form since it sends pleasing signals to the brain)
Fig. 1 illustrates how the habit-forming process works:
Fig. 1: The habit loop (Chen et al., 2020)
Why are Bad Habits Hard to Break?
Bad habits are hard to break, as the brain tends to give priority to tasks that offer immediate rewards. Building habits that offer healthier returns are naturally hard, but not impossible. Some practical steps can help you build and maintain long-lasting, healthy habits over time.
How to Build Lasting, Healthy Habits
Knowing how the brain works to form habits is the first major step to build healthy habits that last. However, you need to carry out some tasks to build long-lasting and healthy habits. A combination of brain-rewiring strategies can help you build the behaviors you want:
1. Embrace self-regulation
Self-control is a major practice to encourage towards maintaining healthier and long-lasting behaviors. Inzlicht et al., (2020) describes the ideal self-regulation model possessing four key elements:
a goal – the habit your self-regulation measure hopes to achieve,
current state – different points from the initial condition (current habit) to states after self-regulation (changes/building new habits) until aims are achieved (healthy habit(s) formed),
conflict monitoring system – a system to identify changes between the goal (new habits) and current state, and
implementing mechanism – a system to make changes (habit-forming activity) that reduce the gap within current state and your desired outcome
Fig. 1 describes how the self-regulation mechanism should function:
Fig. 1: 4-point self-regulation mechanism (Inzlicht et al., 2020)
Tip:
Merge your goals (forming lasting and healthy habits) and your current state while monitoring changes and implementing new activity.
2. Perform small and consistent tasks
Repetitive tasks can stimulate the brain to form new habits over time. However, avoid making significant changes at first. Develop these small changes or inclusions to your routine into regular activity before compounding. Performing small, repetitive tasks over time can help you build lasting behaviors that come naturally.
Tip:
The brain will adapt to small and repeat changes over time. Engage small inclusions of new habits to your current routine and increase such activity when you feel comfortable in such a process.
3. Use incentives and rewards
Wood and Neal (2016) show how incentives can play a vital role in habit formation. The researchers conducted several experiments to determine if intervention through incentives can influence changes in behavior.
One of such experiments (in Fig. 2) showed how providing information and financial incentives produced better responses opposed to a single intervention among smokers:
Fig. 2: Intervention to quit using smoking information and financial incentives vs smoking information only (Wood and Neal, 2016)
The graph clearly shows over 20% of smokers sampled in the study quitting earlier (within 3 or 6 months) with a financial incentive included. Monetary incentives to stop smoking produced twice as much quitters than the other intervention method. Just over 10% reported quitting early without financial incentives.
Incentives coupled with information to quit smoking also encouraged twice as many smokers to form new habits within 15 and 18 months. Under 5% chose to quit without financial incentives within the long-term period.
Tip:
Reward yourself at intervals to discourage old habits while building new ones. Incentives can be anything that stimulates excitement, but ensure your choice incentive doesn’t lead you towards other bad habits.
4. Impose friction
Wood (2024) suggests imposing friction can help improve or control habit formation in humans. Imposing friction in this context means ramping up difficulties in performing a regular behavior.
Fig. 3: Habit-changing strategies through friction increase or reward alteration (Wood, 2024)
Wood relies on the elevator-stair experiment (Houten et al., 1981) to show how imposing friction can help build healthy habits:
A company aims to reduce elevator use by encouraging staff to take the stairs on short office trips. Posting a sign beside the elevator doors to discourage frequent use did not work, but,
Slowing the elevator doors by over 15 seconds reduces its frequent usage by over 30%,
Returning the elevator doors to normal speed after a month did not increase frequent usage among workers. Many workers chose the stairs over waiting at the elevator door for few seconds more
The experiment shows how potent imposing friction can be to reduce unwanted habits while making alternative, healthier options attractive. Such an approach can be useful to build healthier behaviors while grappling with undesirable habits.
Tip:
The path to build lasting healthy habits could be through creating obstacles to discourage existing behavior. Combining incentives to develop new habits while discouraging old behaviors can lead to lasting, desired outcomes.
Final Word
You must understand the neuroscience behind forming habits, as it helps with vital details to build long-lasting and healthy behaviors. You need to start small, ensure consistent action, and reward yourself throughout the process to form new habits. Taking advantage of the neuroscience behind habits allows you harness brain power to develop essential, life-changing behaviors. You can easily rewire your brain to improve your wellbeing and overall productivity while forming new habits.
Reference List
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2016). Healthy Through Habit: Interventions for Initiating & Maintaining Health Behavior Change. Behavioral Science & Policy, 2(1), pp. 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/bsp.2016.0009
Wood. W. (2024). Habits, Goals, and Effective Behavior Change. Journal of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 33(4) 226–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241246480
Houten, R. V., Nau, P. A., & Merrigan, M. (1981). Reducing Elevator Energy Use: A Comparison of Posted Feedback and Reduced Elevator Convenience. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 14(4), 377–387. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1981.14-377
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