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Why is it that we develop habits and how do they differ from other learning? How do we nurture good habits and stop those persistent, onerous ones? These are crucial questions for an intentional life and good decision-making. Once again, because of amazing neuroscience imaging and research, we are beginning to make sense of the underlying brain mechanisms of habit formation, and a bit more about how to stop bad habits.
The brain apparently evolved a system of habit formation as a way to save energy. When learning is new, we use complex prefrontal cognition to understand and integrate the new information pattern of thinking, behaving, emoting, or speaking. If you repeat a learned pattern often enough, the complex cognitive center entrains it onto the motor system and motivational reward system, so that critical thinking gradually drops out of the circuit. The new pattern becomes automatized, executed mostly by the motor system, and is often thoughtlessly reenacted outside of strategic assessment and conscious awareness. Remember that complex thinking takes a lot of energy. If something in our lives is stable and routinely repeated, it will likely become an ingrained habit. In this way, our strategic learning system is freed up to focus on new information that is changing and more variable. Habits save energy and are important for repetitive life demands. However, bad habits can become a problem.
Brain Mechanisms of Habit
It is fascinating to look at the upward placement of the small nuclei and their connections in the basal ganglia, a linked composite of systems interfacing with biochemical circuits of reward, habit, and complex assessment. The reward and habit centers (remember habit centers are connected to the movement system) seemed to have evolved first as they are placed in lower portions of the brain, while the nuclei with connections to the prefrontal cortex, temporal, and vision centers are stationed higher. These basal ganglia nuclei and their connections work in concert to help us make decisions that may facilitate survival.
As intimated earlier, if a pattern of behaving, thinking, etc. is repetitive, the cognitive loops will fade out so that it becomes almost reflexive, often without conscious awareness. What may have once been a series of steps to learn and execute a pattern of behavior or thought, becomes streamlined into habit formation as a sequence of automatized actions. Think of learning a new measure of music. As you practice it over and over again, and importantly sleep on it, the measure becomes a smooth series of notes and no longer demands your focus. The fluid sequence of a habit pattern is difficult to interrupt and change, so once a repetitive habit pattern is triggered, it will be deftly reenacted and mostly out of conscious awareness.
Additionally, the basal ganglia circuit helps us integrate sensory information and to make choices that may maximize reward and minimize the expenditure of energy and time. This system is a plexus of connectivity that entails both a “go system” and a “stop system”. The primary neurochemical is dopamine. There is an activating system for learning and an inhibiting system for rest, restoration, and safety. There are activating, D1, dopamine receptors and inhibitory, D2, receptors. Dopamine is primarily associated with movement, cognition, and motivation for reward. Interestingly, it is the opioid system is more closely aligned with the sensation of pleasure.
Changing Bad Habits
Patterns embedded early in life and deeply entrained repetitive habits are not erased. They can be actively inhibited, so that new learning can emerge and become habituated, but the first learned habit is a kind of default network that can easily reoccur under stress or when triggered. Changing old habits is a rather fragile enterprise. Nothing changes without conscious acknowledgement that there is something that needs changing, a commitment of focused and persistent effort, and a plan to change. This means that complex assessment is once again trained on the habit, but now to inhibit it and to establish a new pattern of responding. It is challenging to alter a well-established habit, but not impossible! It is also hard to keep the newly chosen habit from reverting to the old pattern.
Adulthood scrutiny of habits learned in a culture or family legacy of childhood may reveal some of them to be well worth changing. For instance, eating habits in childhood often change with education and cultural repositioning in later life. In therapy, we may sort out long-term goals from present-day behaviors. Old patterns of responding may need to be shifted and updated to the more self-aware and reflective present person. Have you ever met an educated person whose personal or relationship habits seem primitive in juxtaposition to his/her achieved status? Think of President Lyndon Johnson who was renowned for having his assistants stand outside the bathroom taking notes while he toileted.
The habit system, of course, can go awry, especially when hijacked by the dopamine motivational reward center. Effectively interrupting any addiction can be exceedingly difficult. When the AA folks say, “keep it simple,” they are aware that old habits return under stress, and the dopamine craving circuit can be easily triggered by familiar habit related associations. By refocusing complex assessment on unwanted habit patterns and garnering social support, addiction can be conquered. It may be, however, like a chronic disease that must be addressed on an ongoing basis.
Focus and learning, which are necessary for inhibiting old habits and establishing new ones, takes balanced energy and persistence. Keeping our bodies chemically equilibrated is important for quality of life as well as good decision-making, emotional stability, and flexibility. There are many components to learning and balance. Controlling our own chemistry with healthy wake/sleep cycles, eating, thinking, and exercise habits takes commitment and planning. These are some of the basic ingredients in managing our own balanced chemistry, and sleep is also a critical player. During REM sleep, movement and procedural memories are laid down; remember the movement circuit is related to habit. Slow-wave sleep, on the other hand, is thought to be when new narrative informational experiences are coded. It is also in slow-wave sleep that our brains are cleansed of the toxic cellular waste from daytime activity. Slow-wave sleep decreases with aging but can be increased with exercise. It is also negatively impacted by the internal chemistry (norepinephrine) of stress.
Our learning and memory systems are intimately tied to good health and good sleep. Our ability to habitually comfort, soothe, and decrease stress in a plethora of healthy ways may help to avoid emotional agitation and thoughtless bad habits. The propensity to stay quieted so as to be effectively focused and reflective is epigenetic. How did the members in your childhood family sooth and decrease stress? What were the related habits of neighbors in your childhood social context? If you were lucky, they had a multiplicity of healthy habits on hand to calm and quiet themselves, like exercise, prayer or meditation, learning, and mutual support.
Certain circumstances make it even more difficult to change habits. A childhood filled with untrustworthy people may leave you struggling to believe that anything but immediate rewards can be relied upon. A regular experience of scarcity makes change difficult as it promotes a focus on the present needs rather than the patience and persistence needed for future hopes and habit changes.
Self-control and change involves inhibiting impulse- planning and hoping for the future while resisting distractions. These are skills that many people did not acquire in their young lives. Changing bad habits entails plans for avoiding places and people who may trigger old, now unwanted, patterns. Anticipating unexpected triggers may prevent a slide into undesirable past proclivities. Change takes accountability. For instance, actively working to modify a habit pattern may mean telling your intentions to as many of your family and friends as possible in order to broaden your range of accountability.
Effectively altering a bad habit works best with a multiplicity of factors that support new thinking, behavior, emotional regulation, eating, drinking, etc. Relying on only one thing is often futile. Thinking, as too many people do, that a medication or a single factor is “the answer” is usually fallacious. However, the more we understand how habits form and maintain themselves, the more we may actively set up strategies to change the self defeating ones. At least now, thanks to the advances in neuroscience, we have a better understanding and visible evidence of how this habit system works.
- Dr. Linda Klaitz, Medical Psychologist
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