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I want to be real with you for a second.
Explore the science behind habit formation and breaking, focusing on brain mechanisms, habit loops, and practical examples to change behavior.
Key Takeaways
- Habits are automatic neural pathways formed to conserve brain energy.
- The habit loop consists of cue, routine, and reward, which reinforces behavior.
- Breaking and forming habits requires understanding and working with brain mechanisms, not just motivation.
- Repetition strengthens habits through myelination of neural pathways.
- Practical examples show how common behaviors fit into the habit loop framework.
What the video covers
- Habits are neural shortcuts stored in the basal ganglia, allowing the brain to save energy by automating repetitive behaviors.
- The brain seeks efficiency and automates behaviors regardless of whether habits are good or bad.
- Habits form through a three-step loop: cue (trigger), routine (behavior), and reward (payoff), as identified by Charles Duhigg.
- Examples include anxiety-triggered social media use, stress-related alcohol consumption, midday sugar cravings, and emotional shopping.
- The brain reinforces habits by myelinating neural pathways, which strengthens the behavior loop over time.
- Understanding the science of habits helps create effective systems to build positive habits and break negative ones.
- Motivation alone is insufficient; structure and understanding of brain mechanisms are essential for lasting change.
- The basal ganglia plays a key role in storing habits and freeing cognitive resources for other tasks.
- The brain’s high energy consumption drives its preference for automating behaviors to conserve energy.
- Behavioral neuroscience research underpins the habit loop model and its practical applications.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
You don't need more motivation in order to create habits.
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More motivation to go and take action and do something.
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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
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and to create the habits that are needed for you to change your life.
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and to actually work with your brain, not against it.
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I feel like if you know how your brain works and the mechanisms that trigger and habit 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.
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And so when you look at a habit, like what scientifically speaking, what is a habit?
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A habit is just basically a neural shortcut.
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It's a behavior loop that is stored in a part of your brain that's called the basal ganglia.
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It's a region that is responsible for your routines, for your patterns and for all of your repetitive behaviors.
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And when a behavior is repeated enough times, it eventually becomes automatic.
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Meaning that your brain can offload the energy and attention that is required to do something that you've never done before.
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Do something that is not stored as a habit.
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Habits are very simply your brain's way of saving energy.
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Now, why does that matter?
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Because your brain is always looking to automate.
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It doesn't care if a habit is good, it doesn't care if a habit is bad.
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It cares if it is efficient.
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Because the most energy consuming organ in your body is your brain.
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It only weighs about 2% of your body weight, but it takes up 20% of your energy throughout the day.
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And critical thinking uses a lot of energy, so it wants to store stuff as habits.
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It actually wants you to store as habits.
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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.
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They really like barely move their bodies, they're sitting the entire time.
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The average person burns about 1500 to 2,000 calories.
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They burn 6,000 just because of the way that they're thinking.
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And so habits save energy in your brain.
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How are habits made?
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How are habits created?
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It's very simple, there's a guy named Charles Duhigg who found this.
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There's basically a three-step process to a habit.
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It's the cue, it's the routine, and it's the reward.
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And um, this is coming from research and behavioral neuroscience, all of this.
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So the cue is the first part of it.
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It is the thing that triggers, it's a signal or some sort of context in your life that prompts a behavior.
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So that's the first thing.
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It's you feel a certain way, you think a certain thing, you're in a certain location.
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It could be uh, a time, a place, an emotion, a thought, a uh, preceding event in some sort of way.
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So you have a cue, which is the trigger.
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You have the routine, which is the behavior.
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That's basically the action that you take that you're wanting to turn into a habit.
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If you're trying to create them.
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Or the one that you're trying to break.
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If you're trying to break a habit.
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So that's the routine.
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And then the reward is the payoff for your brain.
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The feeling or benefit that your brain receives from doing the routine.
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And it closes the loop of the cue, routine, reward.
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It closes the loop and now your brain is done with it.
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And so, let me give you some context.
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Let me make it, you know, real.
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I'll give you some examples in your life, right?
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Cue, maybe you feel anxious.
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You have anxiety.
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You start to feel the feelings of like shortness of breath, your your heart's starting to race, maybe you're starting to sweat a little bit.
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You feel anxious in some sort of way.
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Who knows why, you're thinking of something.
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Something happened before.
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You feel anxious.
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That's the cue.
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Routine, you take out your phone and you scroll on Instagram.
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The reward is you tempo you you feel temporarily distracted.
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And your brain says, okay, this is awesome.
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I'm going to do this every time we're anxious.
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Because you're not thinking about the thing that's making you anxious.
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So that's the cue, the routine and the reward.
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I think this is one of the main reasons why so many people are addicted to social media and their phones.
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Is because they're trying to distract themselves from all of the anxiety that they have in their own lives.
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What's another example?
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Let's say that you uh, your cue is you come home from work.
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And you're stressed out about work.
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And maybe you're or maybe you're stressed out at parenting and it's 6:00 p.m.
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You're like, ah, okay.
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It's been a stressful day, I'm going to pour a glass of wine.
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Okay, so the routine is pouring a glass of wine or two or three.
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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.
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Your nervous system gets a little bit of a shift.
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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.
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Right?
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So people say, I want to take an edge off.
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My question always is, why is there an edge?
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And so your brain over time starts to associate alcohol with relief.
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Eventually craves the shortcut even on low stress days.
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So maybe you did have a stressful day.
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Maybe it's Saturday.
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Ah, you know what, it'd be nice just to relax a little bit.
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Oh, boom, now you go to a glass of wine again.
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What's another example?
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Maybe you have like midday junk food cravings.
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So maybe your your cue is between 2:00 and 3:00 on average.
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You have a an energy dip.
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So that's your cue.
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Your routine is you grab sugar or some sort of like a cookie or soda or candy bar.
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The reward is that your blood sugar spikes, it gives you temporary energy.
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It gives you a dopamine boost.
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And so over time your body starts to learn, okay, low energy.
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I need to go to get a sugar fix.
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And eventually your body starts to anticipate that reward before the energy crash even starts to happen.
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And let me give you one more example.
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So we can kind of get this, right?
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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.
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Or just shopping online in period.
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And so the cue could be you're bored, you've had a long day, you're exhausted, you have this uh, emotional emptiness.
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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.
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I don't even enjoy any part of this.
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So you feel empty inside in some sort of way.
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That's the cue.
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Your routine is you go online or you just go walk around Target just because that's your routine.
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And so you buy something, the reward is the dopamine rush of novelty, of short-term emotional lift.
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And so shopping becomes emotional self-soothing.
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And your brain wires consumption to mean comfort in some sort of way.
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And the loop repeats.
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And this neural pathway gets stronger literally.
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And I'll explain to you how it actually gets stronger.
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I hate when people use the word literal when they're not actually saying, when it's not actually literally.
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But this is an actual literal example, right?
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This is how it works.
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Your brain, how it works on habits is this.
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Is there's a thing that's in your brain called myelin.
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And myelin is really important.
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When you repeat a habit over and over again, you myelinate that neural pathway.
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Myelin is an electrical insulation around your brain wires, basically, if you want to think about it that way.
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Just to make it easy to understand.
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It's the same way that if you look at your phone charger, right?
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And you plug in your phone.
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The phone charger might be white.
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But that is just the rubber that's on the outside.
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On the inside of that is a copper wire.
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And the copper wire is actually where the electrical signal is sent from your wall to your phone.
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The wire, the the white that's on the outside of the wire, the rubber insulates the electrical signal.
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Which allows the electrical signal to send more efficiently.
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The myelin in your brain that you build from doing something over and over again is the equivalent of that white little wire.
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And so over time the more you do something, the more myelin that you build around that actual wire in your brain.
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And the more myelin that you build, the faster the signals work.
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The more efficiently they work.
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And the more automatic the behavior becomes.
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It means that every repetition that you have towards something, good or bad, any action, strengthens that behavior on a biological level.
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And so when you look at that,
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Okay, now we kind of understand how the brain works.
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How do we tactically step by step actually start to break habits?
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And then I'm going to talk about how to, I'm sorry.
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How to build habits first.
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And then I'm going to talk about how to break habits second.
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Okay?
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So the first thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to have an actual structure.
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And structure your habit in this form.
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So this this format.
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And it is I will blank at blank in blank.
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So this is the way it works.
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I will behavior at a time in location.
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So I will stretch if you want to start stretching.
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Because you're you're getting old like we all are and things are starting to hurt, right?
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I will stretch for two minutes at 7:00 a.m. in the living room.
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See how you're actually putting structure to it.
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Your brain likes structure and it likes context.
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Likes to know the environment that it's going to be in.
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I will stretch for two minutes at 7:00 a.m. in the living room.
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Cool.
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That's a really good one.
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That's one way that you can help yourself build habits.
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Another way that you can help yourself build habits is to stack it on top of an existing habit.
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This is called habit stacking.
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Um, I believe that BJ Fogg, uh, who's a doctor.
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Um, in some sort of way.
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Uh, came up with this.
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It's either Charles Duhigg or BJ Fogg.
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But habit stacking is when you take one habit that's already a habit and you stack the new habit on top of it.
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And so if you say, you know, I want to do 100 pushups a day.
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Then what you could say is, okay, while my coffee maker is going and creating coffee.
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I'm going to do 100 pushups.
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And I won't have my coffee until the 100 pushups are done.
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If you have coffee every single morning, well, now you're attaching the 100 pushups to the back end of it.
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Great.
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If you want to do, you know, uh, let's say five minutes of meditation.
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Okay, well then after I I'll do it five minutes of meditation in the morning and in the evening.
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After I brush my teeth in the morning and in the evening, I will go to my couch that is, you know, at the end of my bed.
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And uh, I will do a five-minute breathing and meditation routine.
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So you're taking a habit, you're putting another habit on the back end of it.
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This taps into your brain's desire for predictability.
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Our brain's really want predictable.
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And so you're using one habit to basically birth another.
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Okay?
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Another thing that you want to try to do is try to use sensory anchors.
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And so make it visual.
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And and have it out so you can see it.
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So if you want to start journaling more, well then I want you to have your journal on the island in your house next to where your coffee is.
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So that therefore when you're drinking your coffee in the morning, you give yourself five minutes.
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And you actually journal.
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But make it so you can see it.
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So visual is a part of it.
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Auditory is another part of it.
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You know, when you do deep work.
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This is something that I do.
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When I sit down to work for for a good two hours straight.
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If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you've heard me say this over and over again.
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I listen to the same song every time I work.
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I literally did it as I was creating this episode for the past five years.
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I'm training my brain to basically know, hey, we're about to work right now.
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So you can do visual.
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You can do auditory.
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Whatever it is that kind of anchors it in the real world for your brain to go, oh, it's time to do that thing.
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Oh, there's my cue, I need to end up doing the the routine.
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Okay?
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So that's the first part.
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The second part, step two is to make your routine stupidly small.
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Like don't try to be heroic.
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Try to be repeatable.
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And this is where a lot of people go wrong.
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They're like, well, I want to just really just.
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I'm going to work out for two hours every single day.
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And I'm like, no, just just put your workout clothes on.
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Like that's what I want you to do.
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I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to do a uh.
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74 things on my checklist for my morning routine.
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And I'm like, no, just have your feet hit the floor.
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Like make it so small.
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Make it so repeatable.
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And where most people go wrong is they build routines for who they want to become.
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Like in the future, a year from today or 10 years from today.
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And they go, I'm going to do what that person would do.
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I say though you should do is you should build routines for who you are right now.
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You know, it's like going into the gym and trying to lift, you know, squat 400 pounds.
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When you've never been to the gym before.
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No, when you go to the gym, the way that a muscle grows and you get better at something is you lift a little bit more than you can right now.
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It's in your capacity, but it's just on the edge of your capacity.
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The reason why this is really important is because when when you actually have to sit down.
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And the the science behind it is the the prefrontal cortex is involved in decisions.
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And the decisions require effort.
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But your your prefrontal cortex, the decision-making part of your brain fatigues very easily.
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And so when you start small, it kind of passes that prefrontal filter.
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Avoiding this cognitive resistance that you might have.
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And so you want to kind of shrink it into the point of as little resistance as possible.
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And so what you would ask yourself to your I'm going to create this habit.
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And then you ask yourself this question.
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What would the version of me do if I had the flu?
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So, you know, if if you had the flu, it wouldn't be I would go to the gym.
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It would be I would just put on my gym clothes.
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Okay.
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That's the first step.
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That right there is the cue for the routine to start in some sort of way.
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All right, well, you put your gym clothes on, but you you might as well just move around a little bit, right?
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Maybe you could do some yoga.
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Maybe you could do some squats.
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Maybe you go for a walk.
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Right, what would the the sick version of you do?
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Probably not write an entire blog post.
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Maybe they would they could sit down and they could write one sentence.
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That's what I mean by stupid simple, like stupid small.
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One sentence.
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Okay, well then just write one sentence.
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When you get done with that one, guess what you might do?
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You might keep going.
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You're trying to start and initiate the habit, not take this huge thing that you need to do.
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You don't sit down to write a book, you sit down to write one sentence and see if the book keeps coming out of you.
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That's how habits are made.
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You use this thing that's called the two-minute rule.
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Okay, if it takes less than two minutes, it qualifies as the gateway behavior.
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The cue that you're looking for and the the beginning of the routine.
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You know, two minutes of yoga is still yoga.
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And after you do two minutes, you're like, yeah, you know what?
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I'll probably keep going.
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I don't want you to focus and this is a big part of habits, right?
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I don't want you to focus on progress.
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Which is really interesting to think about, right?
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I don't want you to focus on progress.
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I want you to track consistency.
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Right?
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You're not building a body.
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You're building a pattern in some way.
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And this is why I think a lot of people mess up where they're like, why I need to go to the gym every single day.
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And this is my exact routine.
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That's good.
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But really what it comes down to is like, I just want you to walk in the gym every single day.
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And instead of thinking about I need to build, I need to lose 50 pounds of fat.
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And I need to do this.
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No, no, no, I'm trying to build a pattern.
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And the pattern is I walk into the gym every single day.
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And usually when you walk into the gym, guess what you do?
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You decide to do some form of movement.
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Which is better than not showing up to the gym at all.
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So you really just track.
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Did I do it?
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Okay, so that's step number two.
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Step number three is to repeat until this thing is automatic.
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And then you can worry about optimizing.
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Repetition isn't boring.
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People are like, oh my God, repetition is so boring.
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No, repetition is rewiring.
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Is really what it is.
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Repetition is the mother of all skill.
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And so when you look at it, repetition actually strengthens the synaptic connections between neurons.
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So I want to be as repeatable as I possibly can.
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And so your cerebellum, which is a part of your brain that the cerebellum fine tunes and coordinates movements.
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It helps your body perform actions smoothly and accurately.
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Then the other thing it does is it also plays a really key role in making repeated behaviors automatic.
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So you don't have to think about it anymore.
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It's essentially it's turning the conscious effort into unconscious habits.
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And so your cerebellum takes over automated routines once all of this is encoded.
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And they say on average it takes about 66 days to create a new habit.
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But it can take anywhere between, you know, the science has found 18 to 250 days.
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Depending on the complexity of the habit.
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Which is why I say make it as simple as possible.
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What I say, commit to 100 days.
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Of just doing the same thing over and over again.
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Right, your brain codes patterns.
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So if you keep switching context, it won't stick very well.
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So try to have the same trigger, try to have the same time, try to have the same environment.
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And your brain starts to code it that way.
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And then you can track it in some sort of way, like have a a tracker where you track every single day that you do it.
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And then when you screw up, which you will screw up 100%, life happens.
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You'll miss a day.
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Don't spiral.
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Use it as data.
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Okay, I screwed up, I was supposed to I went to the gym 16 days in a row.
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Today 17, I screwed it up.
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You know what, I forgot to put in my schedule, X, Y and Z.
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I'm going to make sure I don't do it again.
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Don't beat yourself up.
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Because then you're not going to show up tomorrow if you make yourself feel like shit.
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Okay?
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So that's how you create a habit.
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Let's talk about how to break a habit really quick.
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So, you know, if you look at it, you're you're thinking cue, routine, reward.
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The first thing you want to do is you want to disrupt the cue.
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Make the trigger, the cue, invisible or irrelevant.
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So if you want to stop uh, eating crappy food around your house.
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Take all of the snacks and throw them away.
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You can't do it.
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If you're scrolling on the couch, take all of the cushions off the couch whenever you wake up in the morning and throw them in another room.
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You're not going to lay on a couch that doesn't have cushions.
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You're watching too much TV.
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Take the TV off of the wall for three months.
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You're spending too much time on social media.
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Delete the apps.
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You want to make the triggers invisible or irrelevant in some sort of way.
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The other thing you want to do is you want to add friction to the routine in some sort of way.
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Put barriers in place.
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Whenever you get done on Instagram, log out of Instagram.
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And therefore you have to give, oh, I'm going to get up and I'm going to have to put the password in, screw it.
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I don't want to do that.
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That little bit of friction will make most people not get on social media.
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You know, you can also take your phone and leave it in a drawer in the kitchen if you work from home.
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Or if you work from an office, you know, put it in your car.
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So that you can't use it.
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Or the couch cushions are put away, or your TV.
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You'd have to take your TV out of your closet just to watch it.
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Screw it, I'll read a book instead.
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Right, and so it's not about becoming perfect, it's about trying to get as chain as many as possible in a row.
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And when you screw up, continue to keep doing it the next day.
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You know, like my favorite quote around this is James Clear and he says, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you wish to become.
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And so every repetition that you have is a neural imprint of your future self.
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So you don't want to be perfect, you want to be consistent.
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You don't want to be big, you want to make it inevitable.
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And so find one thing that you can do every single day.
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Choose one habit.
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Anchor it to an existing habit that you already have, an existing cue.
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Make it stupid small.
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And then celebrate yourself when you get it done.
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Because neurons don't care how sexy your goal is.
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They care if it's repeated.
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Hey, thanks so much for watching this video.
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YouTube thinks out of all of the stuff you've been watching recently that this one right here is going to connect with you the most.
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You should watch this.
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It's perfectly crafted for you.
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And if you want to make sure you subscribe and not miss any more videos, click that link right there.
Topics:habitshabit formationbreaking habitsbasal gangliahabit loopcue routine rewardmyelinbehavioral neurosciencemotivationbrain energy
