How To Change Your Habits According To Neuroscience— 3 Practical Tools
Learn how to wire your brain and lay the foundations to create the life you dream of.
In my previous post, I’ve shared practical tools grounded in neuroscience for you to restructure your day in a way that will make you more productive and healthier while getting rid of insomnia — one of modern societies’ villains.
In case you haven’t read my last post, I strongly advise you to do so before continuing. You can access it here:
These tools require a change in your habits, and as we know changing habits is not easy, so it’s worth diving a bit deeper into the 3 obstacles our brains usually face when changing habits is the issue at hand.
But first…
What is a habit?
Habits are nothing more than a type of memory.
You might find this strange because, to you, memory is probably when you remember your grandma and her delicious cooking, for instance. Am I right?
This is actually a big mistake people usually make, to think memory is one single thing.
Truth is, there are several different types of memories: some are explicit (conscious), others are declarative (you are able to express them), and others are implicit (unconscious). You remembering your grandma is explicit memory, it’s conscious.
There are also emotional habits/ memories: Have you ever caught yourself ruminating on something?
Science has evolved since Freud (who was not the first one to talk about the ‘unconscious mind’ but was the first one to systematize it 120 years ago), and today we know that unconscious processes govern the majority of what happens in our lives.
For instance: unconsciously, you are breathing. Now I’ve put your focus on your breathing, but until now, you were breathing unconsciously.
Breathing is a process that operates conscientiously and unconsciously, but usually unconsciously.
There’s a syndrome that prevents you from breathing unconsciously, babies with this syndrome die without even knowing what’s going on: This is the importance of your unconscious mind!
A habit is usually also unconscious: it’s automated — and studies indicate that between 40% and 70% of what we do, are habits.
A habit is, therefore, a process of modification in your brain.
There are 3 major difficulties regarding habits:
Difficulty #1 — Creating a new habit Difficulty #2 — Giving continuity to a new habit Difficulty #3 — Eliminating a habit
Approaches That Do Not Work While Trying To Change A Habit
1. Trying To Do It In ’21 Days’
How many days will it take to change a habit? The time required to change a habit depends on several variables such as your personality, the stress you are presently living with, the difficulty of the habit in itself, etc.
According to a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, 95% of the individuals studied took from 18 days to 254 days to change a habit and form a new one. The study also concluded that, on average, it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.
What matters to you from this study is that people are not all the same. So, be patient with yourself, there is no formula.
2. The Revolution Approach
Example: “Let’s lose 15 kg in a month”— it won’t work. You might even get there, but due to the intense deprivation you were in, you will gain everything again. You are not another person in that one month: it was only a change based on a goal, not based on the Desired Identity.
The best way to change a habit is to substitute it with another, particularly when you already have a bad habit; just eliminating it will not work.
According to Andre Huberman, professor at the Medical University of Standford, there’s a thing called Lymbic Friction.
To better understand what this is: several things in our brains are governed by our Limbic System — such as emotions, desires, motivation, pleasure, etc., and it governs the unconscious processes behind the creation of habits.
Lymbric Friction is the size of the effort you need to surpass 2 states: alert vs. calm.
The problem is when you go to one of the extremes: alert in extreme gets you to a state of stress, and calm in extreme gets you to apathy.
3. What about Motivation? Can it change my behavior?
First of all, let me refine this concept: Motivation is NOT being always excited about something, because that excitement will not be always there — your brain is not always in that state, period.
Motivation from a neuroscience perspective is about having the necessary energy to get things done even when they are boring. They won’t always be exciting and you won’t always be excited about them, but you will have the energy to go through them knowing you need to do them.
Finding inside you an equilibrium between alert and calm is the key: don’t go to the extremes, and don’t think “motivation” will change your behavior, because the truth is you won’t be as excited to study as you will be when you eat your favorite snacks.
You need to get out of your apathetic state or stressed state to change your habits. If you find equilibrium, you will change habits easily, because your dopamine, cortisol, and adrenaline will be balanced, taking you to a mental place where you are engaged to do things.
A side note: If you are depressed, you won’t be able to act: if you have clinical depression, please get help, you won’t be able to overcome it alone. Depression is a serious state of mind and usually comes with anxiety. Please don’t take it lightly.
You have challenges and competencies. If your challenge is bigger than your competencies, you will be stressed. And if your challenge is below your competencies, you will be apathetic.
To change a habit, you need to be in the right mental state. You can’t control your mental state, but you control your focus and behavior as I’ve shown in a previous post — in case you haven’t read it yet, I will leave a link at the end of this article.
This affects not only your brain but also your body. Have you ever heard the phrase “healthy mind in a healthy body” by the Greek Philosopher Plato? What you might not know, is that Plato was also an athlete, and ‘Plato’ was actually not his name but a nickname that meant “wide shoulders”.
Bottom line: You are a unity, and you need to learn how to take care of that unity with balance.
How To Change Your Habits— 3 Practical Tools To Overcome The 3 Major Difficulties Regarding Habits
This is where I circle back to the title of this article, but before I continue, ask yourself a few questions to help you acknowledge how strong your habits are:
- When you change scenarios (city, country,…), do your habits change as well? Yes or no? The more you keep a habit when you change scenarios, the stronger your habit is.
- What is your Limbic Friction (level of effort) to get out of apathy or out of stress? Let me know in the comments below, from 1 (very easy) to 10 (almost impossible).
With these 2 questions, you will be able to know how strong your habits are. Do this to every habit you have in order to better understand yourself. You can do this on your weekend, looking back to your week.
Please remember: This article is not meant to be a clinical consultation and is not to diagnose illnesses. This is simply an informational article.
Having said that, let’s move on to the tools:
🧠 TOOL #1 — DESIRED IDENTITY
There are two ways to change a habit:
You can do it based on a specific goal (for example: “I want to lose 20 kg to look better”), or based on the desired identity you wish to have (for example: “I want to become a healthier person, with a body and mind that work in their full power. I want to exercise my body through my lifestyle to make sure I’m healthy and have longevity, and “looking good” will be a symptom of my health.”)
The best way is, obviously, the second: base your habits on the desired identity! Make this a life project.
To get you started, I challenge you to do this exercise; On a piece of paper, answer these questions:
📌 What habits do you wish to have and not have? 📌 What do you want to conquer in your life? 📌 What emotions do you want to feel more (or less)? 📌 What type of people do you wish to have around you? 📌 What type of person do you wish to be?
After writing this, keep in mind everything you do in your day during this week, and ask yourself if each action gets you closer or further away from the person you wish to become.
If it gets you further away, don’t do it. Let me know if you accept the challenge: write “ DEAL!” in the comments below.
“ — Sally, but I don’t have the energy for this…” If you’re following the guidelines in my previous article on what to do during your day (particularly in the first 30 minutes), trust me, you’ll have the energy for this and much (much!) more. Believe in yourself.
🧠 TOOL #2 — PROCEDURAL VISUALIZATION
I’m basing this tool on an excellent article called “Psychology of Habit”, by Wendy Wood and Dennis Runger (Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles).
We have several types of memories: episodic, semantic (association of meanings and words), and implicit — one of them is procedural (which consists of a chain of processes). And here we have a trick:
“Neurons that fire together will wire together” — Donald Hebb
Simply put: when neurons fire together, they create a connection between them, so much so that they start to fire together, they become linked to one another.
What this means to you: When you are creating a new habit and you feel you have too much limbic friction (a.k.a. “you’re putting in a lot of effort”), I want you to visualize it in your head step-by-step:
For example: to make a coffee — “I’m going to get up, I’m going to the kitchen, I’m going to open the cabinet where the coffee powder is, I’m going to get the filter,” … and so on and so forth until you have the coffee ready to drink. The idea is for you to describe and visualize in your mind the step-by-step of the habit.
This will decrease the necessary effort for you to start taking action because this will activate your ‘procedural memory’ — which is an automatic memory.
What happens is that circuits of neurons in your brain will start to get activated and compel you to a bigger automatism. This doesn’t mean you will become a robot, obviously, but it will become easier when you need to do habits that originally required a lot of effort.
This is what we call Procedural Visualization.
Visualization is actually a very empowering tool you can apply in everything in your life, not just to specific processes and habits but also to envision the ‘big picture’. I’ll leave a link at the end of this post to another article where I share everything you need to know (including how to create vision boards).
🧠 TOOL #3 — HABIT BRACKETING
Remember what I did in my previous post? I’ve divided the day into 3 phases. I did this so you could start to structure your change of habits inside these phases.
This is habit bracketing. By doing this, you will be implementing small changes, one step at a time, that will compound into bigger results.
Final Thoughts…
To effectively change habits, and create new ones, there is no magic formula: you need to do the work, one step at a time.
The good news is, every small step you take, counts. It’s the consistent minuscule changes that can grow into life-altering outcomes. This is not fluffy talk, it’s golden wisdom, tested and proven by science and in real lives — mine included.
🧠 In the pursuit of Happiness and Success, mindset is important, but Self-knowledge is KEY. Join my VIP List to access Exclusive Content. No fluffy talk, only pure actionable advice and strategies backed up by science and ancient wisdom. Join here (it’s free).
Yours Truly, Sally _