Why You Can’t Ditch Bad Habits & What You Should Do Instead
Once you understand the reason, old habits die hard, things get a bit easier.
What’s the one thing you keep doing that annoys you the most? The habit you’re trying to give up on but you hardly succeed at? Whether it’s about eating junk food, spending too much time online, binge-watching Netflix, or biting nails, we all have our enemies. And we choose to attack them directly. If you’ve been there, you know it’s not the right way to do it, at least not in the long run. Because you stop for a while and then you somehow get back at it. Why do you think you miserably fail at it again and again?
If you keep telling yourself you’re just lazy, not enough motivated, or any other label you prefer, you’re wrong. There’s a real and powerful reason you can’t ditch bad habits and a straightforward way to go about it. That reason involves your brain (and we all know how stubborn brains can be).
The thing is, you’ve been doing it all wrong. You can’t ditch bad habits because they’re deeply rooted in your brain. And you shouldn’t even bother trying to cut the cord and stop doing those things, because it’s difficult, and it’s against how your brain works.
If you want to truly put bad habits behind, you must focus on building new, better habits that will replace the bad ones in time. Why is that, you wonder?
Think you know who’s the mother of learning? Think again.
You’ve heard it at least once in your life, under one of the following forms:
Repetition is the mother of learning.
Repetition is the mother of skill.
Repetition is the key to mastery.
And if you’re really into Zig Ziglar quotes, you know this one too:
Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.
All these quotes are wrong. Plain wrong. It’s not repetition the one we should call “mother of learning”. Myelin is the mother of learning. Of all learning, good or bad.
Come again? My… what?
Myelin, the sheath that covers your neurons, is the one that dictates what you learn and unlearn.
Myelin is a layer of protein and fatty substances that insulates the nerves in your spinal cord and brain. It’s a sheath that acts as a conductor for electrical impulses. The thicker this myelin sheath is, the faster and more effectively it will transmit the electrical impulses from one nerve cell to another.
In plain English, the thicker the myelin sheath, the easier for your brain (therefore for you) to command a certain action. That’s because, for every action you take, a certain region in your brain (and certain neuronal networks) is activated. The more often you perform a specific action, the thicker the myelin sheath will become within that area of the brain, and the faster the nerves’ ability to replicate it.
Myelin and the fight of forming/breaking habits
The things you do every day shape your brain and the phenomenon is called myelin plasticity. Certain areas of your brain are more developed than others because you choose to repeat certain actions again and again. A thicker myelin sheath means not just doing certain things faster, but also easier. Research showed that the nerves that have a thicker sheath can run up to 100 times faster than they did when the neuronal connections were first created within that area of the brain.
Back to plain English, habits are formed through repeated practice of behavior. Repeated practice makes certain nerves grow their myelin sheath thicker. Once an area of the brain was overworked and heavily insulated, it will stay like that for a long time. When you stop repeating that behavior, the myelin sheath won’t get thinner. This is the biological reason why it’s so hard to break habits. Once they are formed, they shape your brain. Refraining from putting those habits into practice won’t make the neuronal connections go weaker. At least not for a very long time.
Despite the brain’s amazing neuroplasticity, if you want to reframe your mind, you can’t just erase the old neuronal connections. What you can do, instead, is to work on building new ones. Through repeated actions — hopefully, this time of positive actions — you’re going to create new synaptic pathways that develop different neuronal networks until these grow stronger than the ones of the bad habits. This is the point where you’ll find it easier to stop thinking of your old habits and find the new ones easier to put into practice.
This is how you can create a new habit faster
You know by now that the smart thing to do is to focus your energy on adopting a new habit rather than simply putting the old one behind. This could translate into choosing a different type of beverage (like a cup of green tea) instead of your traditional morning coffee if you’re trying to cut down on your caffeine intake. Or trying to increase the number of veggies you’re eating rather than just throwing all the chocolate in your house at once.
Is there anything else you can do to increase your odds of successfully adopting a new, healthier habit that will help you put the less healthy one to rest? Of course, there is. You should also try to:
- Start small, with only one habit — the more bad habits you’ll try to give up on, the more difficult it will be.
- Make a plan on how to implement the new habit — knowing how you’re supposed to achieve your goal will help you stick to it easier; you could aim to have raw veggies three times a week, with your lunch meal.
- Prepare your actions so it will be difficult to step away from the plan — you often act the way your environment dictates you, but if you deliberately shape your environment, you have better control over what you can achieve; you could plan what veggies you’ll serve next week right from the weekend, buy them, and even peel them and keep them in the fridge ready to serve.
- Be honest about what you can and cannot do — choosing unrealistic goals will only set you back; if you know you hate broccoli, there’s no point in trying to force you into eating it or, at the very least, don’t you start with a full bowl of broccoli bouquets.
- Do your best to enhance the effect of your new habit — you’ll want to repeat (or plan for repeating) the behavior as often as possible once you’ve got the hang of it; the more veggies you’ll eat (without forcing yourself or feeling like you’ll throw up), the easier and more natural it will become for you to enjoy your veggie snacks.
- Keep your eyes on the North Star rather than look at the darkness behind — instead of focusing on what you try to avoid, focus on what you try to achieve; your brain is wired to act better when you frame it in the right direction, so you don’t want to tell yourself all day long “I won’t be eating chocolate, I won’t be eating chocolate, I won’t be eating chocolate” but rather to confidently repeat yourself “I’ll have a tasty crunchy veggie snack today, I’ll have a tasty crunchy veggie snack today, I’ll have a tasty crunchy veggie snack today.”
Just to wrap it up
Old habits are literally embedded into your brain. You can’t erase them by stop following them. But you can cast a shadow on them by training your brain to embed new habits, with more and stronger neuronal connections.
To do so, it takes time, patience, and working with just one habit rather than all of them. If you want to quit smoking, give up donuts, and read 1 book a week, you could start with reading 1 book a week, which could be about losing weight, and could keep you so engaged that you’ll light a cigarette less often. But by all means, you can’t expect to deliberately work at all three at once.
Ultimately, to make it easier, you should:
- Pick a clear objective;
- Make a plan;
- Make small changes in your environment to help with the plan;
- Know your limits and keep it real;
- Rinse and repeat;
- Always think in terms of results.
Knowing that your brain works this way should help you work with it, not against it. And will certainly allow you to give yourself a little grace when things don’t always go as planned — which will happen, and it doesn’t have to be a tragedy.
All these being said, happy bad habits ditching!
Thank you for making it to the end! I’ve got more stories like this one if you want to peek:
