Breaking bad habits can feel like an uphill battle. Maybe it is checking your phone constantly, distracting yourself when you’re trying to focus, engaging in destructive habits when we don’t feel great.
Whatever the bad habit might be, what’s happening is that it has been wired into our brain and body via repetition. This means, that through awareness and repetition, we can break those habits and wire new ones.
Neuroscience provides a clear roadmap for making meaningful changes. In this piece, I’ll dive into the science behind how habits are formed and how we can leverage the brain and body’s ability to rewire itself.
One thing we will learn as we go here is that part of the challenge many of us face when it comes to creating habits we don’t like is we have a difficult time being with sensations that are uncomfortable.
This is something we never learned to do effectively and often fear. It results in creating coping mechanisms (bad habits) to avoid feeling sensations we don’t like.
One key element of change is gaining the capacity to be with difficult sensations so we don’t build more bad habits in the long run. This helps us get to the root cause of bad habit creation.
The Habit Loop: Awareness as the First Step
One of the first things I share with my nervous system clients is that our habits often wire both in our brain and body. And the very first thing we have to do is develop self-awareness about what is happening within ourselves. For this, we build a sense of presence and interoception – the ability to sense inward.
By building greater interoception, we can better sense how we feel in our body, and how this is linked to our thinking and behaviors. In turn, this created greater awareness.
The flavor of awareness I help my clients build is that of a witness. Something that is neutral and non-judgemental. This awareness is who we truly are, beyond our thinking, identity and problems.
It is the pure consciousness that every ancient wisdom teaching has touched on at some time or another. It is our true Self, awareness behind all things and the witness that is able to watch the thoughts we are having.
We all have naturally listened to this voice at one time or another, but it’s important to tune into it more often as we orient toward changing our habits.
I usually help folks build awareness by instructing them to do exercises that use their senses to tune into the here and now. Aside from that, I encourage them to try to do this throughout the day as often as they can. Exercises like this one (BEE exercise) are not only great for dedicated practice time, but can easily be practiced while you’re doing most tasks.
As awareness builds we also work on education about the brain and how it functions when it comes to habits. This tends to garner buy-in from the mind and the person experiencing a habit they want to change. If we don’t believe something can help, we aren’t likely to do it, and we lose out on the powerful helper of the placebo that is our consciousness in action.
Habits operate within a cycle of cue-routine-reward. A trigger (cue) prompts a behavior (routine), which leads to a satisfying outcome (reward). Much of this is subconscious.
For instance, stress might cue someone to smoke or eat, with the reward being temporary relaxation or distraction from what is stressful. Do this repeatedly and you get a habit.
Neuroscience emphasizes that identifying the trigger is the first critical step in breaking a habit. By becoming aware of the specific situations or emotions that activate a habitual response, we can start disrupting the cycle. The goal is to stop feeding the cycle that subconsciously happens.
Delaying & Replacing the Routine
Eliminating a habit entirely can be difficult because the brain craves the reward. Instead, replacing the harmful behavior with a new one that delivers a similar payoff is more effective.
For example, if boredom leads to mindless snacking, replacing that behavior with a brisk walk or engaging in a creative activity can fulfill the need for stimulation. This approach capitalizes on the brain’s reward system, reinforcing the new behavior over time.
One way to try and implement this is when you feel the subconscious urge to mindlessly snack, pause, tune into your breath, and feel the sensations arising in your body without judgment, just as a witness.
To delay, commit to this awareness for 5 minutes. This helps to delay any response to the urge which helps break the pattern.
If the urge settles and goes away (because you listened to the sensations and let them be heard), great, you interrupted a subconscious pattern. But if it sticks around, go for a brisk walk and see if anything changes.
Slowly but surely, we are trying to not only break the subconscious pattern but get to the root of the urge if it isn’t simply a well run pattern.
Reframing Cravings
Cravings stem from dopamine surges – the brain’s way of anticipating a reward. Rather than fighting these cravings, reframing them can weaken their hold.
Mindfulness practices help individuals observe their urges without judgment (that witness awareness), creating space to choose a different response. Instead of viewing the craving as an irresistible command, it can be seen as a fleeting sensation that will pass.
The other interesting part of bringing witness awareness into the picture is that we can look at our cravings as something that is happening right now, instead of seeing it as who we are.
When it comes to our habits and ways of being, often we will think “this is just how I am.” But this is not true. It’s just how you are wired, and you may have been wired that way since you were a child. We don’t realize this because we are identified strongly with our thinking and the current wiring of our nervous system.
While both our thinking and body are very important parts of our human experience, by expanding our awareness to the point of witness, we see we are more than a body and thoughts. As odd as this might sound to some people, this is one of the most empowering realizations for my clients.
So here the reframe is to realize the cravings are not necessarily who we are nor meaningful, but that they may just be the sensations we have habitually come to feel in certain situations. They are just that, sensations. They can come and go.
Here we can again use the BEE exercise to come to the body, the here and the now, and allow the sensation to pass.
Creating Barriers to Bad Habits
This is another helpful piece to the puzzle, especially in the age of phone addiction.
Making harmful behaviors more difficult to engage with can reduce their frequency and power over you.
For example, someone trying to cut down on phone use might leave the device in another room or install app blockers during specific times. These barriers disrupt the cue-routine-reward loop and encourage alternative actions.
As I discussed in a CE podcast episode, the very action of having your phone near you while you are relaxing, working, or trying to do something creates competition within your brain for its attention. Often times, it wins out over other tasks you’re trying to do.
As a simple recap, think of simple ways, in the short term, to make the habits you want to change harder to engage with.
The Power of Repetition
As we build awareness and have a few techniques on board to try, next is repetition.
Repetition is essential for forming new habits. Each time a desired behavior is performed, neural pathways associated with it strengthen, making the habit easier to maintain. So anytime you interrupt patterns using what we discussed above, you’re breaking old pathways and forming new ones.
Neuroscience shows that consistent, small changes are effective in the long run.
At the tail end of my 5 Days of You Challenge, I have people select one small, tiny action they can take towards something they wanted to shift about themselves. The idea is to select something that moves you forward but isn’t so big that you will put it off and
These tiny ‘wins’ or completions reward the brain with dopamine, making our brain more inclined to send energy to these tasks that are helping us move forward. The small tasks are not only easy to repeat, but we are leveraging the brain’s reward system.
These small steps can be performed in other ways as well. One of the coolest stories of success I heard from this part of my 5 Day Challenge came from someone who got Monsanto banned from their town in Europe because they created very small steps, one after the other, that grew into a real life social result in their town.
If they saw this goal as so big it could never work, they would not have done it. But by breaking it down into very small and achievable steps, and moving through them without stressful activism, they got the result they wanted.
I share this story because often we hear about neuroplasticity in terms of changing ourselves, but I want people to know this can go toward changing the world around us too. Without stress, without survival energy, and with joy on board.
This is also how I built Collective Evolution in 2009 to become the largest conscious media and education platform in the world (before we got censored and demonetized lol), reaching 30 million readers monthly. I never imagined that early on. I just took small steps doing what I loved.
The Timeline for Change
How long does it take to break habits? It depends on the person and the habit. Some people experience changes in their neural circuity in as little as 18 days, for others, it can take 150 days +.
While this timeline can sound bleak, I don’t like to mislead people. Further, much of the time clients will experience improvements and other positive qualities emerge even before a habit is fully changed.
That said, patience is essential, as the brain needs repeated exposure to the new habit to rewire itself fully. Also, understanding that setbacks may be part of the process can help people stay committed as well.
This is also why I encourage clients to develop an attitude and state of being of ease, curiosity, and compassion. Something that can be built and felt in the body so as to not fall into spirals of disappointment and self-judgment.
Ultimately, breaking habits is not about willpower alone; it’s about working with the brain’s natural mechanisms to create lasting transformation. We can also work with the nervous system and body by increasing our awareness around difficult sensations, and increasing our ability to feel and be with them before we engage in habits we don’t like.
With patience and persistence, change is within reach for everyone.
