The Science of Making & Breaking Habits

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week for the past 10 years to help you learn, grow, and improve yourself. So if that's something that you wanna do, go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Let's learn and grow together. Today, I'm gonna be talking about the science of making and breaking habits. And my goal for today is to give you the shortest but most in-depth episodes. So by the end of this, you really understand exactly what it takes in order to make and break habits neurologically inside of your brain.

0:46I don't want to just skim the surface and say something like, set an alarm and hope for the best. I'm going to crack into the brain. I want to dissect the science behind your habits. I want to give you a no BS map of exactly how to do it in your brain. I want to give you a neurologically informed game plan of how to actually change your habits to change your life. And we're going to talk about how to do that action by action, habit by habit. And I want to be real with you for a second. You don't need more motivation in order to create habits, more motivation to go and take action and do something.

1:21What 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 and to create the habits that are needed for you to change your life and to actually work with your brain, not against it. I feel like if you know how your brain works and the mechanisms that trigger and happen 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. And so when you look at a habit, like what scientifically speaking, what is a habit?

1:59A habit is just basically a neural shortcut. It's a behavior loop that is stored in a part of your brain that's called the basal ganglia. It's a region that is responsible for your routines, for your patterns, and for all of your repetitive behaviors. And when a behavior is repeated enough times, it eventually becomes automatic, meaning that your brain can offload the energy and attention that is required to do something that you've never done before, do something that is not stored as a habit. Habits are very simply your brain's way of saving energy. Now, why does that matter? Because your brain is always looking to automate.

2:40It doesn't care if a habit is good. It doesn't care if a habit is bad. It cares if it is efficient. Because the most energy-consuming organ in your body is your brain. It only weighs about 2 % of your body weight, but it takes up 20 % of your energy throughout the day. And critical thinking uses a lot of energy. So it wants to store stuff as habits. It actually wants you to store as habits. 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. They like barely move their bodies or sitting the entire time. The average person burns about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 calories.

3:18They burn 6 ,000 just because of the way that they're thinking. And so habits save energy in your brain. And so how are habits made? How are habits created? It's very simple. There's a guy named Charles Duhigg who found this. There's basically a three-step process to a habit. It's the cue, it's the routine, and it's the reward. And this is coming from research and behavioral neuroscience, all of those. So the cue is the first part of it. It is the thing that triggers. It's a signal or some sort of context in your life that prompts a behavior. So that's the first thing. It's you feel a certain way, you think a certain thing, you're in a certain location.

4:03It could be a time, a place, an emotion, a thought, a proceeding event in some sort of way. So you have a cue, which is the trigger. You have the routine, which is the behavior. That's basically the action that you take that you're wanting to turn into a habit if you're trying to create them or the one that you're trying to break if you're trying to break a habit. So that's the routine. And then the reward is the payoff for your brain. the feeling or benefit that your brain receives from doing the routine. And it closes the loop of the Q routine reward. It closes the loop and now your brain is done with it.

4:44And so let me give you some context. Let me make it real. I'll give you some examples in your life, right? Q, maybe you feel anxious. You have anxiety. You start to feel the feelings of like shortness of breath. Your heart's starting to race. Maybe you're starting to sweat a little bit. You feel anxious in some sort of way. Who knows why? You're thinking of something. Something happened before. You feel anxious. That's the cue. Routine, you take out your phone and you scroll on Instagram. The reward, you feel temporarily distracted and your brain says, okay, this is awesome. I'm going to do this every time we're anxious.

5:17Because you're not thinking about the thing that's making you anxious. So that's the cue, the routine and the reward. I think this is one of the main reasons why so many people are addicted to social media and their phones. It's because they're trying to distract themselves from all of the anxiety that they have in their own lives. What's another example? Let's say that your cue is you come home from work and you're stressed out about work or maybe you're stressed out at parenting and at 6 p.m. you're like, ah, okay, it's been a stressful day. I'm gonna pour a glass of wine, okay? So the routine is pouring a glass of wine or two or three.

5:54That'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. Your nervous system gets a little bit of a shift. 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, right? So people say, I want to take an edge off. My question always is, why is there an edge? And so your brain over time starts to associate alcohol with relief. Eventually craves the shortcut even on low stress days. So maybe you did have a stressful day.

6:32Maybe it's Saturday. Ah, you know what? It'd be nice just to relax a little bit. Oh, boom. Now you go to a glass of wine again. What's another example? Maybe if you have like midday junk food cravings. So maybe your cue is between two and three o 'clock on average, you have an energy dip. So that's your cue. Your routine is you grab sugar or some sort of like a cookie or soda or candy bar. The reward is that your blood sugar spikes. It gives you temporary energy. It gives you a dopamine boost. And so over time, your body starts to learn, okay, low energy, I need to go to get a sugar fix. And eventually your body starts to anticipate that reward before the energy crash even starts to happen.

7:15And let me give you one more example, so we could kind of get this right. One of the things that I've seen with a lot of people that's not really talked about a whole lot is like spending money and buying stuff online or just shopping online and period. And so the cue could be you're bored, you've had a long day, you're exhausted, you have this emotional emptiness, you have a job that you don't love and a boss that you hate and you're thinking about, well, I can't be doing this for the rest of my life, I don't even enjoy any part of this. So you feel empty inside in some sort of way. That's the cue.

7:50Your routine is you go online or you just go walk around Target just because. That's your routine. And so you buy something. The reward is the dopamine rush of novelty, of short-term emotional lift. And so shopping becomes emotional self-soothing. And your brain wires consumption to mean comfort in some sort of way. And the loop repeats. and this neural pathway gets stronger literally. And I'll explain to you how it actually gets stronger. I hate when people use the word literal when they're not actually saying, when it's not actually literally, but this is an actual literal example, right? This is how it works.

8:27Your brain, how it works on habits is this, is there's a thing that's in your brain called myelin. And myelin is really important. When you repeat a habit over and over again, you myelinate that neural pathway. Myelin is an electrical insulation around your brain wires, basically, if you want to think about it that way, just to make it easy to understand. It's the same way that if you look at your phone charger, right, and you plug in your phone, the phone charger might be white, but that is just the rubber that's on the outside. On the inside of that is a copper wire, and the copper wire is actually where the electrical signal is sent from your wall to your phone.

9:10The wire, the white that's on the outside of the wire, the rubber insulates the electrical signal, which allows the electrical signal to send more efficiently. The myelin in your brain that you build from doing something over and over again is the equivalent of that white little wire. And so over time, the more you do something, the more myelin that you build around that actual wire in your brain, and the more myelin that you build, the faster the signals work, the more efficiently they work, and the more automatic the behavior becomes. It means that every repetition that you have towards something, good or bad, any action, strengthens that behavior on a biological level.

9:53And so when you look at that, okay, now we kind of understand how the brain works. How do we tactically, step by step, actually start to break habits? And then I'm going to talk about how to, I'm sorry, how to build habits first, and then I'm going to talk about how to break habits second, okay? So the first thing is we know that the cue is the most important part of this. And so if you're trying to make a habit, you need to make your cue extremely obvious. You need to see it. You need to hear it. You need to smell it. It needs to be in your vicinity in some sort of way. If your brain can't find the trigger, it won't run the routine.

10:25And so here's what most people really miss when they look at habits. Your brain doesn't respond to your intention of, I want to do this. Your brain responds to context. That means if you don't clearly anchor a habit to something that is real in your life, it really won't know when to fire. And so it's not really going to work. And so when you look at the science behind it, the basal ganglia in your brain and the hippocampus work together to recognize patterns in time, location, emotional states, thoughts, preceding actions, all of that. And your brain takes like these mental snapshots of where and when certain actions occur.

11:05and then if your habit isn't tied to a specific cue, it kind of floats around in like maybe someday land. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. So let me give you like a real world strategy to kind of, you know, hammer this home with you and ground it. So the first thing you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna want to have an actual structure and structure your habit in this format. and it is I will blank at blank in blank. So this is the way it works. I will behavior at a time in location. I will do this action at this time at this location. So I will stretch if you want to start stretching because you're getting old like we all are and things are starting to hurt, right?

11:52I will stretch for two minutes at 7 a.m. in the living room. See how you're actually putting structure to it? Your brain likes structure and it likes context, likes to know the environment that it's going to be in. I will stretch for two minutes at 7 a.m. in the living room. Cool. That's a really good one. That's one way that you can help yourself build habits. Another way that you can help yourself build habits is to stack it on top of an existing habit. This is called habit stacking. I believe that BJ Fogg, who's a doctor in some sort of way, cram up with this. It's either Charles Duhigg or BJ Fogg.

12:25But habit stacking is where you take one habit that's already a habit and you stack the new habit on top of it. And so if you say, you know, I want to do 100 push-ups a day, then what you could say is, okay, while my coffee maker is going and creating coffee, I'm going to do 100 push-ups. And I won't have my coffee until the 100 push-ups are done. If you have coffee every single morning, well, now you're attaching the 100 push-ups to the back end of it. Great. if you want to do, let's say, five minutes of meditation. Okay, well then after I, I'll do it, five minutes of meditation in the morning and in the evening.

13:00After 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 and I will do a five-minute breathing and meditation routine. So you're taking a habit, you're putting another habit on the back end of it. This taps into your brain's desire for predictability. Our brains really want predictable. And so you're using one habit to basically birth another. Okay. Another thing that you want to try to do is try to use sensory anchors. And so make it visual and have it out so you can see it. 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 so that therefore, when you're drinking your coffee in the morning, you give yourself five minutes and you actually journal, but make it so you can see it.

13:49So visual is a part of it. Auditory is another part of it. You know, when you do deep work, this is something that I do. When I sit down to work for a good two hours straight, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you've heard me say this over and over again. I listen to the same song every time I work. I literally did it as I was creating this episode for the past five years. I'm training my brain to basically know, hey, we're about to work right now. So you can do visual, you can do auditory, 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.

14:22Oh, there's my cue. I need to end up doing the routine. Okay. So that's the first part. The second part, step two is to make your routine stupidly small. Like don't try to be heroic. Try to be repeatable. And this is where a lot of people go run. They're like, well, I want to just really just, I'm going to work out for two hours every single day. And I'm like, no, just, just put your workout clothes on. That's what I want you to do. I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to do a 74 things on my checklist for my morning routine. I'm like, no, just have your feet hit the floor, like make it so small, make it so repeatable.

14:59And where most people go wrong is they build routines for who they want to become like in the future, a year from today or 10 years from today. and they go, I'm going to do what that person would do. I say that what you should do is you should build routines for who you are right now. You know, it's like going into the gym and trying to lift, you know, squat 400 pounds when you've never been to the gym before. 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. It's in your capacity, but it's just on the edge of your capacity.

15:32And so the reason why this is really important is because when you actually have to sit down and the science behind it is the prefrontal cortex is involved in decisions and the decisions require effort. But your prefrontal cortex, the decision-making part of your brain fatigues very easily. And so when you start small, it kind of passes that prefrontal filter, avoiding this cognitive resistance that you might have. And so you want to kind of shrink it into the point of as little resistance as possible. And so what you would ask yourself to, I'm going to create this habit. And then you ask yourself this question, what would the version of me do if I had the flu?

16:11So, you know, if you had the flu, it wouldn't be I would go to the gym. It would be I would just put on my gym clothes. Okay, that's the first step. That right there is the cue for the routine to start in some sort of way. All right, well, you put your gym clothes on, but you might as well just move around a little bit, right? Maybe you could do some yoga. Maybe you could do some squats. Maybe you go for a walk. What would the sick version of you do? Probably not write an entire blog post. Maybe they could sit down and they could write one sentence. That's what I mean by stupid simple, like stupid small.

16:41One sentence. Okay, well then just write one sentence. When you get done with that one, guess what you might do? You might keep going. You're trying to start and initiate the habit, not take this huge thing that you need to do. 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. That's how habits are made. You use this thing that's called the two-minute rule, okay? If it takes less than two minutes, it qualifies as the gateway behavior, the cue that you're looking for in the beginning of the routine. You know, two minutes of yoga is still yoga.

17:13And after you do two minutes, you're like, yeah, you know what, I'll probably keep going. I don't want you to focus, and this is a big part of habits, right? I don't want you to focus on progress, which is really interesting to think about, right? I don't want you to focus on progress. I want you to track consistency, right? You're not building a body. You're building a pattern in some way. And this is where I think a lot of people mess up, where they're like, well, I need to go to the gym every single day and this is my exact routine. That's good. But really what it comes down to is like, I just want you to walk in the gym every single day.

17:46And instead of thinking about, I need to build, I need to lose 50 pounds of fat. I need to do this. No, no, no. I'm trying to build a pattern. And the pattern is I walk into the gym every single day. And usually when you walk into the gym, guess what you do? You decide to do some form of movement, which is better than not showing up to the gym at all. So you really just track, did I do it? Okay, so that's step number two. Step number three is to repeat until this thing is automatic. And then you can worry about optimizing. Repetition isn't boring. People are like, oh my God, repetition is so boring.

18:17No, repetition is rewiring is really what it is. Repetition is the mother of all skill. And so when you look at it, repetition actually strengthens the synaptic connections between neurons. So I want to be as repeatable as I possibly can. And so your cerebellum, which is a part of your brain, that the cerebellum fine tunes and coordinates movements. It helps your body perform action smoothly and accurately. Then the other thing it does is it also plays a really key role in making repeated behaviors automatic. so you don't have to think about it anymore. It's essentially, it's turning the conscious effort into unconscious habits.

18:56And so your cerebellum takes over automated routines once all of this is encoded. And they say on average, it takes about 66 days to create a new habit, but it can take anywhere between, you know, the science has found 18 to 254 days, but depending on the complexity of the habit, which is why I say make it as simple as possible. What I say, commit to 100 days of just doing the same thing over and over again, right? Your brain codes patterns. So if you keep switching context, it won't stick very well. So try to have the same trigger, try to have the same time, try to have the same environment, and your brain starts to code it that way.

19:33And then you can track it in some sort of way, like have a tracker where you track every single day that you do it. And then when you screw up, which you will screw up 100%, life happens, you'll miss a day. Don't spiral. Use it as data. Okay, I screwed up. How did I screw up? I went to the gym 16 days in a row. Today's 17. I screwed it up. You know what? I forgot to put in my schedule, X, Y, and Z. I'm going to make sure I don't do it again. Don't beat yourself up because then you're not going to show up tomorrow if you make yourself feel like shit. Okay? So that's how you create a habit. Let's talk about how to break a habit really quick.

20:07So, you know, if you look at it, you're thinking cue, routine, reward. The first thing you want to do is you want to disrupt the cue. Make the trigger, the cue, invisible or irrelevant. So if you want to stop eating crappy food around your house, take all of the snacks and throw them away. You can't do it. 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. You're not going to lay on a couch that doesn't have cushions. You're watching too much TV, take the TV off of the wall for three months. You're spending too much time on social media, delete the apps.

20:42You want to make the triggers invisible or irrelevant in some sort of way. The other thing you want to do is you want to add friction to the routine in some sort of way. Put barriers in place. Whenever you get done on Instagram, log out of Instagram. And therefore you have to get, oh, I'm going to get up and I'm going to have to put the password in, screw it. I don't want to do that. That little bit of friction will make most people not get on social media. You know, you can also take your phone and leave it in a drawer in the kitchen if you work from home or if you work from an office, you know, put it in your car so that you can't use it.

21:12And it's just an easy way. There's a little bit of friction. If there's just a tiny bit of friction, usually we'll just be like, I'll get to it later. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to make it hard to start the routine by changing the cue in some sort of way. And then you're adding a little bit of friction where you don't have the apps on your phone, or you have to sign back in, or your phone is inside of your car, or the couch cushions are put away, or your TV. You'd have to take your TV out of your closet just to watch it. Screw it. I'll read a book instead, right? And so it's not about becoming perfect.

21:46It's about trying to get as chain as many as possible in a row. And when you screw up, continue to keep doing it the next day. You know, like my favorite quote around this is James Clear. And he says, every action is a vote that you, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you wish to become. And so every repetition that you have is a neural imprint of your future self. So you don't want to be perfect. You want to be consistent. You don't want to be big. You want to make it inevitable. And so find one thing that you can do every single day. Choose one habit. Anchor it to an existing habit that you already have, an existing cue.

22:19Make it stupid small. And then celebrate yourself when you get it done. Because neurons don't care how sexy your goal is. They care if it's repeated. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you're out there, you love this podcast, and you want to do some extra coaching with me, You can go to mindsetmentor.com. You can check out stuff like Mindset University where I run weekly group coaching calls every single week and help you learn and grow and improve so we can actually take this stuff and put it into your life versus just passively listening to it.

22:53So once again, that is mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave it the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.