Your brain wants easy.
The neuroscience of habits shows you how to make it that way.
True story: One day my husband was driving home from work and called me to let me know he was on his way home. Normal occurrence.
What wasn’t usual was that when I realized I had forgotten to ask him something and put the phone back to my ear, and didn’t get a reply to my rambling, I realized he had put his phone down and thought he had hung up. I realized it even more assuredly when I heard someone else talking in the background. It was a person but the voice was a bit garbled.
And then I realized it was the sound of someone taking his order, a fast food order, in a drive-thru. What was weird is that we had just talked about a dinner plan on his return home and he had not mentioned any plan of stopping for a bite to eat.
Now what you need to know about my husband is that he has struggled with what many call “comfort eating” and weight gain his entire life. A long spiral of feeling bad and nurturing himself with food he ‘deserves’ and then feeling bad about eating it afterwards. It’s a common spiral. You probably either know it yourself or know someone who does.
But what was hard about this day was that he didn’t tell me about the stop until I as gently as I could, let him know I heard the entire thing. It wasn’t hard because I was disappointed in him. It was hard because I was disappointed in myself.
You see, about 15 years ago, I took a deep dive into the neuroscience of habit formation and learned something I was completely surprised by. That the bedrock of successful habit change was not willpower, in fact that willpower was complete B.S. It was self-compassion.
I wrote about it here two weeks ago if you missed it.
And what I realized is that his hiding of this act not only meant he felt shame, it meant I had not offered enough compassion on this struggle as well. 😔
But why is it that even once you decide to change a habit, it can be so difficult? The truth is your brain wants two things that are not unreasonable: To have the path be easy and for it to feel good. Makes sense to me.
Somewhere along the way the habit you are trying to change whether it is scrolling on your phone, eating something you would rather not and on and on was a habit that was stimulated by a need and then became a routine and felt like a reward.
Example:
Trigger: Overwhelm from too much to get done
Routine: Escape discomfort of overwhelm by scrolling on phone
Reward: Brain feels dopamine hit and/or calm from games, scrolling to ease discomfort
The pathways gets more cemented and smooth, like a finely paved road, each time you take it and after a while, it becomes an easy and good-feeling path that your brain knows how to take.
Now, you decide to look at your phone less and you have framed the change with self-compassion (you know it will be hard and that slip-ups are only human…) and you have outlined your Deeper Why beyond the surface one that being on your phone might be unproductive or taking time from your day. (Remember, Your Deeper Why is the first neuroscience-backed tool to use. If you missed that article from last week, here it is below)
You’re all ready, you are excited to reclaim hours of your life back from that darn phone and yet, the very next day, and next and next, you find yourself unable to do it. Again, defeated and dejected. “Why even bother?” is a common refrain your brain may even hear.
First, understand that WHEN you decide to change this habit may matter. If it’s a particularly stressful time (Which btw, these days, in this dystopian world, I am not sure when it is not!), that will hinder you always.
It’s as if you have two minds. The conscious mind is in the more recently evolved frontal part of the brain. It’s disabled when you are in automatic mode and then you aren’t aware of your motivations. Your conscious mind is able to hold your motivation and realize the consequences of a choice that we don’t want.
Stress pushes us to the automatic mindset. Neuroscientists call it “flicking the switch” or “flipping the lid.” Stress turns on the automatic system and primes us for procedural memories, habit pathways that were already well laid down and “easy.”
It makes sense. Stress allows us to manage physical threats and make quick decisions. So if you are stressed, you do want to prime your survival instincts. The brain doesn’t want you to stop and waste time thinking. And even though your stressors today may not be life and death, but instead more related to work, toxic relationships, anxiety, etc, the brain still shifts into this same mode.
Now if I could take away all your stress that would be something. But what I can do is tell you that making it easy for your brain to choose your new habit does matter. And those are the strategies we will dive into our workshop tomorrow. Now, I am not trying to keep those from the wider community and only for paid subscribers, it’s just too much for one article.
But what I can at least share succinctly and help everyone with here is some basic premises of those four strategies we will talk about.
🧠 Make the pathway easier to choose, get really specific and succinct with what it is you want to do.
🧠 Design your environment to support yourself. If you always want to stop by a drive through on the way home, find a different route. Your brain needs support to choose!
🧠 Imagine yourself doing this new pathway even before you succeed at doing it. Athletes use this all the time, successfully. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined. Give it the capacity to try the habit over and over.
🧠 And of course, give yourself grace if stress gets in the way, because it will.
I am looking forward to diving into strategies in tomorrow’s workshop and of course, you will get the recording if you can’t make it. The zoom link will be below! If you can’t attend and have a question, leave it here! (Unfortunately, because I am adding in the zoom link and that’s only for paid subscribers, Substack will not allow the entire community to leave a question. This feature really irks me! I apologize for that but to minimize email clutter, I wanted to include the link on the same email) If you are not a paying subscriber and have a question, I of course want to hear it so leave it on one of the two before referenced articles here and I will see it!