How to Trick Your Brain Into Breaking Bad Habits

Did you make a New Year's Resolution this year? Research shows that most people stop keeping up with these goals by February. Luckily, there are science-backed ways to break bad habits and form new healthy ones! » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker » Watch more Elements! http://bit.ly/ElementsPlaylist » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com » Sign Up for Seeker's Newsletter! https://www.seeker.com/newsletters One strategy for breaking a bad habit is to make it harder to do. Psychologists call this increasing friction. If you’re constantly checking your phone, turn it over so you can’t see the screen, or put it in another room where it takes effort to get. At the center of every habit is a neurological pattern with 3 parts. First there’s a cue, or trigger, that tells your brain to go into auto-mode. Then there's the behavior, which is what we normally think of as the habit. The third step is the reward. Rewards cause your brain to release dopamine, a feel-good chemical that helps you remember the habit in the future. Let’s say you walk by the coffee shop everyday on your way to work.. triggering another craving for a cuppa joe and also lightening your bank account. You can avoid this habit by changing the environmental cue. Take a new route instead. But what makes a habit so easy to form in the first place? Functional MRI scans let researchers look into how brains respond to habitual and conscious tasks. The first time you do an action, brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus lights up. This is where a lot of decision-making and planning happens. But when tasks get repeated, activity moves into more rudimentary areas of the brain, like the putamen and the basal ganglia. These primitive areas use up less energy because a bunch of related actions get grouped together, an idea known as “chunking.” This turns the behavior into a habit. #seeker #science #elements #badhabits #howto #advice Read More: Can Brain Science Help Us Bre