Addictions and habits, explained by a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a journalist

So here's the thing to recognize about your bad habit

You cannot eradicate your bad habit. You have to trick your neurology

We are living through this huge evolution in our understanding of habits

and it's being driven primarily by understanding the neurology of where habits come from

I thought that drugs were the source of the problems that we were seeing in our community

Turns out, not only was I wrong, society was wrong. Basically, we tend to develop addictions when we have a psychological need

At those moments, smartphones tend to be great vehicles for providing the hits that you need when you need them

I think that there is this interior sense when a bad habit strikes that people know that they have a bad habit

It just seems like a lot of people, even the most successful people, don't necessarily know where to start at changing it

The ability to form habits is one of the most important and amazing evolutionary tactics that the human race has come up with

and all primates, and almost all animals for that matter. When you form a habit, you can execute a fairly complex series of behaviors without having to think really, really hard about it

And what that means is that it lets us think about other things. But the downside of a habit is that you stop thinking while you doing a habit So as a result you become less aware of the negative consequences of that behavior There is a woman named Wendy Wood who did a study when she was at Duke

And what she found was that about 45% of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit

It wasn't decision-making. And this gets to sort of the way that habits work, which is that there's this thing called the habit loop

There's three parts to it. There's first a cue, which is a trigger for a behavior. And then the behavior itself, which we usually refer to as a routine

And then there's the reward. And the reward is actually why the habit happens in the first place

It's how your brain sort of decides, should I remember this pattern for the future or not

And the cue and the reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges

that drives your behavior. If you take this framework and sort of apply it and look at the behaviors that you do

for instance, backing your car out of a driveway, or why you suddenly feel hungry

when you see a donut box on the counter at work, but you weren't hungry five minutes earlier

you can find these cues and rewards that kind of explain the behaviors

So it's enormously important. Between 1990 and 2000, that is deemed the decade of the brain

There was a lot of money into studying brain illnesses, brain disease

There was a lot of money in terms of learning about the brain. And during that time, we are looking for some neural footprint of addiction

And we thought that once cocaine interacted with these dopamine neurons, it just had this almost magical power over the person's behavior

We learned that that not necessarily the case So when we think of drug addiction it important for the lay audience to keep the focus on the person behavior

Are they not showing up for work? Are they not meeting their obligations at home

Are they not meeting their obligations in school? All of these are important indicators of whether someone is drug addicted or not

And notice, I didn't look at anyone's brain. I'm really looking at the person's behavior

Behavioral addiction is a lot like substance addiction in a lot of ways

Basically, what has to happen is that there's a behavior that you enjoy doing in the short term

that you do compulsively, so you keep returning to it over and over again

but that in the long term harms your well-being, and it can harm your well-being in lots of different respects

And it's much newer. It's a much more recent phenomenon. And I think the reason why we've got these new forms of addiction

there are two main reasons. The first one is that technology is much more sophisticated and advanced than it was even 20 years ago

you're able to deliver the kinds of rewards that you need for a system to be addictive

So basically what people are looking for is unpredictability and the rapid feedback of

either rewards or if it's negative, then negative experiences. And you actually need that mix of

positive and negative feedback. Just as for example, when you post something online

sometimes you're going to get a lot of hits, sometimes you aren't. And it's that unpredictability

that we find so compelling. Whenever we bored whenever we feeling a little bit lonely whenever we not really sure what to do with ourselves next whenever we don feel particularly efficacious like we having an effect on the

world that we'd like to be having. Those are the moments when you're looking for what some people

call the adult pacifier. And smartphones tend to be a great adult pacifier because at those moments

you turn on your screen, you swipe, and you feel relaxed again. If you just try and say

I'm going to use willpower to make this behavior go away, it's not going to work

And we know this from study after study. Every scientist who works on habits will tell you

once the neurology of that habit is set, it's always there in some form or another

So what you need to do is instead of thinking about eradicating this bad habit

or just using willpower to sort of blast your way through ignoring it

is to change it. And there's this thing that's known as the golden rule of habit change

which is if a habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward

you can't change all three parts at once. In fact, you shouldn't even try

What you really want to change is you want to change the routine, the behavior

And to do that, you need to keep the same cue and deliver the same reward

And you'll be able to shoehorn that new behavior into your daily pattern. You can't change everything overnight

You can't suddenly say, I want a brand new habit tomorrow and expect it to be easy and effortless

It's something you have to give yourself permission to take a little bit of time to practice

because you're building up neural pathways associated with a certain behavior. And those neural pathways just build up over time

You can't speed up that process any more than is natural