Habits can be hard to break, but here are a few ways you can do it.
We all form habits, behaviors we perform automatically in response to a cue or trigger. Habits can be good, bad or benign. The best ones produce beneficial results without requiring too much brain power, such as regular time with a loved one. But some — like emotional eating or spending money to alleviate stress — can have negative effects in the long term and often need to be broken.
The three options are to stop the behavior, stop subjecting yourself to the trigger, or associate the trigger with a new, similarly satisfying behavior. For example, maybe you experience a desire for popcorn as soon as you walk into a movie theater, Gardner said. The movie theater is the trigger, and popcorn buying and eating are the behaviors.
The key to the replacement strategy is to make sure that the new habit is similarly appealing. Replacing a daily cookie with kale or daily Netflix time with a daily run just won't work in the long term, he said. A low-fat cookie or an after-work walk are more plausible changes. It takes time to dump habits because they are mapped into the brain. Behaviors that elicit rewards, like pleasure or comfort, are stored as habits in the region of the brain called the basal ganglia. Researchers have traced neural loops in this region that connect behaviors or habits to sensory signals, which can act as triggers.
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