Habit Formation BASICS

Understanding the HABIT habit
How your BRAIN wants you to do it

© Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, ACT, MCC, SCAC
from the Habits, Decisions, Attention Series

Your Brain is Habit-Building Friendly

© Creative Commons on Wikipedia from Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator

Habits are patterns – and the human brain has evolved to be a pattern-recognition machine.

As we learned in an earlier post in the Habit Series, Brain-based Habit Formation, a part of our brain called the basal ganglia keeps track of those links that are built through repetition.

It’s important to know and remember that pathways remain available for reactivation as long as the basal ganglia are intact.

That can be BOTH good news and bad.

• It’s good news if we drop out the activities that lead to the development of a behavior we want in our lives and decide we want to try again.
• It’s bad news when we stop paying attention to building our new habit and backslide into the non-productive ones before we know it.

In an MIT report of a 2005 study, Dana Alliance member Ann Graybiel wrote encouragingly,

“We knew that neurons can change their firing patterns when habits are learned, but it is startling to find that these patterns reverse when the habit is lost, only to recur again as soon as something kicks off the habit again.”

To underscore what we covered in Part-1 of the entire Habit Series,
Habits, Decisions and Attention . . .

Found HERE

In a 2011 Associated Press article, Dr. Nora Volkow explained that most individuals assign more value to an immediate reward than a long-term goal, based on what science reports about the preferences and behaviors of study participants.

Those study subjects probably represent most human beings fairly closely.

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Dr. Volkow is a Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives [Dana Foundation] member,
and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA]

She goes on to say that the pleasure our brain gets from repeatedly reinforcing the immediate reward is transformed over time into a habit through the processes modulated by the neurotransmitter dopamine (which long-time readers may remember from Brain-based Habit Formation: the Dopamine Pleasure/Reward System).

Volkow explains that the dopamine-rich part of the brain named the striatum (the major input station of the basal ganglia system), “memorizes rituals and routines that are linked to getting a particular reward. Eventually, those environmental cues trigger the striatum to make some behaviors almost automatic.”

Hold that thought!

Especially for ADD/EFD readers

Many of you already know that one of the reasons why stimulant medication is effective is that it increases the bioavailability of dopamine, the amount available for your brain to use.

Impaired dopamine metabolism in many of the citizens of Alphabet City almost approaches reward-deficiency syndrome [RDS] — which is the main reason why consistent and immediate positive feedback is frequently required to reward our ongoing efforts and keep us on task.

Related Post: Virtue is NOT its own Reward

Volkow’s research is great news for us, however – it means that we can learn to manipulate our own dopamine production, even without medication!

Releasing more dopamine through the brain’s automatic response to performing positive habitual activities allows our brains to feel increasingly more pleasure.

That serves as wind beneath our wings as we develop even MORE new habits – as long as we keep it up. The additional dopamine will help with intentional focus overall, too!

No need for the rest of you reading to feel left out, however.

Creating habits that get us where we want to go eventually becomes its own reinforcement no matter how our brains were originally wired — as long as we don’t continually reactivate our bad habits.

Like attracts like

As explained in Habits, Decisions & Attention, Keystone Habits are habitual behaviors that have what is sometimes termed “a multiplier effect,” serving as a CUE for additional habits in harmony with the original set of actions.

Found HERE

By taking advantage of the multiplier effect of Keystone Habits, attracting the formation of positive changes congruent with the original habits, less productive habits will be naturally “pushed aside” by the new pathways created by the new habits — unless we continue to reactivate the old pathways.

That’s the reason why I gave you the final assignment in the previous habits post: “identify what you want to create instead.”  That will be step-one in determining which habits will be congruent with your keystone habits.

Remember that you can always check out the sidebar
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What happens when we “backslide”

©ChristArt.com: Found HERE

Backsliding is represented well by something frequently uttered by smokers trying to quit:

“I’m a puff away from a pack a day.” 

Even though part of the struggle is due to elements of physical addiction, it is also due to the reactivation of a brain-based habit stored in the hippocampus, motivated by attentional rewards and activated by a context-sensitive cue.

Nicotine, remember, is also a psycho-stimulant, “waking up” a sluggish prefontal cortex,
the part of the outer layer of the brain located right behind your forehead
(essential for effective Executive Functioning).

According to memory researchers, it is beginning to look as if, in healthy brains, the neural pathways established as a result of our habits never get deleted.

• Those pathways remain available for activation so that learning complex tasks that build upon information previously stored becomes possible — because the previous habits are still available for linking.

• Healthy brains will store the pathways of old habits (like basic math facts, for example) — even if we don’t use them for decades, just in case we need to go back and use those same routes again — like when the internet is down, our cellphone battery is dead, and we haven’t owned a calculator in a decade.

That’s great news for learning and growing, but it complicates the process of unlearning old habits we want to get rid of – especially habits of thought that keep us tethered to emotions like fear, anger, frustration and sorrow.

Related Post: Yes AND vs. yes but

Building and rebuilding those habits

Do you know what cues your behaviors – wanted and unwanted, thoughts and actions both?  That’s essential. As I told you in a previous article, habit formation follows a formula, and takes consistent repetition over time.

The good news is that researchers Phillippa Lally and associates* found that “missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did NOT materially affect the habit formation process” — in the same study that overturned the old and oft repeated myth that it takes 30 days to form a habit.  (It turns out it takes an average of 66 days.)

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* From a study published in October 2010 [Volume 40, Issue 6, pages 998–1009, European Journal of Social Psychology] – Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre | UCL Epidemiology and Public Health.

Read more about that study & habit formation timing in Changing a habit to change your LIFE

The important take-away today:

Missing a day or two now and then does not negatively affect the process of building your new habit.  You don’t have to “restart your count,” as previously believed (and still passed along by some of the “habit gurus” around the internet) — as long as you get right back on the horse.

Your brain continues to build links in response to your repeated attempts to set the new habit in place, long before the habit reaches the point where it becomes automatic.  You strengthen those links every single time you activate the Habit Cycle, consciously or unconsciously.

• You can decrease the time it takes for a process to become automatic if you are diligent about not reactivating the old pathways while you are attempting to build your new system, but only so much.
• For the most part, changing old habits seems to be a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race process.

Just don’t give up!

Science still does not know what level of consistency is necessary for the formation of a habit, but if you are extremely inconsistent you won’t be able to build the new habit until you step up your level of regularity.

Things will always remain a struggle as long as you allow yourself
to remain in the will I or won’t I decision-making stage.

But there’s always the possibility of change. That possibility increases with every activation of the Habit Cycle by every single new attempt to install your new habit — as new pathways are built and existing links are strengthened.

More questions for notebook noodling:

1. What bad habits of thought cause you emotional agita?
   Personalization? Black and white thinking? Judgment? Shoulds? Anything else?
2. What CUES those habits?
   This is trickier to determine than cues for other types of habits.  If you’re stumped, think “arena” — political discussions, family occasions, certain words or expressions used by others?
3. What new thoughts could you link to those old cues?
   Write them down if you want to help them stick!  Again, hand-writing on paper is best – it activates a different part of your brain than typing it into one of your devices.
4. Think about a few of your GOOD habits you might be able to use a Keystone Habits.
   What else could you link to them and how might you go about it?  Timing?  (before or after?)  Memory prompt?

(For example, since I spend a lot of time online and have developed the habit of putting together a Mental Health Awareness Calendar, queued in advance every month, when a new one autoposts it serves as a Keystone to cue other monthly things I want to make sure I handle — like Tink‘s heartworm medication, internet and utility bills, rent, etc.)

STAY TUNED for more about habits: how to use rewards while you and building them, how to stack them, and-so-much-MORE. Meanwhile, you can find links to every article I’ve already posted here on ADDandSoMuchMORE.com by clicking to pop open the Habits-Decisions-Attention Series LinkList.

Another warning NOT to rely on the Lone Ranger approach

I hope you’ve been looking for a buddy to play along with you as you work your way through the Habit Series – even a virtual helpmate.

To repeat: enrolling a charge-neutral, NO make-wrong, totally encouraging accountability partner has been proven to make a HUGE difference in the probability of your actually doing the work to build the habits that will allow you to reach those goals you set for yourself.

REMEMBER, if you want some personalized professional help with accountability and developing those new habits, that is part of what I DO. And I’d love to do it with you. Get in touch if you want to talk about it.

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IN ANY CASE, do stay tuned.
There’s a lot to know, a lot here already, and a lot more to come – in this Series and in others.
Get it here while it’s still free for the taking.

Want to work directly with me? If you’d like some coaching help with anything that came up while you were reading this Series (one-on-one couples or group), click HERE for Brain-based Coaching with mgh, with a contact form at its end (or click the E-me link on the menubar at the top of every page). Fill out the form, submit, and an email SOS is on its way to me; we’ll schedule a call to talk about what you need. I’ll get back to you ASAP (accent on the “P”ossible!)

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You might also be interested in some of the following articles
available right now – on this site and elsewhere.

For links in context: run your cursor over the article above and the dark grey links will turn dark red;
(subtle, so they don’t pull focus while you read, but you can find them to click when you’re ready for them)
— and check out the links to other Related Content in each of the articles themselves —

COACHING LINKS at end of all posts

• Brain-based Coaching with Madelyn Griffith-Haynie
• Brain-based Coaching Fees & Formats
• The Group Coaching LinkList – explaining how this format works

Related articles on ADDandSoMuchMore.com

• Why you can’t and how you can – Part 1
• Top Ten Reasons to Reframe Procrastination
• Doling out the Cookies: Reward and Acknowledgment, Part 2
• Change, Growth and Decision Dilemmas
• Overcoming the bad to get to the GOOD

Other supports for this article

A Few LinkLists by Category
(to articles by topic on ADDandSoMuchMore.com)

• The Optimal Functioning (Challenges) Series of articles
  (about the Inventory & articles from each category)
• The TaskMaster™ Series
• Time & Time Management articles
• The Transition Tamer™ Series
• The Stuff and Nonsense™ Series (clutter management)

Related Articles ’round the net

• What are Keystone Habits? (And How They Build Breakthrough Routines)
• Ripple effect change- Mindfulness as a ‘keystone habit’
• Why diet, NOT exercise needs to be your keystone habit
• Identity-based Habits
• 10 Things I Learned About The Power of Habit
• How to Turn Learning Strategies into Habits
• On goal-setting vs. habit formation
• Why Habit Formation is Hard
• Are You Struggling to Form a Habit? You Might Just Be Doing It The Wrong Way

 

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