To break a bad habit, stop trying to out-think it with your conscious mind and instead rewrite it at the points where your brain is open to suggestion: rehearse the new emotion and action, find the emotional trigger, change your routine and start now. It opens with a figure: 90% of people fail when they first try to break a bad habit, because they go about it the wrong way. Habits are hardwired into the brain, since you need the space for learning, so breaking one means rewriting the code.
The 15 methods below are the video’s view of how to do that. Treat them as general ideas about habits and not as medical or addiction treatment.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 brain hacks at a glance
- Hack your brain at the right point (0:36)
- Make mistakes, because they break old pathways and build new ones (2:09)
- Use emotional priming to set yourself up for success (3:24)
- Mentally rehearse specific actions for success (5:08)
- Do not force change with information about how bad the behavior is (6:34)
- Take the power back from your body’s automatic reactions (7:42)
- Use routines to rewrite the code (8:48)
- Find the emotional triggers behind the habit (10:27)
- Shorten your emotional reactions (11:37)
- Reprogram your brain’s reward system (13:02)
- Be curious, not critical (14:35)
- The unknown will be scary (15:44)
- Stop starting your day in the past (17:13)
- Do not wait for something out there to change (18:23)
- Meditation and mindfulness will fast-track everything (19:20)
1. Hack your brain at the right point
Nobody breaks into a building at its strongest point, and the same goes for your mind. Trying to trick your conscious mind is close to impossible because it is locked down with guards and too much noise.
The easier way in is the subconscious, at the moments when the noise is quiet. On waking, your brain moves through wave states (delta for deep sleep, theta for deep relaxation, alpha for light relaxation, then active beta). Right after waking and just before sleep, it is more suggestible.
So at those two moments, sneak in imaginary scenarios where you have broken the habit and feel good about it.
2. Make mistakes, because they break old pathways and build new ones
Mistakes interrupt the system and cause chaos, which is what you want when breaking a habit. Thinking failure means square one misunderstands how your brain works.
Each slip is data about what does not work for you. The problem is not the mistake but failing to gather information from it, since you then read it as failure and fall off track. When you do gather it, your brain rewires to recognize other options, and the more mistakes you analyze, the better it gets at predicting and avoiding the behavior.
Ask what caused the error, where the most critical point for intercepting it is, and how to stop it happening again.
3. Use emotional priming to set yourself up for success
Emotions are the key to controlling habits. You turn to a bad habit for comfort when stressed, bored or anxious, and your brain has learned to link comfort to habits that take little energy and give a short rush before the drop.
The script says your body and brain do not tell the difference between what is real and what you imagine. With emotional priming, you rehearse the feeling you want once the habit is gone.
If you want to stop procrastinating, sit still each morning and imagine feeling calm, focused and accomplished in control of your time. Over time, your brain associates the healthier behavior with those positive emotions.
4. Mentally rehearse specific actions for success
After the emotion, rehearse the action. Habits are neural pathways connected like dominoes that always fall the same way. Rehearsing a different action takes another route and creates new pathways, as if you had moved the dominoes.
This takes more energy than imagining a feeling, because you imagine a whole scenario, like a short film: every step, outside obstacles and your own excuses, with devil’s advocate answers ready.
Because the brain treats what you imagine as if it happened, you end up with a blueprint that makes the physical change easier.
5. Do not force change with information about how bad the behavior is
If your first step is learning everything about how bad a habit is, you will not succeed. You already know it is bad, which is why you want to quit. You cannot think your way out of a bad habit.
The more you focus on the behavior, the more comfortable you get in the guilt and shame around it. Focusing on how bad it is also triggers guilt, shame and anxiety, which produce the stress that reinforces the habit.
Shift your focus to what you gain by letting go. Frame the change as a gain and not a loss, and the energy you save from beating yourself up goes into building better habits.
6. Take the power back from your body’s automatic reactions
When something becomes a habit, you are no longer in charge, and that is your brain saving energy. It is great for good habits, but not for bad ones, and that is when you need to show who is in charge.
Your body is conditioned to react to triggers before your conscious mind catches up. So interrupt yourself at unpredictable moments. Picture yourself on the sofa with a vague thought about cleaning, while your body and brain say no. Step in and say yes.
Whenever you catch yourself doing something mindlessly, like the same route or the same food order, kick down that door with a random but powerful change.
7. Use routines to rewrite the code
A saying in neuroscience goes that nerve cells that fire together wire together. The more you repeat a habit, the stronger its connections become, like code hardwired into you.
To rewrite it, find the strongest link, the middle point where you think of the action and the brain switches to autopilot. You usually wake up only after the sequence is done, so you must wake yourself earlier. The quickest way is to change the place where you do it.
Always eat at the dining table, even for a snack, if you usually eat in front of the TV. An evening drinker on the porch can take the glass to the storeroom or bathroom. It feels odd, partly because the new place is uncomfortable, and that is the point, since your brain starts to dislike it.
8. Find the emotional triggers behind the habit
Every bad habit fulfills an emotional need that is lacking. Work out which emotion triggers it: stress, loneliness, boredom or a wish for comfort. Step back and notice what is going on before you indulge, whether you are anxious or overwhelmed.
Once you know the trigger, tackle it directly with a healthier but easy substitute. When stressed, do five squats and five push-ups.
The goal is not to become a champion at squats but to break the automatic loop of feeling an emotion and reaching for the habit. Awareness plus a deliberate action, repeated, is enough to cut that loop.
9. Shorten your emotional reactions
A strong reaction makes your system demand attention to its cause. You take a snapshot, which becomes a memory attached to an emotion, and recalling the memory brings the feeling back. How long the reaction lasts is called the refractory period, and it can run for minutes, hours, days or years. The longer it lasts, the more it becomes part of your personality and temperament.
Controlling it is hard because it can become addictive, with a rush of energy that starts to feel good. Shorten it: when something bad happens, look at it, take one or two lessons, and focus only on those whenever the memory returns.
Chances are you have a memory you like to revisit for the rush, even though it makes you feel bad, and it is tied to some bad habit. To break the habit, you have to get past the memory.
10. Reprogram your brain’s reward system
Your primal function is survival. If your brain thinks something helps you survive and reproduce, it attaches a high reward to it, and the higher the reward, the stronger the habit. For most people, the top reward is calorie-dense food, an old system that has not caught up with today’s world.
So trick your brain with high rewards for good habits. When you skip the usual bad habit, reward yourself with something healthier, preferably smaller doses of dopamine over a longer time.
Rewards should not be compared side by side, since a walk or a few pages of a book will always look harder than scrolling or binge-watching. Keep your own list of rewards, and each time you skip the habit, you pick one from that list rather than letting your brain pick from the old one.
11. Be curious, not critical
Breaking autopilot takes attention, and attention is hard to hold all day. A trick is to be curious about your surroundings. Curiosity is one of the brain’s superpowers because it breaks autopilot and activates the higher thinking centers.
Get curious about random things. Look at a plant, but really look: go close, pick up a leaf, study the lines, spot the bugs. You may look silly, but you train your brain to take charge of your body instead of letting the body fly the plane.
12. The unknown will be scary
Your body is deathly afraid of changing routine and will fight you because it does not know what is next. Think of a sick pet that growls and hides when you try to help it. Brain and body behave the same way, and even thinking about the change feels bad, so your body nudges you toward doing it tomorrow.
The script argues those feelings are produced by your body to keep you in a predictable state, and that to your body the unknown is worse than the guilt and suffering of the habit.
That is why getting started is hard, then the next attempt is hard again but less so. Gradually it learns that unpredictability is not terrible and that it is no longer in charge. First, you have to get used to feeling afraid of the change.
13. Stop starting your day in the past
Every morning, the script says, 99% of people start the day in the past. A thought connects to a memory, the memory to a feeling, and you relive an event the moment you wake up.
Reduce it by focusing on what you are doing right now, like a toddler discovering the world: oh hey, I am waking up, there are my feet touching the floor. Then add future stories, such as a meeting today that you have prepared for and that will go well.
It may sound childish, but your complicated brain is driven by simple motives, and because they are so simple and easy to ignore, we struggle to take back control.
14. Do not wait for something out there to change
Author Joe Dispenza is quoted as saying one of the most dangerous lies is that you will change once something else changes. People say they will break a habit when a stressful situation ends.
The end of that situation will not change your habits, the argument goes. Waiting makes it harder, because the more you repeat the habit, the harder it is to break, and you will still feel stress in milder forms. The behavior comes from an internal feeling, which you will have to some degree throughout life.
Waiting on someone else, another situation or another day only delays it. Start now, even with the smallest change.
15. Meditation and mindfulness will fast-track everything
Many of these hacks need you to go into your mind and change what is happening in there on purpose, and many are tools from meditation and mindfulness. You do not need to practise them to use the hacks, but if you do, it helps a lot.
Unlike traditional meditation, where you sit in silence watching thoughts pass, these hacks have you actively create new thoughts and situations. Still, mind control from meditation makes it easier. You can enter the suggestible state whenever you want instead of waiting for morning or evening.
Meditation also develops meta-cognition, the ability to think about your own thinking. You can look at impulses objectively rather than following them blindly, which makes breaking habits much easier.
Rewrite the code, one small step at a time
The thread running through the 15 hacks is that willpower and self-criticism are the wrong tools. Better ones are timing, rehearsal, curiosity, a changed environment and a swap that gives your brain a different reward.
Pick the hack that feels easiest, try it today, and note what you learn from any slip.
FAQ
Why is it so hard to break a bad habit?
The video says habits are hardwired into the brain and run automatically, and that most people try to break them through the conscious mind, which it describes as nearly impossible. It also says 90% of people fail at first.
What is emotional priming?
It means rehearsing the feeling you want to have once the habit is broken. For example, imagine feeling calm, focused and accomplished each morning, so your brain starts linking healthier behavior to positive emotions.
Does changing your environment help break a habit?
The script says yes. Changing the place where you do the habit upsets its comfortable sequence, like always eating at the table rather than in front of the TV.
Should you learn about how bad a habit is to quit it?
The video says no. You already know it is bad, and focusing on that triggers guilt, shame and anxiety, which feed the stress behind the habit. It suggests focusing on what you gain by letting go.
When is the best time to start breaking a habit?
Now. The video quotes author Joe Dispenza on the lie of waiting for something else to change, and argues that waiting only makes the habit harder to break.
Keep reading
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- 15 Ways to Train Your Brain Like a Genius
- 15 Ways To Boost Your Brain Power
