Breaking Bad: How Your Brain Takes You From Making Habits to Breaking Them

Habits, conscious and unconscious, help shape our lives and dictate how we perceive the world around us. But breaking those habits can be difficult, even seemingly impossible. Behind the difficulty lies our own brain, a powerful organ with the ability to form and break habits in accordance with our willpower. Understanding the science behind the brain’s capacity to make or break habits is a key to understanding ourselves.

Neuroplasticity, the process of forming and breaking neural connections, is key to bad habits’ creation and extinction. When it comes to making habits, the brain learns from a process called “chunking.” According to this theory, the more often an action is repeated, the more likely it will become a habit. The reward of success associated with that action strengthens its neural pathways, while the depletion of dopamine (the feeling of accomplishment) and increase in cortisol (the feeling of stress) makes avoidance of the action more likely.

The opposite happens when trying to break a bad habit. In this case, the reward associated with the action is not present, thus weakening the neural pathways established for the habit. Knowing this, it logically follows that the more you practice a no-habit action, the stronger your neural pathways will become associated with it and the weaker your associated pathways for the bad habit will get.

Our no-habit actions work in synergy with the amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for feelings such as anger and fear. This part also plays an important role in breaking bad habits because it enables us to take control in a much more efficient way. Every time we fail at succeeding in breaking a bad habit, the amygdala signals us to reevaluate our strategies and try harder. This can be seen as a way of the brain training us until we master the desired no-habit action.

Conversely, when trying to break a good habit, the brain works differently depending on how much control a person has over the habit or areas involved in its formation. For example, if someone is trying to break a habit of eating healthy, their prefrontal cortex will be sending them signals to keep it, while the amygdala will be tugging them to start eating junk food. When this happens we need to trust our brain and listen to the cues from our prefrontal cortex by continuing with the healthy habit.

One last principle of habit formation is “priming.” Priming is a psychological term referring to the idea that cues that are related to a situation can influence subsequent behavior without our conscious acknowledgement. This concept can be used to help break or make a habit by providing cues that promote or hinder the desired behavior. For instance, if someone is trying to break a smoking habit, they can be primed by exposing themselves to pictures of people smoking, which will send them a signal to not engage in this behavior as it’s not desirable anymore.

Our brain is an amazingly strong tool capable of forming and breaking habits through a combination of strategy and willpower. By understanding the processes involved in habit formation itself, we can become better at achieving the goals we want in life.