The Science of Making & Breaking Habits | Huberman Lab Podcast #53

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.280 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.080 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:12.680 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.580 | Today, we're talking all about habits.

00:00:16.940 | In particular, we're going to discuss the biology

00:00:20.200 | of habit formation and the biology of how we break habits.

00:00:24.760 | I think we can all appreciate the value of having habits.

00:00:28.420 | Habits organize our behavior into more or less

00:00:30.720 | reflexive actions, so we don't have to think too much

00:00:33.500 | about performing the various behaviors that, for instance,

00:00:37.120 | allow us to brush our teeth or which side of bed

00:00:40.360 | we roll out of in the morning.

00:00:41.880 | And then of course, habits can be more elaborate too.

00:00:44.440 | We can be in the habit of exercising

00:00:46.060 | at a particular time of day.

00:00:47.520 | We can be in the habit of eating certain foods.

00:00:49.200 | We can be in the habit of saying

00:00:50.560 | or not saying certain things.

00:00:52.720 | But of course, there are many habits

00:00:54.460 | that don't serve us well, or that perhaps even undermine

00:00:57.760 | our immediate and long-term health goals

00:01:00.080 | and psychological goals, and even some habits

00:01:02.660 | that can really undermine our overall life goals.

00:01:05.460 | So today, we're going to talk about making,

00:01:07.640 | meaning forming, and breaking,

00:01:09.560 | meaning stopping various habits.

00:01:11.980 | There's a lot of information out there about habits.

00:01:14.720 | You'll find this in the popular sphere.

00:01:16.220 | There are books, there are articles,

00:01:17.740 | there are workshops, and so forth.

00:01:19.780 | However, lesser known is that there's a whole neuroscience

00:01:22.800 | of habit formation and habit breaking,

00:01:24.780 | and there's a whole field of psychology

00:01:26.280 | devoted to understanding habit formation and habit breaking.

00:01:30.120 | And within those scientific literatures,

00:01:32.360 | I think there are some real gems

00:01:34.180 | that at least to my knowledge,

00:01:35.400 | we haven't paid too much attention to

00:01:37.000 | in the popular sphere.

00:01:38.500 | So today, we're going to talk about the biology

00:01:40.320 | of habit formation and habit breaking.

00:01:42.360 | I'm also going to spell out two specific types

00:01:45.040 | of habit formation and habit breaking programs.

00:01:47.880 | I'm going to boil these down to some very explicit steps

00:01:51.240 | that anyone can use.

00:01:53.280 | My reasoning for doing that is, first of all,

00:01:55.560 | it's the end of 2021.

00:01:57.640 | Many people are thinking about New Year's resolutions.

00:01:59.680 | They're thinking about leaving some things behind

00:02:02.120 | from 2021 and previous,

00:02:05.160 | and acquiring some new behaviors,

00:02:07.580 | taking on some new challenges,

00:02:08.920 | and trying to bring new things to their lives.

00:02:10.700 | But regardless of when you're listening to this,

00:02:13.100 | the programs that I'll outline

00:02:14.760 | are grounded in the neuroscience

00:02:16.200 | and biology of habit formation,

00:02:18.040 | and they map very well to what the psychologists

00:02:20.280 | have described in terms of habit formation and breaking.

00:02:23.080 | So today, you're going to learn a lot of science.

00:02:24.560 | You're also going to come away with some practical tools,

00:02:26.720 | and I'm certain that regardless of your present state

00:02:28.800 | or goals, there'll be something of value to you.

00:02:31.480 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

00:02:33.080 | that this podcast is separate from my teaching

00:02:34.840 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:36.560 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:38.360 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:02:40.840 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:02:43.380 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:44.280 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:06:54.120 | Let's talk about habits,

00:06:55.800 | and anytime we're talking about habits,

00:06:57.640 | that means our nervous system learns something.

00:07:01.120 | Now, many people think that habits are just like reflexes,

00:07:04.840 | but pure reflexes are things like the eye blink reflex.

00:07:08.260 | You know, something comes toward your eye

00:07:09.640 | and you don't want it to get in your eye.

00:07:11.540 | You'll blink.

00:07:12.540 | Or if you happen to step on a sharp object

00:07:14.880 | or get too close to something that's too hot,

00:07:17.200 | you'll reflexively move away.

00:07:18.920 | Those aren't habits.

00:07:19.840 | Those are what we call hardwired reflexes.

00:07:23.200 | Habits are things that our nervous system learned,

00:07:26.560 | but not always consciously.

00:07:27.900 | Sometimes we develop habits that we're not even aware of

00:07:31.160 | until they become a problem,

00:07:32.360 | or maybe they serve us well, who knows?

00:07:34.980 | But the fact of the matter is

00:07:36.340 | that habits are a big part of who we are.

00:07:39.280 | What we do habitually makes up much of what we do entirely.

00:07:43.420 | In fact, it's estimated that up to 70%

00:07:45.820 | of our waking behavior is made up of habitual behavior.

00:07:50.480 | So you can imagine that there's a lot of biology,

00:07:53.580 | meaning cells and hormones and neural pathways, et cetera,

00:07:56.860 | that are going to support the development of those habits.

00:07:59.740 | So if habits are largely learned,

00:08:01.440 | consciously or unconsciously,

00:08:04.120 | we have to ask ourselves, what is learning?

00:08:06.220 | Well, learning is neuroplasticity.

00:08:09.500 | Neuroplasticity is simply the process

00:08:11.400 | by which our nervous system changes

00:08:13.260 | in response to experience.

00:08:15.240 | We have to ask, what changes?

00:08:16.960 | Well, what changes are the connections between neurons.

00:08:19.840 | Neurons are just nerve cells.

00:08:21.240 | They communicate with one another by electricity

00:08:23.680 | and by sending chemical signals to one another

00:08:26.080 | that inspire the next neuron and the next neuron

00:08:28.640 | to either be electrically active or not.

00:08:31.280 | But at the end of the day,

00:08:32.260 | neuroplasticity is about forming new neural circuits,

00:08:35.440 | new pathways by which certain habits are likely to occur

00:08:38.660 | and other ones are less likely to occur.

00:08:41.300 | So we've got habits.

00:08:43.020 | We have that habits are learned.

00:08:44.600 | We have that learning involves neuroplasticity

00:08:46.640 | and that neuroplasticity involves changes

00:08:48.620 | in the connections between neurons, nerve cells.

00:08:51.140 | Okay, so that describes habits

00:08:52.920 | through the lens of neuroscience and biology.

00:08:55.920 | But as many of you are well aware,

00:08:58.140 | there are popular books about habits

00:08:59.900 | and there's a whole psychological literature about habits.

00:09:03.080 | And those two areas point to some very interesting aspects

00:09:07.060 | of habits that I think are worth mentioning.

00:09:09.120 | First of all, is this notion of immediate goal-based habits

00:09:13.600 | versus identity-based habits.

00:09:16.440 | Immediate goal-based habits are going to be habits

00:09:18.720 | that are designed to bring you a specific outcome

00:09:22.040 | as you do them.

00:09:22.880 | So each and every time you do them.

00:09:24.600 | So for instance, it might be that you want to develop

00:09:27.240 | a habit of getting 60 minutes of zone two cardio each day

00:09:32.880 | or perhaps, you know, three, four times a week

00:09:35.640 | as we head into the new year.

00:09:36.880 | I've talked before on the podcast

00:09:38.600 | about the fact that the scientific literature

00:09:40.480 | and the health literature really points

00:09:41.880 | to the incredibly positive effects

00:09:44.200 | of getting 150 minutes to 180 minutes per week minimum

00:09:48.440 | of what's called zone two cardio.

00:09:50.280 | Zone two cardio is basically any cardiovascular exercise

00:09:54.140 | that gets you moving and your heart pumping and breathing

00:09:56.760 | but not so hard that you can't hold a conversation.

00:09:59.160 | As it kind of puts you at the threshold

00:10:00.800 | of being just able to have a conversation

00:10:02.860 | that's a little bit strained,

00:10:03.980 | but if you were to exercise a little bit harder,

00:10:05.980 | you know, run a little bit faster, et cetera,

00:10:08.120 | you wouldn't be able to talk while you did it.

00:10:10.600 | There's a lot of literature that points to that

00:10:12.180 | as a healthy practice.

00:10:13.680 | So maybe you're somebody that wants to get more

00:10:16.120 | of zone two cardio, for instance.

00:10:18.840 | That would be an immediate goal-based habit.

00:10:21.880 | If your goal is to get that cardio maybe four times a week,

00:10:26.880 | every time you do it, you could check off a little box

00:10:29.240 | and you'd say, okay, I did it.

00:10:30.560 | You met the goal.

00:10:32.520 | That is different than so-called identity-based habits

00:10:36.080 | where there's a larger overarching theme to the habit

00:10:39.560 | where you're trying to become quote unquote a fit person,

00:10:42.780 | or you're somebody who wants to be an athlete

00:10:46.200 | or something of that sort.

00:10:47.160 | It's where you start to attach some sort of larger picture

00:10:49.760 | about yourself or what it means for you to do that habit

00:10:53.320 | where there's both the immediate goal, right?

00:10:56.320 | Complete the exercise, complete the session

00:10:58.960 | or whatever it is.

00:11:00.340 | Check off that box, but that you're linking it

00:11:02.580 | to some sort of larger goal.

00:11:03.900 | Now, why am I making this distinction?

00:11:05.360 | I mean, first of all, I'm not the one

00:11:06.940 | to first make this distinction.

00:11:08.200 | Others have made the distinction between identity

00:11:10.360 | versus immediate goal-based habit formation.

00:11:12.900 | But the reason I'm making the distinction

00:11:14.240 | is that pretty soon in our discussion today,

00:11:16.360 | we are going to talk about dopamine,

00:11:18.460 | a molecule that's associated with motivation and reward

00:11:22.240 | that we make in our brain

00:11:24.320 | and how different schedules of dopamine release

00:11:28.380 | predict whether or not we will stick to a habit or not.

00:11:31.800 | And in particular, whether or not we will be able

00:11:33.520 | to form that habit quickly or not.

00:11:36.420 | Now, this is absolutely critical to understand

00:11:39.320 | for the following reason.

00:11:40.800 | Another thing that you'll hear out there in the literature

00:11:42.940 | is that it takes 21 days to form a habit.

00:11:45.280 | Some people say 18, some people say 21,

00:11:47.640 | some people say 30 days, some people say 60 days.

00:11:50.440 | So which one is it?

00:11:51.300 | Does it depend on the habit that one is trying to form

00:11:53.500 | or does it depend on the person

00:11:54.660 | that's trying to form the habit?

00:11:56.400 | Well, it turns out that there's excellent peer review data

00:11:58.880 | on this.

00:11:59.720 | There's a study published in 2010,

00:12:00.980 | first author, Lally, L-A-L-L-Y.

00:12:04.040 | This study found that for the same habit to be formed,

00:12:08.440 | it can take anywhere from 18 days to as many as 254 days

00:12:13.440 | for different individuals to form that habit.

00:12:15.600 | The reason I bring this up is that I always get asked,

00:12:18.360 | is it true that it takes 21 days to form a habit?

00:12:21.000 | Is it true that your nervous system changes in six days

00:12:23.600 | when you're doing something repeatedly?

00:12:25.640 | And the answer is, as I mentioned before,

00:12:27.980 | it's highly variable.

00:12:29.440 | What I didn't tell you actually was what specific habit

00:12:31.760 | they were looking at in that Lally study.

00:12:34.020 | And it's interesting that the specific behavior

00:12:37.200 | was a health-related behavior.

00:12:38.640 | That's pretty relevant to our discussion here on the podcast,

00:12:41.320 | which was taking walks after dinner.

00:12:43.760 | There's actually a really nice literature showing

00:12:46.360 | that walks after a meal can speed glucose clearance

00:12:50.400 | from the bloodstream, can be beneficial

00:12:52.120 | for not just weight loss, but cardiovascular health, et cetera.

00:12:55.640 | So a walk after dinner seems pretty straightforward, right?

00:12:58.240 | Well, in order to form that habit,

00:13:00.840 | it took some people 18 days and other people 254 days.

00:13:05.080 | How did they know when they formed the habit?

00:13:06.440 | Well, they were doing it about 85% of the time.

00:13:09.720 | And they also reported not having to spend

00:13:12.400 | that much mental effort in order to get into the mode

00:13:16.400 | of taking a walk after dinner.

00:13:17.920 | So for those of you listening,

00:13:19.000 | some of you might be thinking,

00:13:20.000 | I can't believe that it would take some people 254 days

00:13:22.760 | to get into that habit.

00:13:24.160 | But as I said, people are highly variable.

00:13:26.680 | And if you can't form one habit easily,

00:13:29.120 | it doesn't mean that you can't form other habits easily.

00:13:32.560 | The mystery of why certain people can form certain habits

00:13:35.800 | more easily than others probably has something to do

00:13:39.240 | with how well people manage what's called limbic friction.

00:13:42.360 | Now, limbic friction is not a term that you're going to find

00:13:45.380 | in the formal neurobiological literature

00:13:47.680 | or even psychological literature.

00:13:49.480 | It's frankly a term that I coined to encompass a number

00:13:54.120 | of different pieces of the psychology

00:13:55.680 | and neuroscience literature.

00:13:57.460 | Limbic friction is a shorthand way that I use

00:14:00.320 | to describe the strain that's required

00:14:03.120 | in order to overcome one of two states within your body.

00:14:06.980 | One state is one of anxiousness where you're really anxious

00:14:09.920 | and therefore you can't calm down, you can't relax,

00:14:13.500 | and therefore you can't engage in some particular activity

00:14:15.980 | or thought pattern that you would like.

00:14:17.800 | The other state is one in which you're feeling too tired

00:14:20.200 | or lazy or not motivated.

00:14:22.660 | Both of those states, feeling too alert and too calm,

00:14:25.980 | if you will, relate to the function

00:14:27.600 | of the so-called autonomic nervous system,

00:14:29.680 | a set of neurons and hormones and chemicals

00:14:32.320 | in your brain and body that act as sort of a seesaw.

00:14:34.640 | You're either alert or calm.

00:14:36.160 | You're either asleep or stressed.

00:14:38.240 | Those two states are not compatible with one another.

00:14:41.280 | You've probably heard of wired and tired,

00:14:42.960 | but that's really once you've been very stressed

00:14:45.020 | for a long time to the point where you're exhausted.

00:14:47.540 | What does the autonomic nervous system

00:14:48.840 | have to do with any of this?

00:14:49.780 | Well, limbic friction is a phrase that can be used

00:14:54.020 | to describe how much effort, how much activation energy

00:14:57.920 | you need in order to engage in a particular behavior.

00:15:00.660 | So using this Lally study as an example,

00:15:03.280 | some people would eat dinner and then say,

00:15:05.360 | "Oh, that's right.

00:15:06.200 | I'm trying to develop the habit

00:15:07.440 | of taking a walk after dinner.

00:15:09.040 | So let's get up and go."

00:15:10.480 | Other people will feel like,

00:15:11.320 | I just don't want to do it today.

00:15:12.640 | They're going to feel too much limbic friction.

00:15:14.620 | And that limbic friction could arrive, again,

00:15:16.720 | from one of two sources.

00:15:18.100 | It could be because they are too tired to do it,

00:15:20.540 | or it could be because they're too anxious

00:15:22.680 | and distracted in order to do it.

00:15:25.660 | So this is a key distinction.

00:15:27.180 | A lot of habit formation has to do

00:15:29.060 | with being in the right state of mind

00:15:30.940 | and being able to control your state of body and mind.

00:15:34.400 | So as we march forward, what you're going to find

00:15:36.700 | is that this phrase or this term, limbic friction,

00:15:38.980 | is going to be a useful metric

00:15:40.600 | or way for you to touch in with yourself

00:15:42.800 | and address whether or not you are likely to be able

00:15:45.520 | to form a certain habit easily

00:15:47.140 | or whether or not it's going to be very challenging.

00:15:49.220 | And I'm going to teach you a way

00:15:50.740 | to measure your degree of limbic friction,

00:15:53.140 | that is, how much activation energy it will take

00:15:55.700 | in order for you to execute a new habit.

00:15:58.700 | And I'm going to teach you how to measure

00:16:00.580 | your limbic friction and activation energy

00:16:02.920 | for how likely it is that you're going to be able

00:16:05.080 | to break a habit that you don't want to have.

00:16:07.940 | The other key concept for us to address

00:16:10.180 | that's really mainly found in the books and articles

00:16:12.780 | out there about habits is this notion

00:16:14.940 | of what I call linchpin habits.

00:16:16.840 | Lynchpin habits are certain habits

00:16:18.900 | that make a lot of other habits easier to execute.

00:16:22.120 | Now, the sorts of linchpin habits that I'm referring to

00:16:24.680 | are always going to be things that you enjoy doing.

00:16:27.900 | I'll just give you an example from my life.

00:16:30.440 | I happen to like exercise, not all forms of exercise,

00:16:33.880 | but I happen to like resistance training

00:16:35.760 | and I happen to like running.

00:16:37.240 | So I'm personally in the habit

00:16:38.340 | of getting cardiovascular exercise

00:16:39.960 | three or four times per week,

00:16:41.460 | maybe 30 to 60 minutes per session.

00:16:44.120 | And I'm in the habit of doing resistance training

00:16:46.640 | three or four times per week,

00:16:48.360 | typically also for about 45 to 60 minutes per session.

00:16:51.960 | Now, I enjoy those.

00:16:53.680 | And for reasons that I'll get into a little bit later,

00:16:55.800 | I place those activities typically early in the day

00:16:59.200 | because of the neurochemistry

00:17:00.600 | and the various types of hormones, et cetera,

00:17:03.000 | that are associated with performing those activities.

00:17:05.880 | But I really place those activities under the umbrella

00:17:09.400 | of what I call linchpin habits.

00:17:12.020 | Why?

00:17:12.860 | Because those particular habits are easy to execute

00:17:15.440 | because I enjoy them,

00:17:16.520 | but they also make a lot of other habits easier to execute.

00:17:20.540 | Things like being alert for work,

00:17:23.040 | things like making sure that I get good sleep

00:17:25.440 | the night before, things like hydration,

00:17:27.520 | things like making sure that I eat the foods

00:17:29.600 | that are better for me than maybe some of the other foods

00:17:32.320 | that I would more reflexively reach to

00:17:34.660 | if I weren't doing that training.

00:17:36.400 | So certain habits act as linchpins,

00:17:39.200 | meaning that they shift a lot of other things.

00:17:41.360 | They can control and bias the likelihood that,

00:17:44.880 | in this case, you or me,

00:17:46.320 | will perform other habits that are harder to access,

00:17:49.700 | that we have less of an affinity for.

00:17:52.120 | So again, there's three concepts

00:17:54.000 | that we need to include here.

00:17:55.000 | We've got identity-based versus goal-based habits.

00:17:58.020 | We've got the concept that different habits

00:18:00.900 | take different periods of time to adopt

00:18:03.040 | depending on the person and the habit,

00:18:04.800 | and that there are these, what I call linchpin habits,

00:18:07.780 | certain habits that make other habits easier to execute.

00:18:11.020 | And those linchpin habits always, always, always

00:18:14.260 | are things that we enjoy doing.

00:18:16.300 | So our goal throughout this episode

00:18:17.780 | is for you to identify which habits

00:18:20.240 | are easy for you to perform,

00:18:22.060 | which ones are hard for you to perform,

00:18:24.040 | and which habits you want to break.

00:18:26.000 | If you want to grab a pen and paper, you can do that.

00:18:28.080 | Or if you want to dictate some of that into your phone,

00:18:30.200 | you can.

00:18:31.300 | But right now, actually,

00:18:32.340 | if you just want to think about these concepts,

00:18:34.520 | can always go back later.

00:18:35.980 | I'll make sure to spell out a very specific way

00:18:38.640 | that you can chart out a map towards forming

00:18:41.340 | particular habits and breaking particular habits later on.

00:18:44.840 | What I'd like us to do at this point

00:18:47.100 | is to take that concept of limbic friction

00:18:49.980 | and for you to ask yourself

00:18:52.360 | what habits you perform on a daily basis.

00:18:55.380 | And these could be things as basic as

00:18:57.780 | brushing your teeth before breakfast

00:18:59.820 | or brushing your teeth after breakfast.

00:19:01.260 | It could be, for instance, that you get exercise

00:19:03.920 | or you get it at a particular time of day,

00:19:05.480 | or even that you take a particular route to work, right?

00:19:08.300 | We are very habitual and we tend to do things

00:19:11.440 | more or less over and over in the same way,

00:19:13.140 | unless we intervene in ourselves.

00:19:15.140 | That's just the way that we are wired.

00:19:17.260 | So now I'd like to shift to thinking about

00:19:18.940 | a particular aspect of habits and that's habit strength.

00:19:23.300 | You all have different habits.

00:19:26.260 | You probably brush your teeth at a particular time of day.

00:19:28.300 | You probably exercise at particular times a week.

00:19:30.800 | You probably go to the refrigerator in a very habitual way.

00:19:33.140 | We are incredibly habitual organisms.

00:19:36.340 | Unless we intervene in our habits,

00:19:37.800 | they tend to carry out the same way

00:19:39.260 | that they always have once they've formed.

00:19:41.680 | So you can do this exercise now.

00:19:43.160 | You don't have to write this down if you don't want to,

00:19:44.820 | but you certainly are welcome.

00:19:46.820 | We're going to evaluate what's called habit strength.

00:19:49.300 | That's not a concept that I created.

00:19:50.820 | Habit strength is something that you will find

00:19:52.380 | in the psychological literature.

00:19:54.180 | Habit strength is measured by two main criteria.

00:19:57.400 | The first is how context dependent a given habit is.

00:20:02.220 | So context dependence is

00:20:03.940 | if you go from one environment to the next,

00:20:07.460 | do you tend to do the same thing in the same way

00:20:09.860 | at the same time of day?

00:20:11.260 | So for instance, brushing your teeth

00:20:12.660 | first thing in the morning,

00:20:13.500 | maybe some of you do that before breakfast,

00:20:15.080 | maybe some of you do that later,

00:20:16.340 | maybe some of you like me don't even eat breakfast.

00:20:18.920 | But when I travel, I tend to brush my teeth

00:20:21.740 | at more or less the same time of day

00:20:23.900 | relative to when I wake up as I do when I'm at home.

00:20:26.420 | So it's context independent.

00:20:28.300 | So it's a very strong habit, right?

00:20:31.980 | There are certain behaviors like perhaps what you eat

00:20:35.860 | or perhaps how you dress that are context independent

00:20:40.500 | that you might perform one way in one context

00:20:43.880 | and another way in another context.

00:20:45.780 | The other aspect of habit strength

00:20:47.340 | is how much limbic friction is required

00:20:49.760 | to perform that habit on a regular basis.

00:20:52.020 | This is extremely important

00:20:53.620 | because if you were in the process of building habits

00:20:57.300 | and consolidating those habits,

00:20:59.920 | then it's probably going to take more limbic friction

00:21:03.620 | to execute those habits.

00:21:05.260 | What do I mean by that?

00:21:06.100 | Well, let's say you set out to get,

00:21:09.020 | let's say 45 minutes of zone two cardio exercise every day,

00:21:12.700 | five or maybe even seven days a week.

00:21:14.700 | Well, if at first you're highly motivated,

00:21:18.940 | limbic friction might be pretty low.

00:21:20.500 | Limbic friction is how much top-down,

00:21:22.720 | meaning from your forebrain to your limbic system,

00:21:24.940 | the part of your brain that generates autonomic responses,

00:21:28.060 | how much limbic friction,

00:21:30.260 | meaning conscious override of your state is required

00:21:35.260 | in order to engage in that particular behavior.

00:21:37.420 | So if you're feeling particularly tired

00:21:38.740 | and you don't want to get up out of bed

00:21:40.060 | and you don't want to go out into your zone two cardio,

00:21:42.740 | then there's a high degree of limbic friction.

00:21:45.100 | It takes more, some people think of it as motivation,

00:21:47.340 | but motivation is a bit of a vague concept

00:21:49.340 | whereas limbic friction involves specific neural circuits.

00:21:51.900 | And you can think of it in a more or less quantitative way.

00:21:54.300 | You can think of that your body is very tired,

00:21:56.800 | so it's going to take more limbic friction

00:21:58.460 | in order to get into action, right?

00:22:00.540 | You're going to have to overcome more limbic friction,

00:22:02.380 | excuse me, whereas if you're very, very alert,

00:22:05.220 | there's less limbic friction

00:22:06.660 | because you're moving towards something

00:22:08.180 | that's action-oriented.

00:22:09.820 | However, the inverse is also true.

00:22:11.980 | Let's say that you are trying to get into the habit

00:22:14.660 | or you're in the early stages of forming a habit

00:22:16.900 | to meditate regularly.

00:22:18.600 | That's a pretty quiescent or calming activity.

00:22:22.020 | So if you're somebody who comes home from work

00:22:23.580 | and you're very anxious and you have a lot of work to do

00:22:26.340 | and you have to deal with a bunch of things,

00:22:28.020 | there's a lot of limbic friction to overcome

00:22:30.280 | in order to get into that calm state.

00:22:32.860 | So these two aspects, context dependence,

00:22:35.840 | whether or not you're likely to do the thing

00:22:37.500 | regardless of where you are, right?

00:22:39.960 | On travel, at home, on vacation, with people around,

00:22:42.980 | not people around, et cetera,

00:22:44.520 | and how much limbic friction is required

00:22:47.020 | to execute that habit will tell you

00:22:48.920 | whether or not that habit is deeply

00:22:50.540 | or just shallowly embedded within your nervous system.

00:22:54.460 | The goal of any habit that we want to form

00:22:56.700 | is to get into what's called automaticity.

00:22:58.860 | Automaticity is fancy language

00:23:00.820 | for the neural circuits can perform it automatically.

00:23:03.580 | And that's the ultimate place to be, right?

00:23:06.100 | If you have all these goals

00:23:07.460 | and things that you want to be doing on a regular basis,

00:23:10.380 | you'd love for them to be habitual

00:23:12.020 | because it takes less mental and physical effort,

00:23:14.980 | less limbic friction in order to execute those.

00:23:17.860 | And so much of what's out there,

00:23:19.860 | again, in the popular psychology literature,

00:23:22.340 | in books that you'll find on the bookstore shelf

00:23:24.340 | and on Amazon and in the airports,

00:23:26.140 | are about how to get from that mode

00:23:28.140 | of high degree of limbic friction to automaticity.

00:23:31.140 | And they offer a number of different ways,

00:23:33.060 | I think many of which are useful,

00:23:35.060 | trying to get you to organize different types of habits

00:23:37.220 | into different bins like value-based and goal-based

00:23:39.980 | and trying to persuade you that structuring habits

00:23:42.420 | at the particular times of day or in a particular way

00:23:44.780 | are going to be beneficial.

00:23:46.060 | And indeed, I think they have helped a lot of people.

00:23:48.460 | So what I'd like to do is to take the scientific literature

00:23:51.880 | of how the nervous system learns

00:23:53.600 | and engages in neuroplasticity

00:23:55.380 | and apply that to habit formation, habit maintenance,

00:23:58.900 | and if so desired, how to break particular habits.

00:24:03.060 | I'd like to give you a particular tool

00:24:04.820 | that's gleaned from the research psychology literature.

00:24:08.100 | I should mention that I learned about this

00:24:10.540 | from an excellent review article that's available online.

00:24:13.540 | It's called "Psychology of Habit."

00:24:15.380 | The authors are Wendy Wood and Dennis Runger.

00:24:18.060 | This is published in "Annual Review of Psychology."

00:24:21.240 | The annual reviews series is a very high quality series.

00:24:25.460 | There are annual reviews of neuroscience,

00:24:27.720 | annual reviews of psychology,

00:24:29.080 | annual reviews of nutrition science, et cetera.

00:24:31.260 | For those of you that are interested

00:24:32.320 | in exploring review articles

00:24:34.480 | that are grounded in hundreds

00:24:36.440 | of quality peer-reviewed studies,

00:24:38.480 | the annual review series is really terrific,

00:24:41.080 | certainly among the best, if not the best,

00:24:43.320 | and they also tend to be quite long and quite comprehensive.

00:24:45.880 | So this review, "Psychology of Habit" by Wood and Runger,

00:24:49.160 | is excellent.

00:24:50.640 | And here I'm more or less paraphrasing from them,

00:24:53.420 | so I want to be clear that these are their words, not mine.

00:24:57.000 | They're talking about the various ways

00:24:59.940 | that habits form in the nervous system.

00:25:02.080 | And they mention with each repetition of a habit,

00:25:06.780 | small changes occur in the cognitive and neural mechanisms

00:25:09.840 | associated with procedural memory.

00:25:11.660 | So I just want to talk for a second

00:25:12.920 | about what procedural memory is.

00:25:14.980 | In the neuroscience of memory,

00:25:16.660 | we distinguish between what's called episodic memory

00:25:19.300 | and procedural memory.

00:25:20.880 | Episodic memory is a recall

00:25:23.380 | of a particular set of events that happened,

00:25:25.560 | whereas procedural memory is holding in mind

00:25:28.440 | the specific sequence of things that need to happen

00:25:30.760 | in order for a particular outcome to occur.

00:25:32.880 | So think of it like a recipe or a protocol,

00:25:35.640 | or if for sake of exercise, it's like sets and reps

00:25:38.540 | or a particular course that you're going to run or cycle

00:25:41.560 | or the number of laps you're going to swim

00:25:43.480 | and how you're going to perform it.

00:25:46.460 | It's very clear that for anyone trying to adopt new habits,

00:25:50.160 | getting into the mindset of procedural memory

00:25:52.960 | is very useful for overcoming that barrier

00:25:55.500 | that we call limbic friction.

00:25:56.960 | How do you do that?

00:25:57.960 | Well, a simple visualization exercise,

00:26:01.200 | or it doesn't even have to be done eyes closed.

00:26:03.880 | Oftentimes we hear visualization exercise.

00:26:05.600 | You think about sitting in a Lotus position, eyes closed,

00:26:07.840 | and trying really hard to visualize something.

00:26:10.420 | It doesn't need to be anything like that.

00:26:12.000 | It can simply be, if you are deciding to adopt a new habit,

00:26:16.900 | to just think about the very specific sequence of steps

00:26:19.880 | that's required to execute that habit.

00:26:22.860 | And I'll use a trivial example,

00:26:25.060 | but this could be applied to anything.

00:26:27.020 | Let's say I want to get into the habit of making myself

00:26:29.660 | or someone else in my household

00:26:31.140 | a cup of espresso every morning.

00:26:33.560 | I would actually think through each of those steps,

00:26:37.180 | walk into the kitchen, turn on the espresso machine,

00:26:40.220 | draw the espresso, walking through each of those steps

00:26:42.840 | from start to finish.

00:26:44.080 | And it turns out just that simple mental exercise done once

00:26:47.720 | can shift people toward a much higher likelihood

00:26:51.140 | of performing that habit regularly,

00:26:53.080 | not just the first time,

00:26:54.460 | but as they continue out into the days and weeks that follow.

00:26:58.160 | So that's remarkable to me.

00:26:59.280 | And the literature is really robust.

00:27:01.320 | Just one mental exercise of thinking through

00:27:05.120 | what are the sequence of steps required

00:27:07.040 | in order to perform this habit from start to finish

00:27:09.880 | can shift the likelihood of being able to perform that habit

00:27:13.380 | from unlikely or to moderately likely

00:27:15.780 | to very likely over time.

00:27:17.440 | And that's because it pulls from this process

00:27:20.880 | that involves our hippocampus and our neocortex

00:27:22.920 | and other areas of our brain and nervous system

00:27:25.320 | that engage in procedural memory.

00:27:26.920 | It shifts the brain towards a mindset, if you will.

00:27:30.680 | It's more of a neural circuit set, it would be more accurate,

00:27:33.600 | but a mindset/neural circuit set of doing things

00:27:37.480 | in a particular sequence,

00:27:38.960 | which allows that limbic friction to come down

00:27:41.780 | and increases the likelihood

00:27:43.200 | that we're going to perform that thing.

00:27:44.660 | Simple tool, but very powerful tool

00:27:46.540 | according to the psychology literature.

00:27:48.540 | And actually the cellular and molecular mechanisms

00:27:50.760 | that underlie that sort of procedural memory

00:27:53.720 | stepping through phenomenon are known.

00:27:56.760 | In this article I mentioned, this beautiful review,

00:28:00.380 | they talk about so-called Hebbian learning.

00:28:03.520 | Donald Hebb was a psychologist in Canada

00:28:06.240 | and birthed this field that has now lasted, gosh,

00:28:09.840 | more than 50 years and is still very strong

00:28:11.900 | in neuroscience and psychology of Hebbian learning.

00:28:14.580 | Hebbian learning is when particular neurons are co-active,

00:28:18.380 | meaning when they fire together,

00:28:19.660 | they tend to strengthen their connections with one another.

00:28:22.400 | And it has a number of different

00:28:23.640 | underlying cellular and molecular features

00:28:25.340 | that we don't have to go into in detail.

00:28:26.760 | But for those of you that want to know,

00:28:28.000 | I know some of you are hungry

00:28:29.080 | for a little bit more neuroscience.

00:28:31.920 | This involves things like NMDA receptors,

00:28:34.720 | N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors.

00:28:37.040 | NMDA receptors are really important,

00:28:38.920 | I think for everyone to understand.

00:28:40.660 | So I'll just tell you a little bit about them.

00:28:42.280 | These are receptors that are on the neuron surface

00:28:45.100 | and normally they don't contribute much

00:28:46.820 | to the activity of those neurons.

00:28:48.440 | Those neurons are perfectly capable of doing their thing

00:28:50.720 | without activation of this NMDA receptor.

00:28:53.240 | But when a neuron gets a very strong input,

00:28:55.880 | a strong stimulus, that NMDA receptor

00:28:59.160 | triggers a number of mechanisms

00:29:00.780 | that recruit to the surface of the neuron

00:29:03.080 | more other receptors.

00:29:04.600 | In other words, it makes that neuron more responsive

00:29:07.440 | to input in the future,

00:29:08.940 | such that it doesn't require so much input.

00:29:11.760 | In other words, it takes a neuron

00:29:14.480 | that is very unlikely to fire

00:29:16.560 | and makes it more likely to fire.

00:29:18.440 | So this procedural stepping through

00:29:20.360 | of the steps of the recipe or the series of action steps

00:29:23.620 | that are involved in sitting down to study

00:29:25.960 | and writing for an hour or generating exercise,

00:29:28.720 | whatever it is, the habit that you're trying to learn,

00:29:30.640 | when you're doing that exercise,

00:29:32.360 | it's not as if your nervous system

00:29:33.720 | thinks you're actually performing the behavior.

00:29:35.560 | Your nervous system isn't stupid.

00:29:36.860 | It's actually a lot smarter than that.

00:29:38.520 | It knows the difference between a thought and an action.

00:29:41.080 | But when you do that, it sets in motion the same neurons

00:29:44.360 | that are going to be required

00:29:46.040 | for the execution of that habit.

00:29:47.960 | And so when you actually show up to perform that habit,

00:29:50.740 | it's as if the dominoes fall more easily.

00:29:53.580 | It's a lower threshold, as we say,

00:29:56.460 | in order to get the habit to perform.

00:29:58.520 | So heavy in learning, NMDA receptors,

00:30:00.840 | all that nuts and bolts stuff,

00:30:03.320 | really the guts of the mechanisms of how this works.

00:30:05.680 | But for those of you that just want to be more habitual

00:30:08.720 | about certain things,

00:30:09.960 | be able to perform certain things more reflexively

00:30:11.920 | that you would like in your life,

00:30:13.200 | simply take the time, do it once, maybe twice,

00:30:16.180 | and just sit down, close your eyes if you like,

00:30:18.640 | and just step through the procedure

00:30:20.200 | of what it's going to take in order to perform that habit.

00:30:23.160 | The psychology literature, as I mentioned,

00:30:25.120 | and also the neuroscience literature

00:30:27.720 | strongly supports the fact

00:30:29.300 | that it is going to make it far easier

00:30:31.220 | for you to adopt and maintain that habit.

00:30:33.660 | And if you are somebody who used to perform a habit

00:30:36.580 | and you don't understand why you dropped it

00:30:39.040 | and you're frustrated with yourself

00:30:40.520 | and you're trying to figure out

00:30:41.700 | how you can get back into that habit,

00:30:43.780 | well, by all means, lean right back into that habit.

00:30:46.140 | But if you're having trouble doing that,

00:30:47.960 | also just use the procedural memory exercise

00:30:50.940 | in order to shift your nervous system

00:30:52.820 | toward a higher likelihood

00:30:55.060 | that you will return to that habit.

00:30:57.120 | Just the same way I described

00:30:58.380 | for trying to initiate a new habit.

00:31:00.780 | So now I'd like to discuss a second

00:31:02.460 | and what I think is perhaps the most powerful tool

00:31:05.460 | for being able to acquire and stick to new habits.

00:31:09.040 | This tool is rooted in what we call neural circuits.

00:31:12.700 | And I do think it is important to understand a little bit

00:31:15.200 | about how those neural circuits work.

00:31:17.420 | For those of you that are saying, just tell me what to do,

00:31:20.220 | I have to say, as I always say,

00:31:22.300 | understanding a little bit or a lot of underlying mechanism

00:31:26.020 | will help solidify these concepts for you

00:31:29.200 | and will help ensure that the tools that I offer

00:31:32.260 | are going to make sense

00:31:33.220 | and that they're going to make sense in different contexts

00:31:35.360 | and for different types of habits

00:31:36.860 | that you're trying to learn.

00:31:38.180 | So rather than just tell you what to do,

00:31:39.860 | I'm going to tell you how this particular tool works.

00:31:42.780 | And then in doing that,

00:31:43.740 | you should be able to apply it to any habit

00:31:45.540 | under any conditions.

00:31:47.340 | The tool that I'm referring to

00:31:49.320 | is something called task bracketing.

00:31:51.800 | And the neural circuits associated with task bracketing

00:31:54.900 | are basically the neural circuits

00:31:56.560 | that are going to allow you to learn any new type of habit

00:32:00.140 | or break any habit that you'd like to break.

00:32:03.100 | We have in our brain a set of neural circuits

00:32:05.900 | that fall under the umbrella term of the basal ganglia.

00:32:08.740 | The basal ganglia are involved in action execution,

00:32:12.020 | meaning doing certain things,

00:32:13.580 | and action suppression, not doing certain things.

00:32:16.900 | In the experimental realm,

00:32:20.180 | these are referred to as go, meaning do,

00:32:22.620 | or no-go, don't do certain things.

00:32:25.540 | And some of us fall more into the category

00:32:27.860 | of we find it very easy to do certain things,

00:32:30.360 | but harder to not do other things.

00:32:32.940 | Some people have a lot of no-go type circuits

00:32:36.820 | that are very robust,

00:32:37.860 | and they have a lot of behavioral constraint,

00:32:40.140 | but they have a harder time getting into action.

00:32:41.980 | And some people have a perfect balance of both,

00:32:43.940 | but I've never met one of those people.

00:32:46.160 | So again, drawing from more or less paraphrasing

00:32:49.720 | from this beautiful review that I described earlier,

00:32:52.920 | an annual review of psychology, excuse me,

00:32:56.500 | by Wood and Runger,

00:32:58.940 | task bracketing involves a particular set of neural circuits

00:33:01.880 | within the basal ganglia.

00:33:04.040 | So I'm going to describe this here again,

00:33:05.840 | paraphrasing a sensory motor loop.

00:33:08.500 | Sensory means just input coming in about sight,

00:33:12.000 | sounds, tastes, et cetera.

00:33:14.160 | And then the motor systems,

00:33:15.760 | the systems of the brain and body that generate action,

00:33:18.460 | taking that information and generating action.

00:33:21.320 | So it turns out that there's an area of our basal ganglia

00:33:24.420 | called the dorsolateral striatum.

00:33:26.560 | We can use the acronym DLS.

00:33:28.560 | Again, dorsolateral striatum.

00:33:31.140 | Dorsal means up, lateral means to the side,

00:33:33.240 | so dorsolateral.

00:33:34.080 | And striatum is a subdivision of the basal ganglia.

00:33:37.740 | And it's very important for the establishment of behaviors

00:33:42.220 | that are associated with a habit,

00:33:44.220 | but not necessarily the habit itself.

00:33:47.160 | And beautiful studies in both animals and humans

00:33:50.200 | that record the electrical activity

00:33:52.380 | in the dorsolateral striatum

00:33:54.060 | find that the dorsolateral striatum is associated,

00:33:57.420 | meaning it becomes active

00:33:59.520 | at the beginning of a particular habit

00:34:02.120 | and at the very end and after a particular habit.

00:34:05.400 | Hence the phrase task bracketing, it brackets the habit.

00:34:09.380 | Now, other sets of neurons are going to be active

00:34:11.440 | during the actual execution of the habit,

00:34:14.240 | but what the literature on the dorsolateral striatum

00:34:17.260 | tells us is that we have particular circuits in our brain

00:34:21.600 | that are devoted to framing the events

00:34:24.360 | that happen just before and as we initiate a habit

00:34:27.840 | and just after and as we terminate a habit.

00:34:30.720 | In other words, it acts as a sort of marker

00:34:33.100 | for the habit execution,

00:34:34.300 | but not the execution of the habit per se.

00:34:37.320 | This is very important because task bracketing

00:34:41.460 | is what underlies whether or not a habit will be

00:34:44.360 | context dependent or not,

00:34:46.300 | whether or not it will be strong and likely to occur

00:34:49.420 | even if we didn't get a good night's sleep the night before,

00:34:51.640 | even if we're feeling distracted,

00:34:53.400 | even if we are not feeling like doing something emotionally,

00:34:56.800 | or if we are completely overwhelmed by other events,

00:35:01.100 | if the neural circuits for task bracketing

00:35:03.980 | are deeply embedded in us,

00:35:05.500 | meaning they are very robust around a particular habit,

00:35:08.600 | well, then it's likely that we're going to go out

00:35:10.220 | for that zone two cardio no matter what,

00:35:12.380 | that we're going to brush our teeth no matter what.

00:35:14.200 | In fact, brushing our teeth is a pretty good example

00:35:16.080 | because for most people,

00:35:17.620 | even if you've got a terrible night's sleep,

00:35:19.800 | even if everything in your life is going wrong,

00:35:22.840 | chances are, unless you're very depressed,

00:35:25.440 | if you're going to leave to work, or even if you're not,

00:35:27.880 | that you're going to still carry out the behavior

00:35:30.280 | of brushing your teeth in the morning.

00:35:31.580 | I would hope so actually,

00:35:33.240 | but you are probably less likely to perform

00:35:36.600 | particular habits that are not what you deem as necessary.

00:35:41.020 | But if you think about it, brushing your teeth,

00:35:43.840 | exercise, eating particular foods,

00:35:45.740 | maybe engaging socially in particular ways,

00:35:47.940 | you are the one that places any kind of value assessment

00:35:51.400 | on which ones are essential and which ones are negotiable.

00:35:54.800 | So task bracketing sets a neural imprint,

00:35:58.600 | a kind of a fingerprint in your brain

00:36:00.160 | of this thing has to happen at this particular time of day,

00:36:03.320 | so much so that it's reflexive.

00:36:05.600 | And as we'll talk about in a moment,

00:36:07.360 | there's a way that you can build up task bracketing

00:36:10.740 | so that regardless of what it is you're trying to learn,

00:36:13.660 | there's a much higher probability

00:36:15.480 | that you're going to do that thing.

00:36:17.200 | And when I say learn, meaning,

00:36:18.840 | let's say you're trying to acquire a habit

00:36:20.240 | that for you is really challenging.

00:36:21.640 | Maybe it's that you're going to write for an hour a day

00:36:24.240 | on a book project that you've been thinking about,

00:36:26.180 | or you're going to work on mathematics,

00:36:28.240 | or you're going to do any sort of thing that for you,

00:36:30.280 | there's a lot of limbic friction.

00:36:33.320 | While it is important to think about the sequence of events

00:36:35.880 | that would be required in order to engage in that behavior,

00:36:38.440 | that procedural memory visualization exercise

00:36:41.000 | we talked about before, that will help.

00:36:43.380 | There is a way also that you can orient your nervous system

00:36:46.840 | toward this task bracketing process

00:36:49.560 | so that your nervous system is shifted or oriented

00:36:52.840 | towards the execution of a given habit.

00:36:55.980 | So this is sort of like warming up your body to exercise.

00:36:59.140 | When the dorsolateral striatum is engaged,

00:37:01.680 | your body and your brain are primed to execute a habit,

00:37:04.840 | and then you get to consciously insert

00:37:06.640 | which habit you want to perform.

00:37:08.200 | So in order to leverage the neural mechanisms

00:37:10.440 | of task bracketing in order to increase the likelihood

00:37:13.880 | that you're going to perform a particular habit,

00:37:16.640 | I have to break it to you that one thing

00:37:19.380 | that you've probably heard over and over

00:37:21.700 | about habit formation is not true.

00:37:25.060 | And what I'm referring to is this idea

00:37:27.240 | that if you are very specific about exactly

00:37:30.040 | when you're going to perform a particular habit,

00:37:32.880 | that you are more likely to perform that habit.

00:37:35.520 | And while that is true in the short term,

00:37:38.560 | it is not true in the longterm.

00:37:40.320 | And the reason for that is that our nervous system

00:37:43.880 | tends to generate particular kinds of behaviors

00:37:46.720 | based not on time, but on our state,

00:37:50.440 | meaning what level of activation is taking place

00:37:53.400 | in our brain and body, how much focus we happen to have,

00:37:56.080 | how fatigued we are, how energized we are.

00:37:59.340 | So while schedules are important,

00:38:01.840 | it's not the specific time of day per se

00:38:05.180 | that's going to allow you to get into a habit

00:38:08.000 | and form that habit and consolidate that habit.

00:38:10.640 | Rather, it's the state that your brain and body are in

00:38:14.100 | that's important to anchor yourself to.

00:38:16.240 | So now I'm going to offer you a tool.

00:38:18.280 | It's actually an entire program

00:38:20.100 | by which you can insert particular habits and activities

00:38:23.640 | at particular phases of the day,

00:38:25.480 | not times of day, but phases of the day,

00:38:27.840 | because it turns out that particular phases of the day

00:38:30.580 | are associated with particular biological underpinnings,

00:38:33.880 | chemicals and neural circuits and so forth.

00:38:36.260 | And in doing so, it will make it far more likely

00:38:39.020 | that you'll be able to regularly engage in these habits

00:38:41.980 | and activities over a long period of time.

00:38:45.020 | Now, whether or not that will move you from somebody

00:38:46.780 | who ordinarily would take 200 days to form a habit

00:38:49.920 | to one of those 18 days to habit people

00:38:52.780 | in that earlier study I mentioned, I don't know,

00:38:55.380 | but I am certain that it will have a significant shift

00:38:57.960 | on allowing you to engage in particular habits more easily

00:39:01.380 | and to consolidate those habits more quickly.

00:39:03.700 | So the program I'm about to describe,

00:39:05.620 | I formulated for you based on the neuroscience literature

00:39:09.140 | and the psychology literature of learning

00:39:10.780 | and this concept of task bracketing.

00:39:13.080 | It involves dividing the 24 hour days

00:39:15.260 | into what I call three phases.

00:39:17.460 | The first is phase one,

00:39:19.300 | which is zero to eight hours after waking up, approximately.

00:39:24.020 | Okay, you can put a plus or minus 30 minutes

00:39:26.380 | on this for yourself.

00:39:28.220 | The second phase is the nine to 14,

00:39:31.460 | maybe 15 hours after you wake up.

00:39:34.620 | And the third phase is 16 to 24 hours after waking up.

00:39:38.200 | So we've taken the 24 hour cycle,

00:39:39.740 | we've carved it up into three phases,

00:39:41.720 | phase one, phase two and phase three.

00:39:43.940 | Now, everything I'm describing,

00:39:45.820 | or at least the way I'm going to describe it

00:39:47.780 | is based on what I would call a typical schedule,

00:39:50.400 | diurnal schedule.

00:39:51.560 | You've heard of nocturnal?

00:39:52.620 | Well, we are diurnal.

00:39:54.320 | Most of us are asleep at night and awake during the day.

00:39:56.880 | I do realize that a number of people have shift work

00:40:00.100 | or they have newborns or other reasons

00:40:02.180 | why they have to be up in the middle of the night

00:40:03.720 | and sleeping during the day.

00:40:05.380 | If that's the case, please listen to the episode

00:40:07.860 | that we did on jet lag and shift work,

00:40:10.040 | because it has a lot of tools

00:40:11.220 | specifically for that population.

00:40:13.460 | But most people go to sleep somewhere around 10 p.m.,

00:40:17.200 | plus or minus two hours and wake up sometime around 7 a.m.,

00:40:21.420 | plus or minus two hours.

00:40:23.080 | So today I'm going to use the two bed at 10 p.m.

00:40:26.180 | and the wake up time of 7 a.m. as the framework for this,

00:40:30.340 | but you could adopt it easily to your particular schedule.

00:40:33.340 | Phase one, which again is zero to eight hours after waking,

00:40:37.900 | has a particular neurochemical signature.

00:40:41.300 | Regardless of what you do,

00:40:43.140 | the neuromodulators norepinephrine as well as epinephrine,

00:40:46.620 | so that's noradrenaline and adrenaline,

00:40:48.700 | as well as the neuromodulator dopamine

00:40:51.060 | tend to be elevated

00:40:52.360 | during that first zero to eight hours after waking.

00:40:55.900 | There are a number of reasons for this

00:40:57.020 | related to the fact that also cortisol

00:40:59.140 | is higher in our brain and bloodstream.

00:41:01.660 | It's a healthy level of cortisol upon waking.

00:41:03.840 | Body temperature is increased, et cetera.

00:41:05.860 | And there are several things

00:41:07.080 | that perhaps we should all be doing.

00:41:08.820 | I've talked about many of these on the podcast before,

00:41:11.380 | that in addition to those chemicals,

00:41:13.660 | further support an alert and focused state.

00:41:17.100 | And I'll just list those off.

00:41:18.460 | I've done many podcasts on each of these.

00:41:20.860 | If you'd like to access those podcasts,

00:41:22.480 | you can find them in the menu of podcasts

00:41:25.440 | on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, et cetera.

00:41:27.500 | They involve, for instance,

00:41:28.820 | viewing sunlight or bright artificial light

00:41:32.000 | if you can't access sunlight

00:41:33.160 | within the first 30 minutes of waking.

00:41:35.660 | Physical exercise of some kind

00:41:38.040 | in this first phase of the day,

00:41:39.900 | zero to eight hours of the day,

00:41:41.100 | ideally pretty early in that phase.

00:41:43.400 | But if it has to be at the seven to eight hour

00:41:46.540 | transition point, that's fine too.

00:41:48.420 | Cold exposure in the form of cold showers or ice baths

00:41:51.740 | or outside with minimal clothing,

00:41:55.460 | appropriate yet minimal clothing.

00:41:57.980 | Caffeine ingestion, fasting, for instance,

00:42:02.260 | not ingesting calories also will lend itself

00:42:05.560 | to increased norepinephrine, dopamine, et cetera.

00:42:08.720 | If you are going to consume foods,

00:42:10.140 | foods that are rich in things like tyrosine,

00:42:12.400 | which is a precursor for dopamine,

00:42:14.560 | you can look up which foods are high in tyrosine.

00:42:17.300 | And for those of you that are interested in supplementation

00:42:19.660 | and like to use those routes,

00:42:21.060 | things like alpha GPC or phenylethylamine thing

00:42:24.700 | or L-tyrosine, if that's in keeping

00:42:26.580 | with what you're able to do.

00:42:28.460 | Of course, consult your doctor

00:42:30.060 | if you're going to rely on supplementation.

00:42:32.260 | What's this all about?

00:42:33.120 | Well, the already elevated norepinephrine and dopamine,

00:42:37.060 | the sunlight, exercise, cold exposure,

00:42:39.380 | caffeine, tyrosine, et cetera,

00:42:41.420 | all of those place the brain and body into a state

00:42:45.260 | in which you are better able,

00:42:48.300 | or I would say more easily able to engage in activities

00:42:52.400 | that have a high degree of limbic friction

00:42:55.660 | and where you need to override that limbic friction, right?

00:42:58.740 | We've heard that the morning is kind of sacred,

00:43:00.660 | conquer the hardest things first thing in the morning.

00:43:02.620 | And that's been discussed in the pop psychology literature

00:43:05.820 | and in the habit formation literature,

00:43:08.040 | merely from the perspective of get it out of the way

00:43:11.060 | so you can feel good about having done it.

00:43:13.480 | But what I'm referring to is quite different.

00:43:15.020 | What I'm referring to is a particular phase of day

00:43:17.920 | that after rising, after waking up that is,

00:43:20.680 | for zero to eight hours, right, in that first phase,

00:43:24.120 | your whole system is action and focus oriented.

00:43:27.480 | And we know that when you are action and focus oriented,

00:43:30.300 | and because of the neurochemicals

00:43:32.540 | that are naturally released into your brain and body,

00:43:35.540 | that you will be more likely to overcome any limbic friction

00:43:39.620 | that stands in the way of performing particular habits.

00:43:42.700 | So as you list out or think about the various habits

00:43:46.080 | that you'd like to adopt in your life,

00:43:47.980 | take the habits for which you know

00:43:51.380 | there's the highest degree of limbic friction.

00:43:53.520 | They are the hardest for you to engage in.

00:43:55.580 | They require the most activation energy

00:43:57.900 | and put those in this zero to eight hours after waking.

00:44:01.900 | This will greatly facilitate

00:44:04.100 | your performance of those new habits.

00:44:06.880 | I'm certain of that.

00:44:07.780 | And in addition to that,

00:44:09.560 | by doing them in this particular phase of the day,

00:44:12.540 | not necessarily at the same time.

00:44:14.020 | I mean, if you want to be very habitual

00:44:15.440 | and you want to do the exercise or the sunlight viewing

00:44:17.980 | always at the same time,

00:44:19.380 | or you want to do, you want to drink your caffeine

00:44:22.020 | always at the exact same time, that's fine.

00:44:24.260 | But by placing them in this broader window

00:44:26.340 | of zero to eight hours after waking,

00:44:28.860 | what you're doing is you're creating task bracketing.

00:44:32.020 | You're making it such that your nervous system will predict

00:44:35.220 | when you are going to lean in against limbic friction

00:44:38.620 | in order to perform particular types of habits.

00:44:41.420 | And this is very different than saying,

00:44:43.340 | I'm always going to run,

00:44:44.820 | or I'm always going to study from 10 to 12 AM every morning.

00:44:49.120 | That's great.

00:44:49.960 | And if you can do that, terrific.

00:44:51.500 | But the literature indicates that people who do that,

00:44:53.700 | who are very rigid about when they do things,

00:44:55.940 | tend because of context dependence

00:44:58.460 | to not necessarily stick to those habits over time.

00:45:00.960 | Some people do, but many, many people don't.

00:45:03.980 | So think about the hardest habits to form

00:45:06.060 | and the habits that you most want to form

00:45:08.880 | that are hardest for you to adopt and to maintain.

00:45:11.640 | And I highly suggest placing those somewhere

00:45:14.960 | within this phase one of zero to eight hours after waking.

00:45:18.500 | Now, of course, some of the things I listed out,

00:45:20.740 | sunlight viewing, exercise, cold exposure, caffeine, fasting,

00:45:24.600 | those might be the actual habits themselves.

00:45:27.080 | But here I realize, or rather I want to acknowledge

00:45:30.540 | that many people, including myself,

00:45:32.400 | are doing some or all of these things already.

00:45:34.700 | And many people, including myself,

00:45:36.760 | are trying to adopt new habits that don't fall

00:45:39.460 | into the category of just trying to set your overall state.

00:45:42.800 | Again, norepinephrine, dopamine,

00:45:44.820 | and all these neural systems will be greatly elevated

00:45:47.220 | in this zero to eight hours after waking.

00:45:49.700 | However, the other things I mentioned, sunlight exposure,

00:45:52.540 | exercise, cold exposure, caffeine, fasting,

00:45:55.460 | if that's for you, or if you're eating during that phase,

00:45:58.620 | eating things that contain some or elevated levels

00:46:01.100 | of tyrosine, maybe supplementing GPC or L-tyrosine, et cetera.

00:46:06.100 | All of those things further facilitate the neurochemistry

00:46:09.760 | and therefore the state of mind that's going to be ideal

00:46:12.700 | for leaning into limbic friction

00:46:14.440 | and overriding that limbic friction

00:46:16.140 | so that you can regularly perform that habit.

00:46:18.140 | What we're really talking about here

00:46:19.300 | is leveraging neural systems in order to help you

00:46:23.100 | make it more likely that you're going to be able to engage

00:46:25.740 | and maintain a particular habit.

00:46:27.640 | So what I'm referring to as phase one of each day

00:46:30.860 | is useful for acquiring certain habits,

00:46:33.600 | but there are other phases of the day

00:46:35.360 | and those turn out to be useful

00:46:36.760 | for acquiring other types of habits.

00:46:38.840 | Phase two, as I mentioned, is about, again,

00:46:43.060 | these aren't specifics,

00:46:44.200 | but about nine to 14 or 15 hours after waking.

00:46:48.640 | During this phase of the day,

00:46:49.920 | because of the circadian shifts in our biology,

00:46:53.480 | the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine

00:46:55.260 | that's circulating in our brain and bloodstream

00:46:57.540 | tends to start to come down

00:47:00.120 | and levels of cortisol tend to start to come down.

00:47:03.580 | That's the ideal circumstance.

00:47:05.000 | In fact, you don't really want elevated cortisol

00:47:07.520 | late in the day.

00:47:08.360 | That's actually a signature of depression and anxiety

00:47:10.380 | and a number of other unfortunate things.

00:47:14.440 | So nine to 14 hours after waking,

00:47:17.740 | dopamine and norepinephrine and cortisol

00:47:19.600 | are starting to taper down just naturally

00:47:21.640 | and a different neuromodulator, serotonin,

00:47:25.260 | is starting to rise.

00:47:26.900 | Serotonin is definitely going to be highest

00:47:29.820 | in this second half of the day

00:47:31.940 | and tends to lend itself to a more relaxed state of being.

00:47:36.680 | Now, of course, I do realize

00:47:38.120 | that some people are less of morning people

00:47:40.080 | and find that they really come alive

00:47:41.560 | and awake in the afternoon,

00:47:42.620 | but most people don't fall into that category.

00:47:45.260 | Most people feel more alert early in the day,

00:47:47.600 | even anxious early in the day,

00:47:49.180 | and then as the afternoon progresses,

00:47:50.660 | they tend to be a bit more sleepy,

00:47:52.580 | a bit more relaxed, a bit more calm.

00:47:55.660 | There are certain things that we all can and should do

00:47:58.760 | during this phase two of each day

00:48:01.200 | that lend themselves to a state of mind

00:48:04.880 | and a state of body that is going to be beneficial

00:48:07.980 | for the generation and consolidation

00:48:10.300 | of certain types of habits.

00:48:11.960 | What are those things?

00:48:12.840 | First of all, as the day goes on,

00:48:15.400 | you should try, if you can,

00:48:16.600 | to start tapering the amount of light that you're viewing.

00:48:20.080 | Now, this doesn't mean putting yourself into dim light

00:48:22.440 | at three o'clock or four o'clock in the afternoon.

00:48:24.960 | That's certainly not the case.

00:48:26.520 | Simply that you want to start tapering off

00:48:28.420 | the amount of really bright light that you're getting,

00:48:30.800 | unless it's sunlight.

00:48:32.560 | Talked about this before on the podcast,

00:48:34.200 | but if you haven't heard,

00:48:35.800 | viewing the sun as it's what we call low solar angle,

00:48:39.040 | so as it's headed toward the horizon,

00:48:41.120 | you don't necessarily have to watch the sunset,

00:48:42.900 | although that can be nice,

00:48:44.160 | but getting some sunlight in your eyes

00:48:45.540 | in the second half of the day can also be beneficial

00:48:47.680 | for a number of brain systems and psychological systems.

00:48:51.060 | So you can get some sunlight in your eyes.

00:48:52.640 | You can certainly have artificial lights on,

00:48:55.520 | but you want to start dimming those lights

00:48:57.400 | and bringing them actually physically lower in the room

00:48:59.660 | because the neurons in your eye

00:49:01.760 | that view the upper visual field,

00:49:04.380 | they actually trigger this alertness mechanism

00:49:06.760 | in the brain and body.

00:49:07.600 | And in the second half of the day,

00:49:09.160 | even if you're humming around and doing work

00:49:11.340 | at three or four or five or even 7 p.m.,

00:49:14.120 | you are probably headed towards sleep a few hours later.

00:49:17.720 | So things like limiting the total amount of light

00:49:20.000 | if you can, things like NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.

00:49:24.200 | Another thing that I've talked about on this podcast,

00:49:26.200 | if you haven't heard about this before,

00:49:27.420 | non-sleep deep rest is an umbrella term

00:49:29.360 | for things like meditation, for yoga nidra,

00:49:32.640 | a very powerful science-supported tool

00:49:35.280 | for teaching you how to relax.

00:49:37.740 | Things like self-hypnosis,

00:49:39.240 | which might sound a little kooky to some of you,

00:49:40.840 | but actually is a clinically-based tool

00:49:42.360 | for which there's a lot of scientific literature.

00:49:44.660 | If you're interested in that,

00:49:45.580 | there's a great free resource called Reveri, R-E-V-E-R-I.com.

00:49:50.160 | There's a app for both Apple and Android.

00:49:53.060 | This is an app that was developed by colleagues of mine

00:49:55.300 | and researchers at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:49:57.580 | You can do these short 15-minute self-hypnosis scripts,

00:50:00.900 | as they're called, that can teach you how to relax yourself.

00:50:03.820 | There's even ones for focus, for sleep, for chronic pain.

00:50:07.180 | Again, all very strongly supported

00:50:09.020 | by quality peer-reviewed literature.

00:50:11.220 | So things like Reveri, meditation.

00:50:13.800 | Things like heat and sauna, hot baths, hot showers.

00:50:18.220 | Those are terrific things to do

00:50:19.980 | in the second half of the day.

00:50:21.740 | They tend to support this serotonergic

00:50:24.100 | or high serotonin-like state

00:50:25.980 | and lend themselves to more calm and relaxation.

00:50:28.760 | For those of you that are interested in supplementation,

00:50:31.780 | there's always ashwagandha, which reduces cortisol.

00:50:35.580 | Again, peaks in cortisol late in the afternoon and evening

00:50:38.460 | are associated with depression, anxiety, and so forth.

00:50:41.160 | Ashwagandha is a pretty potent cortisol-inhibiting tool.

00:50:46.160 | I personally don't use it very often,

00:50:48.780 | and I caution people about using it

00:50:50.700 | for longer than two-week periods of time

00:50:52.360 | without taking some breaks.

00:50:53.620 | You can look up more about ashwagandha on examine.com.

00:50:56.940 | There's a lot of terrific literature

00:50:58.180 | with links to studies there.

00:50:59.660 | But basically this phase two of the day

00:51:01.780 | is one in which you're alert, you are present,

00:51:04.220 | you are working, you are engaging socially,

00:51:06.180 | you're cooking dinner,

00:51:07.020 | probably paying attention to a number of things,

00:51:09.080 | but you should really be trying

00:51:10.100 | to taper off your stress level.

00:51:11.920 | So how do you leverage phase two of the day

00:51:13.820 | for habit formation?

00:51:15.680 | Well, given what we know about the neurochemistry

00:51:17.580 | of learning and memory,

00:51:18.660 | given what we know about task formation

00:51:20.780 | and its reliance on certain forms of neuroplasticity,

00:51:23.640 | the second half of the day is a terrific time

00:51:26.140 | to take on habits and things that you're already doing

00:51:30.940 | that require very little override of limbic friction.

00:51:34.280 | So these might be things that you could categorize

00:51:37.780 | in common terms as kind of mellower activities.

00:51:40.260 | It might be journaling.

00:51:41.820 | It might be that you already are performing music

00:51:46.100 | or I should say practicing music regularly,

00:51:48.680 | but that there's a particular type of music

00:51:50.520 | that is hard for you

00:51:51.680 | or that you're working on a particular piece of music,

00:51:53.560 | or you're trying to learn a language,

00:51:54.600 | something that's a little bit challenging,

00:51:56.100 | but doesn't require a ton of energy

00:51:58.900 | in order to override that limbic friction.

00:52:01.080 | The second half of the day is a much better time to do that.

00:52:03.600 | Less resistance, as we might say.

00:52:06.520 | But of course, resistance has a neural substrate.

00:52:08.980 | And the reason for doing those things

00:52:10.640 | in the second part of the day,

00:52:11.960 | the so-called phase two, as I've called it,

00:52:14.200 | part of the day is because your ability

00:52:16.360 | to override resistance is really diminished

00:52:19.040 | in this second phase of the day.

00:52:21.660 | Some of you might say, well, wait,

00:52:23.320 | I like to exercise in the second half of the day.

00:52:25.300 | That's actually when I have the most energy.

00:52:26.960 | That's when I feel warmer, I'm not a morning exerciser.

00:52:29.800 | That's absolutely fine.

00:52:31.760 | What I'm referring to is the acquisition of new behaviors

00:52:35.320 | and placing those consistently

00:52:37.280 | at the second half of the day

00:52:38.400 | in order to engage this task bracketing mechanisms

00:52:41.040 | that I talked about before.

00:52:42.900 | One of the hallmark features

00:52:44.640 | of those basal ganglia circuits for go and no-go

00:52:47.440 | is that they are associated with certain neurochemicals,

00:52:50.760 | dopamine and serotonin, acetylcholine,

00:52:52.880 | and other neurochemicals.

00:52:54.280 | And by placing particular habits

00:52:57.000 | at particular phases of the day,

00:52:58.700 | those neurochemical states start to be associated

00:53:01.200 | with the leaning in and the process of beginning and,

00:53:04.360 | as I mentioned, ending those particular habits.

00:53:06.800 | And in doing so, they shift the whole nervous system

00:53:09.720 | toward being able to predict that certain things

00:53:12.220 | are going to happen at particular times of day,

00:53:14.560 | that you are going to be leaning very hard

00:53:16.660 | against limbic friction early in the day in phase one,

00:53:19.140 | and that you're going to be doing things

00:53:20.360 | that require less conscious override

00:53:22.860 | of limbic friction in phase two.

00:53:24.240 | And in doing so, set up this task bracketing system

00:53:28.180 | so that the individual habits that you're learning

00:53:31.140 | or that you're trying to learn

00:53:32.100 | have a much greater probability of being executed

00:53:35.000 | and consolidated, meaning that pretty soon

00:53:37.920 | they will just naturally become reflexive.

00:53:40.320 | And as with phase one, many of the things that I mentioned

00:53:44.000 | that support this, what I'm calling a serotonergic state

00:53:47.700 | or a more relaxed state in phase two,

00:53:50.540 | things like seeing some light in the afternoon,

00:53:53.540 | but not a lot of bright light from artificial sources,

00:53:56.620 | things like NSDR, things like heat and sauna,

00:54:00.600 | hot baths, et cetera, ashwagandha,

00:54:02.820 | again, all of those things themselves could be habits

00:54:05.180 | that you're trying to adopt, right?

00:54:06.980 | In that case, do those if you'd like to explore them.

00:54:10.100 | They are quite beneficial for a number of reasons,

00:54:12.980 | not just related to execution of particular habits

00:54:15.480 | in phase two of the day,

00:54:16.860 | but also for improving quality of sleep

00:54:19.300 | and consolidating any learning

00:54:20.960 | that you might've triggered early in the day.

00:54:22.580 | I've talked about that before,

00:54:23.640 | but just briefly as a relevant aside,

00:54:26.700 | neuroplasticity involves triggering the neuroplasticity,

00:54:30.080 | setting it in motion,

00:54:31.440 | but the actual rewiring of the brain

00:54:33.640 | and the reconfiguration of neurons

00:54:35.160 | that will allow that learning to be reflexive,

00:54:37.220 | that actually occurs during states of deep rest,

00:54:39.420 | like NSDR and like deep sleep.

00:54:42.880 | And I should just mention for those of you

00:54:45.000 | that can only exercise or prefer to exercise

00:54:47.580 | in phase two of the day, right?

00:54:50.160 | Nine to 14 hours or 15 hours after waking,

00:54:53.240 | that's absolutely fine.

00:54:54.920 | However, because of the importance of sleep

00:54:58.220 | and in particular deep sleep throughout the night

00:55:00.240 | for not just neuroplasticity,

00:55:01.840 | but recovery of muscle and other tissues

00:55:04.800 | that are taxed during physical exercise.

00:55:08.300 | If you do train in phase two, I highly recommend,

00:55:11.340 | I highly recommend that you start doing

00:55:13.400 | some sort of NSDR type activity after you train

00:55:16.200 | within an hour or two,

00:55:17.320 | because that will allow you to taper down and relax

00:55:19.680 | so that you can get into the next phase

00:55:21.380 | we're going to talk about, which is phase three.

00:55:23.720 | Phase three of the 24 hour schedule

00:55:26.680 | runs from about 16 to 24 hours after waking.

00:55:30.400 | During that period of time,

00:55:33.300 | there are a few things that are going to support

00:55:35.240 | being in a state of mind, state of body,

00:55:38.500 | that are going to allow neuroplasticity to occur,

00:55:41.640 | that are going to allow the rewiring that you've triggered

00:55:44.280 | during the waking part of the day to actually take place.

00:55:47.740 | Those things are very low to no light,

00:55:51.240 | meaning keeping your environment very dark

00:55:53.380 | or very, very dim.

00:55:55.480 | I don't think it's necessary to sleep in a room

00:55:57.600 | that's complete blackness.

00:55:59.480 | I think that's a little bit overkill,

00:56:01.520 | but for most people, keeping the room dark

00:56:04.600 | and keeping the room temperature low

00:56:07.000 | is very beneficial for getting and staying in deep sleep.

00:56:09.960 | The body has to drop by about one to three degrees

00:56:14.080 | in order to get into sleep and to stay asleep.

00:56:16.760 | So low light, low temperature environment,

00:56:19.540 | you can always pile on blankets, of course,

00:56:21.360 | if you don't want to be cold at night,

00:56:23.180 | you want to be warm enough,

00:56:24.360 | but you want your environment to be cold.

00:56:26.480 | Typically people aren't eating in the middle of the night.

00:56:29.640 | Although one thing that can be useful

00:56:31.820 | is to make sure that you're at least well fed enough

00:56:34.700 | when you head into this third phase of every 24 hour day

00:56:38.080 | that you're not awake because you're hungry.

00:56:40.520 | Now, a lot of people recommend putting a gap

00:56:42.640 | between your final bite of food

00:56:44.000 | and when you go to sleep at night.

00:56:45.440 | Some people will say that gap should be four hours.

00:56:47.500 | Other people say two hours.

00:56:49.340 | If you're me, I generally have something, I don't know,

00:56:51.440 | within two hours or 90 minutes of going to sleep,

00:56:54.180 | but it's not a big meal, but that's just me.

00:56:55.620 | And I fall asleep and stay asleep fine with that.

00:56:57.920 | You have to experiment for yourself.

00:57:00.460 | I've talked about supplements that can support sleep

00:57:02.500 | in previous episodes of the podcast,

00:57:04.120 | things like magnesium threonate or magnesium bisglycinate,

00:57:07.480 | things like theanine, apigenin.

00:57:09.960 | If you'd like to read more about those,

00:57:11.660 | we actually have a newsletter

00:57:12.960 | that I'll just quickly refer you to.

00:57:14.420 | This is the Huberman Lab Neural Network newsletter.

00:57:17.620 | You can sign up for it by going to hubermanlab.com.

00:57:20.020 | It's very easy to find.

00:57:21.320 | But even if you don't sign up,

00:57:23.360 | you can go to the toolkit for sleep that's listed there.

00:57:26.400 | And that toolkit is not just supplements.

00:57:28.200 | That toolkit is a number of different things,

00:57:29.960 | both behavioral and supplement-based

00:57:32.800 | and nutrition-based, et cetera,

00:57:34.420 | that can allow you to get into sleep

00:57:37.100 | and to stay asleep more readily.

00:57:38.680 | It's totally zero cost.

00:57:39.820 | You can find that again at hubermanlab.com.

00:57:41.860 | So things like low light, low temperature,

00:57:43.940 | the supplements I mentioned,

00:57:45.300 | adjusting your eating schedule appropriately,

00:57:48.080 | obviously not drinking caffeine in the middle of the night

00:57:50.120 | or too close to bed, that's going to be critical.

00:57:51.920 | In fact, ideally you wouldn't ingest any caffeine

00:57:55.080 | in phase two of the day

00:57:56.640 | so that you could get into this deeper state of rest

00:57:59.800 | in which habit formation and neuroplasticity can occur.

00:58:02.820 | What if you wake up, right?

00:58:05.840 | The way I've cast phase three

00:58:07.560 | is that you're supposed to be in this deep slumber.

00:58:09.720 | You're not supposed to wake up at all.

00:58:11.320 | You're supposed to be in low light

00:58:12.640 | and your brain is rewiring

00:58:13.840 | and those habits are getting consolidated, et cetera.

00:58:16.720 | Well, if you're like me,

00:58:18.120 | you probably get up once in the middle of the night.

00:58:19.580 | Maybe you go use the restroom.

00:58:20.640 | Perfectly normal, perfectly normal.

00:58:22.360 | But a lot of people have trouble falling back asleep.

00:58:25.180 | Very important if you get up in the middle of the night

00:58:26.900 | to use a minimum of light

00:58:28.160 | in order to navigate your surroundings,

00:58:29.660 | just as much as you need in order to safely do so.

00:58:32.900 | Because light inhibits the hormone melatonin,

00:58:35.700 | can make it very hard to fall back asleep

00:58:37.120 | if you inhibit melatonin.

00:58:38.840 | The effects of light inhibiting melatonin

00:58:40.560 | are actually very potent, happens very, very quickly.

00:58:43.180 | So try and keep the lights low.

00:58:45.440 | And if you have trouble falling back asleep,

00:58:47.420 | that's when you might also want to use

00:58:49.240 | something like the Reverie app.

00:58:51.120 | They have a sleep script there

00:58:52.360 | that can hopefully help you get back to sleep

00:58:54.480 | or something like NSDR.

00:58:55.880 | You can find NSDR scripts on YouTube.

00:58:57.920 | These are zero cost.

00:58:59.240 | You can look up one that I particularly like

00:59:00.800 | is NSDR Made For.

00:59:02.320 | It's a company I'm associated with,

00:59:04.040 | but the NSDR is completely zero cost.

00:59:06.200 | And there are other things like yoga nidra,

00:59:08.540 | which you can find scripts for elsewhere.

00:59:10.300 | Again, all of these habits or these behaviors,

00:59:13.020 | these do's and don'ts around phase three themselves

00:59:16.220 | might be habits that you're trying to create for yourself.

00:59:19.560 | But again, phase three is really about making sure

00:59:21.820 | that whatever limbic friction you've been able to override

00:59:24.880 | in phase one and trigger some new habit, right?

00:59:27.320 | Forcing yourself to write or forcing yourself to study

00:59:31.080 | or forcing yourself to exercise

00:59:32.480 | during that high limbic friction state.

00:59:35.120 | And then whatever things you've been doing in phase two,

00:59:37.160 | which are habits that hopefully have moved

00:59:38.980 | a little bit further along the continuum of newly formed

00:59:42.120 | versus all the way to reflexive,

00:59:44.100 | or things that take less limbic friction in order to do.

00:59:47.360 | Phase three is when all of that gets really locked

00:59:49.600 | into the nervous system through those heavy mechanisms

00:59:52.240 | like NMDA receptors, et cetera, that I talked about before.

00:59:55.080 | Again, neuroplasticity is the basis of habit formation

00:59:58.720 | and neuroplasticity and the rewiring of neural circuits

01:00:01.220 | happens in these states of deep sleep.

01:00:02.800 | So if you're not obeying this phase three,

01:00:07.060 | if you're not giving phase three the materials it needs

01:00:10.040 | and you're not avoiding the certain things like caffeine

01:00:12.780 | and bright light and stress during phase three,

01:00:16.200 | you're simply not going to be able to build those habits

01:00:19.360 | that you've been working so hard to trigger in phase one

01:00:21.960 | and phase two of the day.

01:00:24.180 | Again, these are things that I've talked about

01:00:26.480 | in previous episodes of the podcast and elsewhere,

01:00:29.080 | but really this is about habit formation.

01:00:32.500 | And the whole reason for placing particular types

01:00:35.020 | of behaviors at particular phases of the day

01:00:38.720 | is to set a framework for that task bracketing.

01:00:41.740 | Again, task bracketing and those circuits

01:00:44.140 | of the basal ganglia indicate that it's not just

01:00:47.480 | the neural circuits that are engaged by the task itself,

01:00:51.320 | but the neural circuits that are engaged

01:00:53.600 | before and after that task execution.

01:00:57.580 | That's what gets consolidated.

01:00:59.620 | So when you do things at particular phases of the day

01:01:03.160 | under particular conditions of neurochemistry,

01:01:05.920 | what you're doing is you're giving the brain

01:01:07.720 | a very predictable set of sequences that during sleep,

01:01:10.920 | it can start to put into your hard drive if you will,

01:01:14.120 | it can really program it into your nervous system

01:01:16.560 | so that within a short period of time,

01:01:18.800 | hopefully within 18 or maybe even six days or who knows,

01:01:22.640 | maybe even fewer days, you'll find that executing

01:01:26.000 | those behaviors is very, very straightforward for you

01:01:28.480 | and that you won't have to feel so much limbic friction

01:01:32.000 | or override so much limbic friction.

01:01:34.120 | Some of you are probably asking, okay,

01:01:36.720 | if I perform a particular habit during phase one,

01:01:40.840 | and then I do other habits during phase two,

01:01:42.960 | and I eventually get to the point where I'm engaging

01:01:45.700 | in those habits in a pretty effortless way,

01:01:49.480 | do I keep them in the same phase of the day?

01:01:51.560 | And the good news is the literature says it doesn't matter.

01:01:54.560 | And in fact, moving that particular habit

01:01:57.220 | around somewhat randomly can actually be beneficial to you

01:02:00.240 | because actually moving it from one time a day to the other

01:02:03.320 | is that context independence that we really are seeking.

01:02:07.460 | By being able to do the same thing that we want to do,

01:02:11.000 | regardless of time of day or circumstances,

01:02:13.900 | that's how we know that we've achieved

01:02:15.820 | a real habit formation.

01:02:17.160 | That's how we know that the habit has been moved

01:02:19.800 | into certain components of our neural circuitry

01:02:21.840 | that just allow us to do it what seems like reflexively.

01:02:24.560 | Although earlier I pointed out that these aren't reflexes

01:02:27.320 | in the traditional sense.

01:02:29.400 | The reason for that is that this brain area,

01:02:32.500 | the hippocampus that many of you know

01:02:34.280 | is associated with learning and memory

01:02:35.940 | is not actually where memories are stored.

01:02:38.320 | The hippocampus is where memories are formed.

01:02:40.720 | It's where procedures, like I talked about before,

01:02:43.200 | procedural memory of how you're going to execute

01:02:45.200 | a particular sequence where that's maintained.

01:02:47.720 | So like if we use the recipe model, that's where the recipe

01:02:50.840 | is maintained until you know how to cook that dish.

01:02:53.720 | And then the procedural memory literally migrates off

01:02:58.420 | into a different set of neural circuits,

01:03:00.220 | which are the neural circuits of the neocortex,

01:03:02.480 | where we have maps of sensory experience,

01:03:05.560 | maps of all kinds of experiences,

01:03:08.500 | including motor maps of how to execute things.

01:03:10.440 | So we use one part of the brain to learn something,

01:03:12.980 | but then that information in the form

01:03:14.960 | of the electrical activity of neurons is passed off

01:03:18.600 | to a different brain area.

01:03:20.080 | Now the neurons themselves don't move

01:03:22.000 | from the hippocampus to the cortex.

01:03:23.440 | That doesn't happen.

01:03:24.280 | What happens is the signals,

01:03:26.320 | the sequence of electrical firing,

01:03:28.040 | much like a script for a movie or the notes on a sheet

01:03:33.040 | of paper for a particular musical piece is transferred off

01:03:37.520 | to a different brain area.

01:03:39.080 | So that whole process of really leaning

01:03:41.960 | into something that's hard, then it becoming easier.

01:03:44.080 | And then eventually that thing becoming more

01:03:45.800 | or less reflexive involves a migration

01:03:48.080 | of the information in the brain.

01:03:49.680 | And once it's migrated out to a different location

01:03:53.240 | in the brain, at that point,

01:03:54.680 | it's achieved context independence.

01:03:56.980 | It doesn't have to be bracketed by your caffeine

01:04:01.360 | and your lunch.

01:04:02.200 | It doesn't have to occur immediately

01:04:05.000 | after your afternoon NSDR,

01:04:06.800 | but before your four o'clock meeting on Zoom

01:04:09.760 | or something of that sort.

01:04:11.080 | So all this is to say that once something

01:04:14.160 | has become reflexive,

01:04:16.080 | you should play with it a little bit about time of day.

01:04:18.160 | If you want to keep it in the same phase of day, great.

01:04:21.440 | But if you one day decide you're going to exercise

01:04:24.260 | in the afternoon, next day,

01:04:25.520 | you decide you're going to exercise in the morning

01:04:26.960 | and that's the habit that you're concerned with.

01:04:28.700 | That's terrific.

01:04:29.540 | If you're able to do that,

01:04:30.620 | that means that it's truly achieved context independence.

01:04:32.820 | It means that you have officially formed that habit.

01:04:35.400 | And as I mentioned earlier,

01:04:37.480 | much earlier at the beginning of the episode,

01:04:39.620 | the strength of a habit is dictated

01:04:42.200 | by how much limbic friction, that was one,

01:04:45.680 | and how much context dependence there is.

01:04:48.640 | So when it doesn't take much activation energy

01:04:51.300 | to get into the execution of that habit

01:04:53.460 | and you can do it in any context,

01:04:55.260 | well, then you have formed a habit.

01:04:58.000 | We really can't have a discussion

01:04:59.420 | about learning anything habits or otherwise,

01:05:02.240 | unless we talk about reward prediction error.

01:05:05.480 | Reward prediction error is associated

01:05:07.780 | with the molecule dopamine.

01:05:09.260 | Although I should say there are other neurochemicals

01:05:11.540 | in our brain and body that are also related

01:05:14.140 | to reward prediction error.

01:05:16.020 | But reward prediction error is a very good system,

01:05:20.520 | or I should say a lens through which to think about

01:05:22.900 | whether or not we should reward ourselves

01:05:25.220 | for performing a given habit.

01:05:27.660 | And this is a much larger discussion

01:05:29.260 | that actually relates to things like parenting

01:05:31.320 | and self-regulation.

01:05:32.880 | Should we reward kids just for effort?

01:05:35.740 | Should we reward ourselves just for effort?

01:05:37.840 | What should we reward?

01:05:38.780 | How much should we reward ourselves?

01:05:40.140 | When should we withdraw reward?

01:05:41.780 | Should we use punishment?

01:05:42.920 | These kinds of things.

01:05:43.760 | This is a vast literature.

01:05:45.340 | We don't have time to go into all the details,

01:05:47.760 | but the notion of reward prediction error is so powerful

01:05:51.880 | that it can predict most, if not all forms of learning,

01:05:54.860 | including habit formation.

01:05:56.580 | And you can deploy or use particular features

01:05:59.500 | of reward prediction error if you would like to reinforce

01:06:03.260 | or accelerate the formation of certain habits.

01:06:07.200 | So reward prediction error, quite simply,

01:06:10.880 | is if you expect a reward and the reward comes,

01:06:15.880 | a particular behavior that was associated

01:06:17.980 | with generating that reward is more likely to occur again.

01:06:21.480 | That's pretty straightforward.

01:06:23.360 | However, the amount of reward

01:06:26.660 | in the form of this molecule dopamine

01:06:29.100 | that you will experience is even greater

01:06:32.960 | if a reward arrives that's unexpected, okay?

01:06:37.340 | So let me repeat that again.

01:06:38.820 | If I think that something's coming that's going to be great,

01:06:43.540 | that I, let's say I lean into a habit,

01:06:46.220 | I managed to override my limbic friction

01:06:48.340 | and I'm doing my 45 minutes of writing in the morning

01:06:51.260 | with no phone and no internet,

01:06:52.740 | and I'm getting toward the end and I'm anticipating,

01:06:54.540 | oh, I'm actually doing this, this is great.

01:06:56.060 | I did it, I'm feeling really, really good.

01:06:58.460 | I finish, I definitely will receive a dopamine reward.

01:07:03.320 | I'll make my own dopamine reward.

01:07:04.600 | That's where it comes from.

01:07:05.440 | Remember, this is all internal.

01:07:07.500 | However, I will also receive dopamine reward

01:07:11.240 | if unexpectedly something positive happens.

01:07:14.640 | And typically if something unexpected but positive happens,

01:07:19.040 | the amount of dopamine reward that we get

01:07:21.120 | is actually much greater than in any other conditions.

01:07:24.340 | However, it's hard to surprise yourself

01:07:26.580 | about a behavior that you're deliberately engaging in.

01:07:29.140 | So that becomes a bit of a tricky one.

01:07:31.280 | Reward prediction error also says that if we expect a reward

01:07:36.460 | and the reward doesn't come,

01:07:39.780 | that the pattern of dopamine release

01:07:41.580 | will follow a particular contour.

01:07:43.980 | And that contour is very important.

01:07:45.540 | Here's how it goes.

01:07:47.180 | Let's say that I'm writing

01:07:50.140 | and I'm about 30 or 45 minutes in

01:07:52.700 | and I'm thinking, oh, this is great.

01:07:53.780 | I'm actually, I managed to do this.

01:07:55.320 | I'm succeeding in executing the behaviors that I need to

01:07:59.420 | in order to perform this habit.

01:08:01.740 | I'm overriding limbic friction.

01:08:03.420 | Just that series of thoughts will start to generate

01:08:07.080 | a dopamine release within my brain and body.

01:08:09.700 | However, if at the 50-minute mark,

01:08:12.680 | the phone rings and I pick up the phone

01:08:16.260 | or I break my own protocol,

01:08:18.680 | I break my own self-discipline

01:08:20.380 | and I go on and check social media

01:08:22.620 | or I do something that takes me out of that,

01:08:25.280 | what's going to happen is that my level of dopamine

01:08:28.640 | is actually going to drop below the baseline,

01:08:31.820 | meaning below the level of dopamine I had

01:08:34.040 | before I even started the habit execution, okay?

01:08:38.220 | So what this is, is this is a system

01:08:41.020 | that predicts whether or not rewards are going to come.

01:08:43.660 | When we think a reward is going to come,

01:08:46.560 | it starts to actually arrive earlier

01:08:48.660 | in the form of dopamine release.

01:08:50.020 | This is the feeling that we experience

01:08:52.660 | as in positive anticipation.

01:08:55.020 | You tell a kid, hey, we're going to go to the amusement park

01:08:57.540 | or we're going to go get ice cream.

01:08:59.020 | They haven't had the ice cream yet.

01:09:00.300 | They're not at the amusement park, but they're excited.

01:09:02.280 | The dopamine release comes earlier, okay?

01:09:04.840 | They get to the amusement park or they get the ice cream,

01:09:07.020 | they will also have some dopamine release

01:09:09.360 | associated with that.

01:09:10.820 | But most of it, believe it or not,

01:09:12.500 | came in the form of the anticipation.

01:09:14.420 | And dopamine has some qualities that make

01:09:16.460 | the actual ice cream and the actual amusement park experience

01:09:19.660 | more pleasureful than it would be

01:09:21.740 | had that dopamine release not happened.

01:09:24.020 | Now, of course, the other way to do it is to surprise a kid.

01:09:26.080 | You tell them, listen, we're going to the class

01:09:29.240 | that you absolutely hate,

01:09:30.280 | or we're going to go see the person

01:09:31.820 | that you absolutely despise,

01:09:33.140 | and then you drive them to the amusement park.

01:09:34.520 | That's the big release of dopamine.

01:09:37.080 | But reward prediction error also says

01:09:39.360 | that if you tell the kid or yourself,

01:09:41.740 | okay, we're headed to the amusement park,

01:09:43.100 | we're going to get some ice cream,

01:09:44.300 | they're really, really excited,

01:09:45.300 | and then you get there and it's closed

01:09:47.540 | or they're not letting any more people in,

01:09:49.340 | well, then the dopamine level drops way below what it was

01:09:52.380 | before you told them that you were headed there, okay?

01:09:54.500 | I've given a number of different examples

01:09:55.820 | that hopefully make this clear.

01:09:57.160 | Reward prediction error governs virtually all aspects

01:10:01.420 | of effort and all aspects of learning, why?

01:10:04.820 | Because when dopamine is released in the brain and body,

01:10:07.660 | the neural circuits of our brain and body change.

01:10:10.440 | There's a state change, our overlevel, excuse me,

01:10:14.140 | our overall level of energy,

01:10:16.420 | but also the sorts of sensory events

01:10:18.580 | that we're paying attention to changes

01:10:20.500 | when there's a lot of dopamine in our system.

01:10:23.420 | Now, you can leverage this for habit formation.

01:10:25.800 | Think back to task bracketing.

01:10:28.460 | Think back to limbic friction.

01:10:32.100 | If you are considering adopting a new habit

01:10:35.260 | or if you are trying to break a habit,

01:10:37.040 | something we haven't talked too much about,

01:10:38.460 | but we will in a moment,

01:10:39.660 | it's very useful to think not just about the procedural

01:10:44.380 | aspects of what you're going to do,

01:10:46.300 | but also think about the events that precede and follow

01:10:50.920 | that particular habit and the execution,

01:10:54.580 | or at least the effort to execute that habit.

01:10:57.740 | What you're doing is you're casting a kind of a spotlight

01:11:00.620 | around a bin of time or a set of events

01:11:03.840 | for which dopamine can be associated.

01:11:06.020 | What does this look like in the practical sense?

01:11:08.100 | Well, again, I'll just try and use

01:11:09.540 | very simple concrete examples,

01:11:11.060 | but this could carry over to anything.

01:11:12.720 | Let's say I were somebody who has a hard time

01:11:15.880 | getting in that 30 to 60 minutes

01:11:18.300 | of zone two cardiovascular exercise mid morning.

01:11:21.620 | This is actually an issue for me.

01:11:22.940 | I much prefer to do resistance exercise

01:11:24.800 | than cardiovascular exercise.

01:11:26.040 | Although once I do it,

01:11:26.880 | I always feel much better that I have done it.

01:11:29.660 | What I should do is positively anticipate the onset

01:11:36.860 | and the offset of that session, right?

01:11:39.860 | So thinking about leaning into the effort,

01:11:43.740 | going out and doing that zone two cardio session,

01:11:46.280 | and I should think about how I'm going to feel after.

01:11:48.360 | So not just thinking about how great I'm going to feel after,

01:11:50.800 | but also thinking about how hard it's going to be

01:11:54.400 | at the beginning, and then trying to reward myself

01:11:57.000 | subjectively for the entire experience.

01:11:59.060 | In other words, start rewarding task bracketing

01:12:01.820 | in addition to rewarding the execution of the habit itself.

01:12:06.540 | Now, some of you might be saying,

01:12:07.600 | well, wait, this is all self-talk.

01:12:09.220 | This is just positive self-talk,

01:12:10.700 | but it's not positive self-talk.

01:12:12.620 | It's not saying, you know,

01:12:14.340 | I feel so great about doing something that I actually hate.

01:12:16.620 | You can't lie to yourself,

01:12:17.580 | or you're welcome to lie to yourself,

01:12:19.060 | but the neuroscience literature,

01:12:20.600 | the literature of growth mindset,

01:12:22.100 | all the literature basically of mindset

01:12:24.060 | speaks to the fact that when you lie to yourself,

01:12:26.160 | you know you're lying,

01:12:27.240 | and you actually set up the opposite of a reward system.

01:12:30.380 | So you have to be brutally honest with yourself

01:12:33.020 | that for instance,

01:12:34.380 | I don't like initiating this cardiovascular exercise,

01:12:37.200 | but I do like the fact that I've done it after I've done it.

01:12:39.820 | So what you are doing

01:12:40.880 | is you are applying reward prediction error

01:12:43.620 | to the entire sequence of things

01:12:45.420 | that's involved in getting into the habit execution,

01:12:49.160 | getting through the habit execution,

01:12:51.040 | and getting out of the habit execution.

01:12:53.120 | How do you do this?

01:12:54.160 | Well, I take us back to our procedural

01:12:57.080 | memory visualization exercise that we talked about earlier.

01:13:00.320 | When I talked about it in that context,

01:13:02.060 | I talked about walking through mentally

01:13:04.880 | the series of steps that's required

01:13:06.920 | to perform a particular habit.

01:13:08.140 | So in the case of the zone two cardio thing,

01:13:10.140 | it would be, okay, I'm going to put on my shoes.

01:13:11.600 | Then I'm going to head out the door.

01:13:12.620 | Then I'm going to drive up the road.

01:13:13.860 | There's a particular canyon near here

01:13:15.200 | that if I'm going to run,

01:13:16.460 | I happen to like running,

01:13:17.700 | or I don't hate running enough that I tend to do it.

01:13:20.540 | Going through that, heading back, et cetera, et cetera.

01:13:23.300 | That's great,

01:13:24.380 | but even better would be to broaden the time bin

01:13:27.780 | and start to positively anticipate

01:13:30.020 | the period headed into the habit.

01:13:33.300 | So even before you put on your shoes,

01:13:35.040 | the fact that you are successfully placing the habit in,

01:13:39.140 | in this case, phase one of the day,

01:13:42.180 | and that afterwards I'm going to feel

01:13:44.860 | a particular set of positive benefits,

01:13:46.920 | elevated mood, et cetera.

01:13:48.380 | I like being hungry.

01:13:49.380 | And typically after exercise, I'm hungry.

01:13:50.980 | So I like being hungry 'cause I like eating.

01:13:52.700 | And so there's a whole set of things

01:13:54.280 | that link up with one another.

01:13:55.860 | So I'm not just thinking about habit execution

01:13:57.580 | as this isolated little set of events

01:13:59.660 | or this little time bin,

01:14:01.260 | but rather I'm drawing a larger envelope around it

01:14:04.160 | and starting to positively associate dopamine reward

01:14:06.660 | with that larger envelope.

01:14:08.660 | And for those of you that are thinking,

01:14:09.900 | well, this is just a psychological trick.

01:14:12.460 | This is sort of like lying to yourself.

01:14:14.460 | It's not, because you're not actually contradicting

01:14:17.620 | the fact that some of this is unpleasant.

01:14:19.780 | What you're doing is you're taking

01:14:21.020 | this entire series of events,

01:14:22.360 | what I'm calling this kind of time envelope,

01:14:23.980 | and you're associating it with a particular reward

01:14:26.580 | that comes later, which for me would be the feeling

01:14:28.940 | that I've completed this, right?

01:14:31.400 | 'Cause for me, that's usually a good feeling.

01:14:33.240 | So reward prediction error is beautiful,

01:14:35.600 | not just because it's a sort of math of anticipation

01:14:39.000 | and reward or a math of anticipation and disappointment.

01:14:42.400 | It's beautiful because you can stretch out

01:14:45.420 | or make more narrow the time bins

01:14:47.640 | in which reward prediction error works.

01:14:50.100 | Reward prediction error is the way

01:14:51.680 | in which people navigate four-year degrees, right?

01:14:54.600 | I mean, you go, sure, final exam to final exam, et cetera,

01:14:57.640 | but ultimately there's a big payoff at the end

01:14:59.520 | and it's all basically for that big payoff.

01:15:02.400 | And of course I understand that it's the journey,

01:15:04.120 | not the destination, but let's face it for a lot of us,

01:15:06.600 | goals and habits are about achieving

01:15:08.680 | some sort of destination.

01:15:10.260 | In the case of zone two cardio, for me,

01:15:11.840 | it's about trying to stay alive for as long as I can,

01:15:15.160 | as long as I can with vitality that is.

01:15:17.600 | And it's also the fact that if I'm doing that,

01:15:20.120 | I get to eat the foods that I like,

01:15:22.600 | I tend to be able to eat more,

01:15:23.920 | which I happen to really enjoy eating so much so

01:15:25.800 | that I'd like it just as an activity.

01:15:27.640 | So basically what you're trying to do

01:15:29.500 | is not restrict your thinking to just the habit

01:15:32.280 | that you're trying to form,

01:15:33.460 | but rather to grab a hold of the timing

01:15:36.160 | before and after that particular habit

01:15:38.840 | and start to positively associate reward mechanisms

01:15:41.540 | in your brain with that entire time bin.

01:15:44.040 | This is a very useful and very powerful tool

01:15:46.680 | in order to form habits.

01:15:48.340 | And I should say that it's not something

01:15:50.520 | that comes naturally to most people.

01:15:52.040 | In fact, even as I describe it,

01:15:53.520 | you might find it's still a little bit abstract,

01:15:55.540 | but what I encourage you to do

01:15:57.060 | if you are finding it to be a little bit vague

01:15:59.320 | would be to pick the habit that you want to form,

01:16:02.080 | write down or think about very concretely

01:16:04.560 | what is the sequence of steps involved

01:16:06.260 | in the execution of that habit,

01:16:08.200 | and then write down or think about

01:16:10.200 | what is the sequence of events

01:16:11.620 | that need to precede that habit,

01:16:13.500 | maybe the immediate 10 or 15 minutes before,

01:16:16.100 | as well as the immediate sequence of events

01:16:18.240 | and or feelings that will occur after that habit,

01:16:21.280 | and then call the whole thing a habit execution,

01:16:24.860 | the whole thing a effort to engage in that particular habit.

01:16:29.080 | And in doing that and in positively associating

01:16:32.060 | with the idea that you're going to complete

01:16:33.940 | that entire sequence,

01:16:35.440 | you will engage reward prediction error

01:16:37.520 | in the proper way that the dopamine surge

01:16:40.140 | can lend itself toward motivation,

01:16:41.900 | because ultimately dopamine is not about feeling good,

01:16:45.480 | it's about feeling motivated.

01:16:46.960 | This is something that I've talked about

01:16:48.400 | numerous times before,

01:16:49.400 | but dopamine, contrary to popular belief,

01:16:51.780 | is not a reward molecule as much as it is a molecule

01:16:55.200 | of motivation and drive.

01:16:57.340 | And the natural consequence of doing the exercise

01:17:00.420 | I just described of writing things out that precede,

01:17:03.540 | are involved in the immediate execution of the habit

01:17:05.660 | and follow the habit,

01:17:07.220 | will allow you to experience an increase in energy

01:17:11.080 | and thereby an increase in likelihood

01:17:13.460 | that you're going to engage

01:17:14.500 | in that entire sequence of events.

01:17:16.460 | And the reason for that is that dopamine gives us energy.

01:17:18.820 | And the reason for that is that the molecule epinephrine,

01:17:22.160 | adrenaline, is actually manufactured from dopamine.

01:17:24.860 | Biochemically, it comes from dopamine.

01:17:27.060 | So dopamine is powerful and you can access more dopamine

01:17:31.140 | around even habits that you haven't yet formed

01:17:34.460 | by taking this broader time envelope

01:17:36.420 | and task bracketing that specific task execution

01:17:39.660 | or habit execution.

01:17:41.300 | Way back at the beginning of the episode,

01:17:43.140 | I promised you that I would deliver two programs

01:17:46.100 | that are geared towards habit formation.

01:17:49.320 | And I promised that I would give you ways

01:17:51.340 | in which you could gauge whether or not certain habits

01:17:53.620 | had moved from high effort,

01:17:56.980 | what I call high limbic friction, to reflexive.

01:18:00.180 | We talked about a number of ways to gauge that.

01:18:02.940 | In researching this episode,

01:18:04.540 | I found a tremendous number of different systems

01:18:07.480 | for habit formation.

01:18:08.500 | It's really amazing how much is out there.

01:18:10.420 | There are ones that are 60 days to this,

01:18:12.220 | or 21 days to that, or 18 days to this.

01:18:14.580 | I mean, it's just rampant

01:18:16.320 | in the popular psychology literature

01:18:18.180 | and in the self-help literature.

01:18:19.780 | I want to spell out a particular system

01:18:23.420 | that I think could be very useful

01:18:25.100 | to most if not all people

01:18:27.520 | that's rooted in the biology of habit formation,

01:18:31.100 | rooted in the psychology of habit formation,

01:18:33.180 | and that is entirely compatible

01:18:34.860 | with that phase one, phase two, phase three type program

01:18:37.380 | that I talked about earlier,

01:18:38.980 | but encompasses a bit of a longer time scale

01:18:42.180 | and really arrives at a kind of a system, if you will,

01:18:46.540 | for how to build in habits

01:18:48.780 | and then to test whether or not those habits

01:18:51.060 | have really stuck

01:18:52.420 | and whether or not they're likely to stick going forward.

01:18:55.140 | And so this is at least for sake of this example,

01:18:58.440 | a 21-day system.

01:18:59.660 | I picked 21 days because that seems to be the average

01:19:02.700 | or most typical system for engaging neuroplasticity

01:19:06.900 | as it relates to the formation of new habits.

01:19:08.900 | This 21-day system actually is one

01:19:10.620 | that someone I know very well uses

01:19:12.340 | and has used for a long time.

01:19:13.960 | They actually use them, their kids use it as well,

01:19:16.180 | and it has a certain elegance to it.

01:19:18.220 | And I think as I describe it,

01:19:19.760 | that elegance will begin to reveal itself.

01:19:22.480 | So basically what this involves is you set out

01:19:26.160 | to perform six new habits per day

01:19:30.620 | across the course of 21 days.

01:19:32.760 | Why six and why 21?

01:19:34.640 | Well, we'll talk about that in a moment,

01:19:36.100 | but the idea is you write down six things

01:19:38.080 | that you would like to do every day for 21 days.

01:19:41.180 | What phase of the day those things fall into?

01:19:44.280 | Well, that will depend on what they are

01:19:45.800 | and how they relate to those earlier phase one,

01:19:47.800 | phase two, phase three.

01:19:48.840 | But for now, 21 days, six things per day.

01:19:51.720 | However, the expectation is that you'll only complete

01:19:55.640 | four to five of those each day, okay?

01:19:58.520 | So built into this is a kind of permission to fail,

01:20:01.560 | but it's not failure because it turns out

01:20:04.680 | that this approach to forming habits

01:20:07.760 | is based not so much on the specific habits

01:20:10.760 | that you're trying to form,

01:20:12.240 | but the habit of performing habits, right?

01:20:15.240 | It's the habit of doing a certain number of things

01:20:18.800 | per day.

01:20:20.140 | So you set out to perform six.

01:20:21.740 | Now, another reason for not necessarily performing all six

01:20:24.700 | is that some activities probably shouldn't be

01:20:27.560 | performed each day.

01:20:28.440 | For instance, in my case, if I were to weight train

01:20:31.640 | or even run every day, I'm of the sort,

01:20:34.120 | or my biology is of the sort that I don't recover so well.

01:20:37.540 | So I wouldn't want to do resistance training every day,

01:20:40.160 | but I might want to do it four days a week, for instance.

01:20:42.840 | So by having six things in that list,

01:20:44.560 | I could shuffle out that particular activity

01:20:47.280 | on particular days of the week.

01:20:48.560 | And simply do four or five other activities.

01:20:51.280 | So 21 days, you list out four to five things.

01:20:53.260 | So it might be zone two cardio resistance training,

01:20:55.640 | sunlight viewing, writing, it could be journaling.

01:21:00.160 | It could be learning a language, mathematics.

01:21:02.560 | Again, this is going to vary depending

01:21:03.960 | on your particular goals and the habits

01:21:05.780 | that you're trying to create.

01:21:07.420 | But no more than six.

01:21:09.020 | And the expectation is that you're not going to perform

01:21:11.120 | more than four to five.

01:21:12.260 | If you miss a day, meaning you don't perform

01:21:16.020 | four to five things, there is no punishment.

01:21:19.560 | And in fact, it's important that you don't actually try

01:21:23.180 | and do what in the literature is called

01:21:24.760 | a habit slip compensation,

01:21:26.460 | which is just fancy psychological language

01:21:29.080 | for if you screw up and you don't get all four or five

01:21:33.340 | in one day, you don't do eight the next day

01:21:35.900 | in order to compensate.

01:21:37.720 | This actually brings me back to an example

01:21:39.700 | I had from graduate school.

01:21:40.900 | I remember when I started graduate school,

01:21:42.380 | feeling very excited, but a little bit overwhelmed

01:21:45.460 | by the amount of things that I had to do

01:21:47.240 | because I had to both do research.

01:21:48.400 | I was doing coursework at the time,

01:21:50.520 | graduate student stipends, and still now, unfortunately,

01:21:52.940 | were depressingly low.

01:21:55.300 | So it was financially stressful.

01:21:56.600 | There were a number of things happening.

01:21:58.000 | And I remember a neurologist, this was at UC Berkeley,

01:22:01.640 | it's really fantastic scientist and person.

01:22:03.560 | His name is Bob Knight.

01:22:04.400 | Some of you may know him.

01:22:05.840 | I remember I went to him and I asked him,

01:22:07.640 | what is the process by which someone actually navigates

01:22:10.320 | graduate school successfully?

01:22:11.620 | And he said, listen, you don't want to do anything

01:22:16.000 | or engage in a routine in any way

01:22:18.640 | that you can't keep up consistently for at least five

01:22:21.200 | and ideally six days per week.

01:22:23.120 | I thought, oh, that's pretty good.

01:22:24.240 | And he said, every four or five years,

01:22:26.000 | you might have to update that,

01:22:27.040 | but you need to decide what you can do consistently,

01:22:29.200 | what you can do every day or at least six days a week

01:22:31.980 | or five days a week.

01:22:33.040 | And that was very, very useful to me.

01:22:35.080 | And it fits well with this notion of habit slips,

01:22:37.880 | that if you happen to screw up

01:22:40.000 | and not be able to engage in whatever habits

01:22:42.360 | you're trying to learn for whatever reason,

01:22:44.800 | that the next day you just get right back on the horse,

01:22:47.960 | so to speak.

01:22:49.240 | However, there's a really interesting feature

01:22:51.760 | from the neuroscience literature

01:22:53.620 | and from the psychology literature that says that

01:22:55.940 | chunking this 21 days into two day bins

01:22:58.940 | can be very, very useful.

01:23:00.880 | While it is true that the unit of the day that our cells use

01:23:04.600 | is a circadian one, a 24 hour clock,

01:23:07.540 | there does seem to be something powerful

01:23:09.180 | about engaging in particular habits

01:23:11.080 | in a particular sequence for two days in a row

01:23:15.180 | and then resetting.

01:23:16.160 | So thinking, okay, I can do this for a day.

01:23:18.760 | And if I can do it for a day,

01:23:19.680 | I can probably do it for two days and then resetting.

01:23:21.740 | So every two days you're resetting.

01:23:23.720 | So you're kind of chunking this 21 days

01:23:26.200 | into a series of two day bins

01:23:27.980 | in which you are trying to perform four to five new habits

01:23:31.280 | and then completing that 21 days.

01:23:33.820 | Now, everything I've described about this 21 day program

01:23:36.120 | with six things that you're trying to do as new habits

01:23:38.680 | and only performing four to five

01:23:40.320 | and not compensating, et cetera.

01:23:42.120 | There's nothing neuroscientifically unique about it,

01:23:45.660 | except for the fact that it's not just 21 days

01:23:50.140 | broken up into two day chunks.

01:23:52.380 | After 21 days, you stop engaging in this 21 day

01:23:57.380 | deliberate four to five things per day type schedule.

01:24:01.440 | And you simply go into autopilot.

01:24:04.080 | You ask yourself how many of those particular habits

01:24:07.560 | that I was deliberately trying to learn

01:24:10.000 | in the previous 21 days

01:24:12.040 | are automatically incorporated into my schedule.

01:24:14.420 | How many of them am I naturally doing?

01:24:16.680 | In other words, every 21 days,

01:24:18.480 | you don't update and start adding new habits.

01:24:21.080 | You simply try and maintain the ones

01:24:22.880 | that you built in that first 21 days.

01:24:25.000 | And this I think is extremely important

01:24:27.180 | because in all of the habit literature that I could find,

01:24:30.720 | sure, there was a lot of psychological data,

01:24:33.280 | neuroscience data, behavioral science data around,

01:24:36.280 | here's how you form a habit.

01:24:37.420 | Here's how you break a habit.

01:24:38.920 | There was even some kind of tests

01:24:41.180 | for whether or not a habit

01:24:42.220 | had really achieved context independence,

01:24:45.080 | whether or not it was a strongly formed habit.

01:24:47.840 | But there wasn't a lot of information,

01:24:49.760 | at least by my search,

01:24:51.700 | of what to do once you've formed a habit

01:24:54.000 | and how to evaluate whether or not that habit

01:24:56.680 | is likely to persist long into the future.

01:24:59.900 | So here's the idea.

01:25:01.600 | You set out these six things that you would like to learn

01:25:05.680 | or that you would like to acquire in your life,

01:25:07.680 | these habits.

01:25:08.780 | You only expect that you're going to perform

01:25:10.540 | four or five each day.

01:25:11.700 | You do that for 21 days.

01:25:13.340 | Again, if you miss a day,

01:25:14.480 | you just hop right back on the next day.

01:25:16.000 | However, you should think about the functional units

01:25:18.980 | within this 21 day period as two days.

01:25:22.240 | You're going to try and nail four to five of these things

01:25:24.760 | for two days.

01:25:25.600 | If you happen to get all six, great,

01:25:26.940 | but that's not necessarily required.

01:25:29.120 | So you can do two days, then reset two days,

01:25:31.060 | then reset two days.

01:25:32.000 | And then in the next 21 days,

01:25:33.780 | you're not trying to acquire any new habits.

01:25:35.780 | You're not going to throw in six more habits

01:25:38.000 | that you want to learn.

01:25:38.960 | You're simply going to assess how well,

01:25:41.200 | how deeply you've rewired your nervous system

01:25:43.820 | to be able to perform those six habits

01:25:46.680 | of the previous 21 days.

01:25:48.660 | And this is extremely useful, I believe,

01:25:50.720 | because it will allow you to assess whether or not

01:25:54.060 | you can indeed make room, if you even have room,

01:25:56.740 | I should say, for more habits, right?

01:25:59.940 | Many people are trying to cram so many new behaviors

01:26:02.340 | into their nervous system that they don't stand a chance

01:26:04.720 | of learning all those behaviors.

01:26:06.140 | What you may find is that you kept up two of those things

01:26:09.280 | very consistently throughout the 21 days.

01:26:11.300 | And perhaps there was one of them that you did sporadically

01:26:14.020 | and that there were three others that, frankly,

01:26:17.300 | you didn't manage to execute.

01:26:19.280 | You may also be one of these people, one of these mutants,

01:26:22.240 | that sets out to do six new things per day for 21 days

01:26:25.100 | and performs every single one of them.

01:26:26.880 | Terrific, more power to you.

01:26:28.380 | In that case, for the following 21 days,

01:26:31.420 | let's see whether or not you can continue to perform

01:26:33.420 | those very same six things every day for 21 days.

01:26:36.680 | And then, and only then,

01:26:38.980 | would you want to add more habits in.

01:26:41.160 | So you could repeat this 21 day process,

01:26:43.540 | 21 days of new habit, 21 days of testing those new habits

01:26:46.860 | as whether or not they're reflexive or not.

01:26:48.260 | You could do that forever if you wanted.

01:26:51.340 | But the idea is that this isn't something

01:26:52.880 | that you're doing all year long.

01:26:54.620 | It's that you perhaps starting the new year

01:26:56.820 | or regardless of when you're listening to this,

01:26:58.740 | you set out to make that 21 day,

01:27:00.500 | really the stimulus period in which the habits get wired in.

01:27:04.260 | And then the following month,

01:27:05.460 | and maybe even the following months or periods of 21 days,

01:27:09.340 | are really that kind of thermometer or the test bed

01:27:12.100 | of how well you've embedded those particular habits.

01:27:15.540 | And if indeed you want to continue to add new habits

01:27:18.560 | or you find that certain habits that you weren't able

01:27:20.500 | to embed in your nervous system and make reflexive,

01:27:22.780 | you want to then bring those in, fantastic.

01:27:25.100 | But it's only once you've achieved all those six habits

01:27:27.620 | as reflexive that you would move forward.

01:27:29.420 | And I think this sort of system,

01:27:31.780 | while it could have been replaced

01:27:33.720 | with many other different systems,

01:27:35.700 | again, there's nothing holy about the system,

01:27:37.880 | but this particular system has a number of features,

01:27:40.740 | the lack of compensation for missed days,

01:27:43.340 | the fact that it's a fairly high intensity program

01:27:46.060 | for 21 days, but then you test yourself

01:27:48.500 | a kind of a competition test with yourself, if you will.

01:27:51.940 | Those features and the fact that habits slips,

01:27:55.100 | missing of particular habits and not doing all six

01:27:57.740 | is kind of built into the system,

01:27:59.000 | I think makes it a very reasonable one.

01:28:01.220 | It's very adaptable to the real world.

01:28:03.980 | And I think it's one that provided you obey the phase one,

01:28:08.420 | phase two, phase three type system

01:28:10.060 | that we talked about earlier,

01:28:10.980 | you collapse these two programs with one another,

01:28:13.440 | which hopefully will be easy

01:28:14.640 | based on the descriptions I've given.

01:28:16.420 | Well, if you do that,

01:28:17.260 | and I think there's a very high probability

01:28:19.720 | that the habits that you try and form

01:28:21.140 | will achieve this context dependence

01:28:22.740 | and that it will take progressively

01:28:24.140 | less and less limbic friction to perform them.

01:28:26.460 | Thus far, we've almost exclusively been discussing

01:28:28.920 | how to form habits, but what about breaking habits?

01:28:32.360 | Certainly many people out there would like to break habits

01:28:35.440 | that they feel don't serve them well.

01:28:38.100 | One of the challenges in breaking habits

01:28:39.840 | is that many habits occur very, very quickly.

01:28:43.160 | And so there isn't an opportunity to intervene

01:28:45.760 | until the habit has already been initiated

01:28:48.120 | and in some cases completed.

01:28:50.480 | Well, there are a couple of tools

01:28:52.240 | that neuroscience and psychology

01:28:54.520 | tell us can be very beneficial.

01:28:56.580 | Some of those things are somewhat intuitive

01:28:59.380 | and relate to what I call foundational practices,

01:29:02.220 | meaning things that set the overall tone

01:29:04.540 | in your body and brain,

01:29:06.020 | such that you would be less likely

01:29:08.100 | to engage in a particular habit,

01:29:10.200 | or that would raise your level of awareness,

01:29:13.100 | both of your situation and to how you feel inside.

01:29:16.540 | So things like stress reduction,

01:29:18.380 | things like getting good sleep,

01:29:19.700 | things like quality nutrition,

01:29:21.180 | things like having positive routines

01:29:23.300 | arranged throughout your day.

01:29:24.760 | All of those, of course, will support you

01:29:27.380 | in trying to break particular habits.

01:29:29.720 | And while that can be very useful,

01:29:31.320 | it's admittedly very generic advice.

01:29:34.120 | It doesn't point to any one specific protocol.

01:29:36.740 | In order to identify a specific protocol

01:29:39.760 | that one could apply in order to break habits,

01:29:42.220 | we have to look at the mirror image

01:29:44.620 | of the sort of neuroplasticity that we talked about

01:29:47.060 | at the beginning of the episode.

01:29:49.000 | At the beginning of the episode,

01:29:50.000 | we talked about a form of neuroplasticity

01:29:51.700 | called long-term potentiation involving the NMDA receptor.

01:29:56.140 | Just to refresh your memory a little bit,

01:29:57.780 | it basically says that if a set of neurons

01:30:00.540 | is very electrically active,

01:30:01.960 | it's likely that over time,

01:30:03.520 | those neurons will communicate with themselves more easily

01:30:06.820 | because of changes in things like NMDA receptor activity,

01:30:10.300 | the recruitment of additional receptors, et cetera.

01:30:12.700 | It's essentially a cellular and molecular explanation

01:30:15.360 | for how something goes from unlearned to learned

01:30:19.660 | to reflexive.

01:30:20.940 | Now, in order to break synapses

01:30:23.560 | or to break apart neural connections

01:30:25.620 | that are serving a habit that you don't want to engage in,

01:30:28.860 | we need to engage the process called long-term depression.

01:30:32.520 | And long-term depression has nothing to do

01:30:35.260 | with a state of mental depression or a reduction in mood.

01:30:39.900 | So I really want to be clear

01:30:41.380 | that when I say depression in this context,

01:30:43.860 | it has nothing to do with psychological depression.

01:30:46.220 | It has nothing to do with mood.

01:30:47.900 | It's simply called long-term depression

01:30:50.180 | because just as long-term potentiation says,

01:30:52.940 | if neuron A triggers the firing of neuron B,

01:30:55.840 | and it does so very robustly over and over and over again,

01:30:59.020 | then neuron A will not have to fire

01:31:01.780 | as intensely or as frequently

01:31:03.780 | in order to activate neuron B in the future

01:31:06.740 | because they become potentiated, right?

01:31:08.740 | The threshold for coactivation has been reduced.

01:31:11.700 | There's a much higher probability

01:31:12.980 | that they will be activated together

01:31:14.660 | at low levels of intensity.

01:31:16.980 | That's essentially what long-term potentiation is.

01:31:19.520 | Long-term depression says that if neuron A is active

01:31:23.260 | and neuron B is not active within a particular time window,

01:31:28.200 | then the connection between neuron A and B

01:31:30.580 | will weaken over time,

01:31:32.000 | even if they started off very strongly connected, okay?

01:31:35.700 | So I'm going to repeat that

01:31:36.700 | because this is a pretty detailed neurobiological mechanism

01:31:41.180 | whereby if neuron A is active and neuron B is active,

01:31:45.100 | but at a different time or outside of particular,

01:31:48.200 | what we call temporal window,

01:31:49.500 | meaning outside a particular time window,

01:31:52.020 | then through long-term depression,

01:31:54.340 | the connection between neuron A and neuron B will weaken.

01:31:58.220 | And just as a point of interest,

01:32:01.020 | the NMDA receptor is also involved in long-term depression,

01:32:04.340 | although there are other molecular components

01:32:06.540 | involved as well.

01:32:07.660 | So how do you take two neurons

01:32:09.980 | that underlie a habit out of synchrony?

01:32:12.240 | How do you get them to fire asynchronously?

01:32:14.700 | This is pretty interesting

01:32:16.200 | with respect to the cellular molecular biology,

01:32:18.080 | but at the behavioral level, it's especially interesting.

01:32:20.940 | The way that one would do this is let's say, for instance,

01:32:24.300 | you have a habit of picking up your phone mid-work session.

01:32:29.300 | Okay, that's a reflexive habit

01:32:31.540 | I think that most people have experienced.

01:32:34.520 | And we often hear the idea that, oh, you know,

01:32:37.220 | the phone is so filled with access to dopamine

01:32:39.980 | and incredible things that we're just drawn to it.

01:32:42.580 | But if you notice what's happened with phone use over time,

01:32:46.300 | most people, including myself sometimes, I admit,

01:32:48.980 | find ourselves just looking at our phone

01:32:50.800 | or find ourselves in a particular app

01:32:52.680 | without actually having engaged in the conscious set

01:32:55.020 | of steps of, oh, I'm really curious

01:32:56.620 | what's going on in this particular app.

01:32:58.240 | I'm really curious what's going on

01:33:00.000 | in this particular website.

01:33:01.160 | And you just kind of find yourself, in air quotes,

01:33:03.900 | for those of you listening, I'm making air quotes,

01:33:06.540 | you just sort of find yourself doing it

01:33:08.140 | because the behavior of picking up your phone

01:33:09.860 | is sort of reflexive or has become fully reflexive.

01:33:13.120 | You see this a lot at meals where multiple people are there

01:33:16.460 | and no one's looking at their phone.

01:33:17.860 | And then all of a sudden someone takes out their phone

01:33:19.400 | and you'll notice that other people

01:33:20.540 | just naturally take out their phone.

01:33:22.060 | It's this kind of observed, observation-induced reflex.

01:33:26.360 | And I would wager that most people aren't consciously aware

01:33:30.500 | of the immediate steps involved.

01:33:33.560 | So the literature says there are a number of ways

01:33:36.020 | to break these sorts of habitual behaviors

01:33:39.000 | or reflexive behaviors.

01:33:40.980 | Most of those approaches involve establishing

01:33:44.260 | some sort of reward for not performing the activity

01:33:48.040 | or some sort of punishment for forming the activity.

01:33:50.920 | I've heard of some basic things that people will do,

01:33:53.080 | like they'll even put like a rubber band on their wrist

01:33:54.980 | and every time they complain

01:33:56.420 | or every time they do some behavior,

01:33:58.880 | like pick up their phone,

01:33:59.920 | they'll give themselves a snap on the wrist.

01:34:01.840 | The rationale there is that you're trying to create

01:34:04.280 | a somatic, a very physical representation of something

01:34:08.480 | that makes it very real and harder to overlook.

01:34:11.180 | Other people will just do a tick mark on a piece of paper,

01:34:13.460 | the sort of what gets measured

01:34:15.620 | is what gets managed kind of mindset,

01:34:18.180 | where if every time you do something,

01:34:20.160 | you take away the judgment,

01:34:21.700 | this is very new agey, I realize,

01:34:23.280 | but this is what you find out there

01:34:24.980 | if you search the literature,

01:34:27.040 | even on PubMed, peer-reviewed articles,

01:34:29.840 | that every time you engage in a behavior,

01:34:31.740 | you just measure the fact that you did that behavior.

01:34:34.920 | You just mark it down at the end of the day.

01:34:36.720 | People are supposed to look at that and say,

01:34:37.840 | "Oh my goodness, I can't believe that I spent,

01:34:40.380 | you know, three hours doing something

01:34:42.600 | or I did it 46 times."

01:34:44.360 | And in fact, a lot of apps, social media apps,

01:34:46.640 | will start to give you warnings now if you opt in

01:34:49.420 | that you've been on the app for an hour,

01:34:51.840 | would you like to leave?

01:34:52.680 | Most people just click right past it and go back in.

01:34:54.600 | I think very few people say,

01:34:56.800 | "Oh my goodness, it's been an hour,"

01:34:58.220 | and therefore you're right,

01:34:59.360 | I absolutely shouldn't engage in this anymore.

01:35:01.520 | It's just far too easy to just blow past those reminders.

01:35:04.740 | Well, the literature on habit formation

01:35:08.560 | and habit reduction, breaking habits, has been analyzed.

01:35:12.580 | There's a beautiful meta-analysis,

01:35:15.320 | which involves looking at a number of different studies

01:35:17.500 | all together, comparing the statistical strength

01:35:21.220 | of each of those studies, looking in different conditions,

01:35:23.220 | what sorts of habits we're trying to be made or broken.

01:35:26.760 | The first author on this review is Fritz, F-R-I-T-Z.

01:35:31.060 | I'll certainly put a link to this.

01:35:33.280 | It's Heather Fritz and it's "Intervention to Modify Habits,"

01:35:36.560 | a scoping review, and it is indeed a very broad scale review.

01:35:39.100 | It's from the Journal of Occupation,

01:35:40.340 | Participation, and Health.

01:35:41.480 | It's published in 2020.

01:35:42.760 | It's a really nice article.

01:35:44.400 | A couple of things I learned from this article,

01:35:46.020 | and then I'll get into the specific tool

01:35:47.460 | for breaking habits.

01:35:48.720 | Perhaps the most interesting thing

01:35:50.060 | that I took from this review was the finding

01:35:52.580 | that notifications to either engage in habits

01:35:57.160 | or to not engage in habits

01:35:58.800 | actually were not very effective over time.

01:36:01.600 | They were effective in the immediate period

01:36:03.960 | when people started using these notifications,

01:36:05.960 | as were little sticky notes,

01:36:07.440 | like don't go into the refrigerator

01:36:09.180 | between the hours of whatever and whatever,

01:36:11.300 | or just visual reminders,

01:36:13.940 | physical reminders or electronic reminders

01:36:16.780 | were effective in the immediate term,

01:36:18.340 | but in the longterm did not predict

01:36:20.020 | whether or not people would effectively stick to habits

01:36:22.880 | they were trying to stick to

01:36:23.820 | or break habits that they were trying to break.

01:36:25.940 | So sadly, that doesn't seem to work very well,

01:36:28.960 | and perhaps they just need to come up with

01:36:32.120 | more robust reminders on a mild electric shock

01:36:34.540 | or something like that,

01:36:35.380 | because what we do know,

01:36:37.160 | only sort of kidding about mild electric shock,

01:36:39.620 | but what we do know from both human and animal studies

01:36:42.240 | is that things like electric shock,

01:36:44.800 | things like monetary penalties, right?

01:36:47.600 | Having to pay out every time you engage

01:36:49.320 | in a particular behavior,

01:36:50.480 | those are pretty effective ways to break habits.

01:36:53.260 | The problem is when people are not being monitored

01:36:56.360 | for habit use, for instance,

01:36:59.480 | you can imagine a situation where you say,

01:37:01.300 | I'm not going to pick up my phone

01:37:02.560 | for the four hours in the early part of the day

01:37:04.920 | so that I can get real dedicated focus work done.

01:37:07.740 | Unless someone's monitoring them,

01:37:10.000 | then people don't tend to monitor themselves

01:37:13.760 | completely enough that they punish themselves

01:37:15.560 | completely enough that they break the behavior.

01:37:17.080 | In other words, the punishment isn't bad enough

01:37:19.480 | in order to break the habit,

01:37:20.520 | which just speaks to how powerful these habits are

01:37:23.760 | once they become reflexive.

01:37:24.920 | They're just very, very hard to override.

01:37:26.980 | So it turns out that the key

01:37:28.640 | to generating long-term depression in these pathways

01:37:32.460 | is actually to take the period immediately following

01:37:37.460 | the bad habit execution,

01:37:39.620 | meaning let's say you tell yourself,

01:37:40.840 | you're not going to pick up your phone,

01:37:41.880 | you're not going to bite your nails,

01:37:42.840 | you're not going to reflexively walk to the refrigerator

01:37:45.000 | at a particular time of day,

01:37:46.260 | but you find yourself doing it anyway.

01:37:48.440 | And what actually has to happen

01:37:50.480 | is bringing conscious awareness

01:37:52.720 | to the period immediately afterward,

01:37:54.360 | which I think most people recognize.

01:37:55.820 | They realize, oh, I just did it again.

01:37:57.540 | I just did it again.

01:37:58.480 | And in that moment, capture the sequence of events,

01:38:02.000 | not that led to the bad habit execution,

01:38:05.680 | but actually to take advantage of the fact

01:38:08.260 | that the neurons that were responsible

01:38:09.920 | for generating that bad habit were active a moment ago,

01:38:14.280 | and to actually engage in a replacement behavior

01:38:17.680 | immediately afterward.

01:38:19.400 | Now, this is really interesting and I think powerful

01:38:21.500 | because I would have thought

01:38:22.720 | that you have to engage in a replacement behavior

01:38:25.880 | that truly replaces the bad habit behavior, right?

01:38:29.600 | That you would have to be able to identify

01:38:32.020 | your state of mind or the sequence of events

01:38:34.040 | leading into the bad habit,

01:38:35.760 | but rather the stage or the period

01:38:38.280 | immediately after the bad habit execution

01:38:40.320 | is a unique opportunity to insert a different type

01:38:43.760 | of what we would call adaptive behavior,

01:38:45.720 | but that could be any behavior

01:38:46.920 | that's not in line with the bad behavior.

01:38:50.600 | So let's give it an example.

01:38:51.800 | Let's say you find yourself,

01:38:53.560 | you're trying to do focused work, you pick up your phone,

01:38:56.180 | you're disappointing yourself for picking up your phone.

01:38:59.560 | You could of course just put it down

01:39:01.760 | and re-engage in the work behavior.

01:39:04.220 | But if you were good at that,

01:39:05.440 | then you probably wouldn't have done it in the first place.

01:39:07.560 | And so what turns out to be very effective

01:39:09.920 | is to go engage in some other positive habit.

01:39:12.920 | Now, this has two major effects.

01:39:14.960 | The first one is you start to link in time

01:39:17.640 | the execution of a bad behavior

01:39:19.500 | to this other good behavior.

01:39:21.960 | And in doing so, you start to recruit other neural circuits,

01:39:26.400 | other neurons that can start to somewhat dismantle

01:39:30.500 | the sequence of firing associated with the bad behavior.

01:39:33.580 | In other words, you start to create

01:39:35.520 | a kind of a double habit that starts with a bad habit

01:39:38.440 | and then ends with a good habit.

01:39:40.320 | And that seems to create enough of a temporal mismatch

01:39:44.260 | so that then recognizing

01:39:46.000 | when you're heading toward the bad habit

01:39:47.880 | becomes more apparent to you.

01:39:50.120 | So again, I want to make this very, very concrete.

01:39:52.180 | Let's say that the behavior

01:39:53.700 | is reflexively picking up one's phone.

01:39:55.940 | You do that, you think, "Oh goodness, I did it again."

01:39:58.540 | Here's what I'm going to do.

01:39:59.620 | You would set that down

01:40:00.780 | and then you would engage in some other positive behavior

01:40:04.080 | that you've deemed positive.

01:40:05.240 | And here it's very subjective.

01:40:06.500 | So it's hard for me to give an example

01:40:07.860 | that will necessarily make sense to everybody.

01:40:10.500 | But perhaps you're working on hydration.

01:40:12.680 | So maybe you go have a glass of water.

01:40:14.320 | Maybe you are trying to do breath work or something.

01:40:18.900 | Maybe you are trying

01:40:20.320 | to enhance your language speaking skills.

01:40:23.100 | And so you go and you spend five minutes

01:40:24.880 | doing a particular type of language learning.

01:40:28.040 | You literally exit whatever you are doing

01:40:30.240 | and perform that other new positive habit

01:40:32.940 | in the immediate period right after that,

01:40:34.720 | even for a short period of time.

01:40:36.500 | It's a little bit counterintuitive,

01:40:38.160 | but what this does is it creates a kind of a cognitive

01:40:40.900 | and a temporal mismatch between the initial bad behavior,

01:40:45.020 | which before is what we would call sort of a closed loop.

01:40:47.980 | And the engineers out there will know what I'm talking about.

01:40:50.540 | But in closed loop, it's one behavior,

01:40:53.620 | one set of neural firings leads to another,

01:40:55.420 | leads to another,

01:40:56.260 | and then just kind of sets the same thing in motion.

01:40:58.100 | It can be kind of a self-perpetuating system.

01:41:00.700 | By changing the number of features that are in that loop,

01:41:03.740 | it disrupts the closed nature of that loop.

01:41:06.680 | It creates what we call an open loop.

01:41:08.500 | And in an open loop, you are better able to intervene.

01:41:11.540 | So as I mentioned before, this might seem counterintuitive.

01:41:14.420 | You might think, why would I want to reward the execution

01:41:17.140 | of a bad habit with a good habit?

01:41:19.860 | I don't want to reward myself for the bad habit,

01:41:22.100 | but really what you're trying to do

01:41:23.380 | is you're trying to change the nature of the neural circuits

01:41:26.580 | that are firing so that you can rewrite the script

01:41:29.380 | for that bad habit.

01:41:31.200 | A different way to put it would be,

01:41:34.500 | imagine that the bad habit is like a chord on the piano

01:41:38.660 | that you play, or a chord of notes,

01:41:40.240 | or a sequence of notes that you would play.

01:41:42.500 | And it comes very easily.

01:41:44.120 | You can play it every single time.

01:41:45.820 | But let's say as you're trying to learn a new piece of music,

01:41:47.880 | you're just constantly inserting that

01:41:49.300 | at the inappropriate times.

01:41:50.380 | That was a, you know,

01:41:51.340 | I think it's a decent enough analogy for a bad habit

01:41:53.760 | because it involves some motor execution.

01:41:55.620 | You just find yourself doing it.

01:41:57.260 | Rather than trying to prevent yourself from doing it,

01:41:59.740 | the next time you do it,

01:42:01.240 | add in a new quarter sequence that you're trying to learn.

01:42:05.680 | What this does then is it changes the whole nature

01:42:08.280 | of the sequence of neurons that are firing

01:42:10.440 | from bad habit through to the end

01:42:12.720 | of this newly applied good habit.

01:42:15.440 | So this is the way in which you start to dismantle,

01:42:19.360 | or when I say dismantle, really weaken the likelihood

01:42:22.700 | that if neuron A fires, neuron B will fire.

01:42:25.120 | Because as you're starting off in the mode

01:42:28.100 | of very reflexively performing a bad habit,

01:42:30.760 | those neurons are firing together

01:42:32.620 | without you consciously being aware of it.

01:42:34.660 | It's almost impossible for you to intervene in yourself

01:42:38.820 | without a number of other features like severe punishment,

01:42:42.380 | severe consequence type outcomes.

01:42:45.260 | Rather tacking on some additional sequences,

01:42:48.000 | like if neuron A fires, neuron B fires,

01:42:50.560 | and then you're saying, okay, well, if neuron B fires,

01:42:53.220 | I'm going to start inserting neuron CDEF to fire, right?

01:42:57.580 | That's the CDEF being the positive behavior

01:43:00.860 | that you're going to insert.

01:43:02.020 | And in doing so, you create a chain of neuronal activation

01:43:05.400 | that then is very easy to dismantle.

01:43:07.820 | And so when people have applied this kind of approach,

01:43:11.460 | it removes the need to have constant conscious awareness

01:43:15.380 | of one's own behavior prior to that behavior,

01:43:18.420 | which is very, very difficult to achieve.

01:43:20.920 | Rather, what they find is that they are able to engage

01:43:24.420 | in remapping of the neural circuits associated

01:43:26.900 | with bad habits in ways

01:43:28.180 | that are very, very straightforward, right?

01:43:30.820 | Because you can always identify

01:43:32.540 | when you've done the thing you don't want to do,

01:43:34.180 | and then tack onto that something additional

01:43:36.620 | that's positive.

01:43:37.680 | Now, the nature of that positive thing is important.

01:43:40.680 | You don't want it to be something

01:43:41.740 | that's very hard to execute.

01:43:42.980 | You want it to be something that's positive

01:43:44.580 | and fairly easy to execute

01:43:46.360 | so that you're not struggling all the time

01:43:48.060 | to insert this on top of this bad behavior,

01:43:51.340 | whatever that bad behavior might happen to be.

01:43:53.500 | But again, this is rooted in the biology

01:43:55.520 | of long-term depression.

01:43:56.800 | It maps very well to the behavioral change literature

01:43:59.620 | that I was able to glean that really shows

01:44:01.380 | that rather than just get reminders,

01:44:03.220 | rather than trying to instill punishment,

01:44:04.880 | rather than setting up reward for breaking bad habits,

01:44:07.740 | that perhaps the simplest way to approach this

01:44:10.120 | is to tack on additional behaviors to the bad habits,

01:44:13.600 | make sure those behaviors are good behaviors

01:44:15.980 | or behaviors that are adaptive for you.

01:44:18.220 | And in doing so, you will soon find

01:44:20.620 | that the initiation of the bad habit

01:44:22.460 | takes on a whole new form

01:44:23.620 | or that you're not even inspired to do it at all.

01:44:26.220 | And of course, I want to acknowledge

01:44:27.620 | that breaking bad habits is really hard.

01:44:30.440 | We had an episode all about addiction

01:44:32.940 | with Dr. Anna Lemke from Stanford Medical School.

01:44:36.080 | She's a colleague of mine

01:44:37.420 | who runs the dual diagnosis addiction clinic at Stanford.

01:44:41.180 | And in that episode, we talked a lot about how addicts

01:44:44.120 | for drugs, alcohol, people who have addictions

01:44:47.400 | to certain types of behaviors or avoidance behaviors even,

01:44:50.500 | that in the case of addiction,

01:44:51.780 | there has to be a tremendous kind of full-scale campaign

01:44:55.420 | for them to be able to intervene in their behavior.

01:44:57.500 | So for those of you that are thinking

01:44:58.580 | about bad habit breaking

01:44:59.660 | in the context of addictive type behaviors,

01:45:03.300 | definitely check out that episode.

01:45:05.140 | Addiction does employ some of these principles

01:45:07.620 | around habit making and habit breaking, as it were.

01:45:11.980 | But of course, because the consequences of certain habits

01:45:15.940 | in addiction can be so severe,

01:45:18.140 | there's other sets of protocols

01:45:19.980 | and there's a kind of a psychological backdrop to it

01:45:22.060 | that's very important.

01:45:23.160 | It also relates to the biology of dopamine,

01:45:25.020 | and you can find all of that

01:45:26.100 | in the episode with Dr. Anna Lemke.

01:45:28.460 | So today we've covered a lot about the biology

01:45:31.300 | and psychology of habit formation and habit breaking.

01:45:35.000 | We talked about why certain habits are so hard to wire in,

01:45:40.000 | why certain habits are so hard to break down and eliminate,

01:45:43.980 | and how we can determine which habits are going to be easier

01:45:48.160 | for us to access, which habits are going to be harder

01:45:50.940 | for us to access and break.

01:45:53.420 | We talked a lot about this notion of limbic friction,

01:45:55.880 | and we talked about context dependence,

01:45:57.740 | and we talked about a number of different things

01:46:00.920 | as it relates to neural circuits

01:46:02.560 | and the formation of new connections in the brain

01:46:05.000 | and strengthening and weakening of connections in the brain.

01:46:07.880 | We also discussed two programs,

01:46:10.340 | programs designed specifically for you

01:46:12.160 | on the basis of the neurobiology literature

01:46:15.020 | and the literature on the psychology of habit formation

01:46:17.400 | and habit breaking.

01:46:18.500 | Just to briefly recap,

01:46:20.120 | one program involves dividing the 24-hour day

01:46:24.380 | into three phases, phase one, phase two, phase three,

01:46:27.660 | and to try and tackle specific habits

01:46:30.260 | at particular phases of the 24-hour cycle.

01:46:33.860 | The second program involved a 21-day process

01:46:37.560 | of engaging approximately six new habits per day,

01:46:41.700 | although the expectation, as I mentioned earlier,

01:46:43.460 | is that you're not going to perform all six of those,

01:46:46.120 | and an assessment in the following 21 days

01:46:48.660 | as to whether or not you have indeed

01:46:50.500 | formed those new habits or not.

01:46:52.700 | And there were a number of other features that I mentioned

01:46:55.020 | that were related to those two general programs,

01:46:57.140 | phase one, phase two, phase three, and the 21-day program,

01:47:00.200 | and how those could be meshed together.

01:47:02.420 | So I'm guessing some of you will probably have questions

01:47:04.780 | about those programs and how to apply them,

01:47:06.900 | but hopefully they were clear enough for you to get started.

01:47:09.860 | This is a good opportunity for me to mention

01:47:11.800 | that the Huberman Lab Podcast

01:47:13.700 | has something called the Neural Network Newsletter

01:47:16.360 | that is sent out approximately once a month.

01:47:19.560 | For the next newsletter,

01:47:21.120 | I will release a on-paper version of these two systems

01:47:25.940 | and how they mesh together

01:47:27.040 | for habit formation and habit breaking.

01:47:29.380 | And if you'd like to access that,

01:47:31.340 | you can go to HubermanLab.com, you go to the menu,

01:47:33.880 | you can sign up for the newsletter.

01:47:35.480 | First of all, it's zero cost.

01:47:37.580 | Second of all, we have our privacy policy there,

01:47:40.000 | but I can tell you right now we don't share your email

01:47:42.080 | with any vendors or any other sources.

01:47:44.460 | Those emails stay internal to us.

01:47:47.080 | And if you'd like to see what the sort of flavor

01:47:49.060 | of those newsletters is, the previous newsletters,

01:47:52.620 | for instance, one on tools for sleep

01:47:54.740 | that I mentioned earlier, or tools for neuroplasticity

01:47:58.300 | in the classroom and outside the classroom as well

01:48:00.600 | for teachers and for students of various kinds,

01:48:02.780 | those are also posted there

01:48:04.300 | so you can access any of the previous newsletters.

01:48:07.100 | My hope is that today you've learned

01:48:08.580 | both the biological mechanisms and the practical tools

01:48:11.540 | by which you can start to establish habits that for you,

01:48:15.160 | you deem adaptive, healthy,

01:48:17.080 | and that are going to support you and your goals.

01:48:18.900 | And that you can start to dismantle some of the habits

01:48:21.860 | that you find to be unhealthy or maladaptive for you

01:48:25.140 | and for your goals.

01:48:26.520 | If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast,

01:48:28.660 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

01:48:30.440 | That's a terrific way to support us.

01:48:32.180 | In addition, on YouTube,

01:48:33.640 | you can leave us feedback in the comment section.

01:48:36.100 | You can also leave us suggestions for future guests

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01:48:46.340 | On Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review,

01:48:48.540 | and now Spotify has a feature

01:48:49.980 | by which you can also leave us review feedback.

01:48:52.620 | Please also check out the sponsors mentioned

01:48:54.520 | at the beginning of this podcast episode.

01:48:56.580 | That's perhaps the best way to support our podcast.

01:48:59.000 | In addition, we have a Patreon.

01:49:00.660 | It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman,

01:49:03.480 | and there you can support the podcast

01:49:05.200 | at any level that you like.

01:49:06.740 | During today's podcast and in many previous episodes

01:49:09.480 | of the Huberman Lab Podcast, I mentioned supplements.

01:49:12.120 | While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,

01:49:14.720 | many people derive tremendous benefit from supplements.

01:49:17.600 | Supplements for sleep, supplements for focus,

01:49:19.540 | supplements for various other things

01:49:20.940 | related to mental and physical health and performance.

01:49:23.800 | One key issue anytime there's a discussion about supplements

01:49:27.020 | is you have to be sure that the supplements you are taking

01:49:30.060 | are of the very highest quality.

01:49:31.460 | And for that reason, we've partnered with Thorne

01:49:33.580 | because Thorne has the very highest stringency

01:49:35.740 | with respect to the quality of the ingredients they include

01:49:38.220 | and the precision of the amounts of the ingredients

01:49:40.480 | that they include in their supplements.

01:49:42.540 | If you'd like to see the supplements that I take

01:49:44.620 | and get 20% off any of those supplements,

01:49:46.860 | you can go to thorne.com/u/huberman.

01:49:51.740 | And in addition to being able to get 20% off

01:49:54.340 | any of those supplements, if you navigate deeper

01:49:56.460 | into the Thorne site through that web portal,

01:49:58.500 | thorne.com/u/huberman, you can also get 20% off

01:50:02.140 | any of the other supplements that Thorne makes.

01:50:04.480 | If you're not already following us on Instagram and Twitter,

01:50:07.220 | please feel free to do so.

01:50:08.980 | There, I teach neuroscience and neuroscience-related tools

01:50:12.100 | in short format.

01:50:13.640 | Some of that material overlaps

01:50:15.060 | with what you hear on the podcast.

01:50:16.340 | Some of it is unique and different

01:50:17.840 | from what's on the podcast.

01:50:19.300 | And once again, I want to thank you

01:50:21.000 | for going on this journey of exploring the neuroscience

01:50:24.940 | and the psychology of habit formation and habit breaking.

01:50:28.100 | I hope it supports you in your goals.

01:50:29.940 | And last, but certainly not least,

01:50:32.100 | thank you for your interest in science.

01:50:33.860 | (upbeat music)

01:50:36.440 | (upbeat music)

The Science of Making & Breaking Habits | Huberman Lab Podcast #53

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