Willpower likely won’t save you from your bad habits. Science explains why

- So here's the thing to recognize about your bad habit.

You cannot eradicate your bad habit.

You have to trick your neurology.

(pensive music)

We are living through this huge evolution

in our understanding of habits,

and it's being driven primarily

by understanding the neurology of where habits come from.

- I thought that drugs were the source of the problems

that we were seeing in our community.

Turns out not only was I wrong, society was wrong.

- Basically, we tend to develop addictions

when we have a psychological need.

At those moments, smartphones tend to be great vehicles

for providing the hits that you need when you need them.

- I think that there is this interior sense

when a bad habit strikes

that people know that they have a bad habit.

It just seems like a lot of people,

even the most successful people,

don't necessarily know where to start at changing it.

The ability to form habits is one of the most important

and amazing evolutionary tactics

that the human race has come up with and all primates

and almost all animals for that matter.

When you form a habit,

you can execute a fairly complex series of behaviors

without having to think really, really hard about it.

And what that means

is that it lets us think about other things.

But the downside of a habit is that you stop thinking

while you're doing a habit.

So as a result, you become less aware

of the negative consequences of that behavior.

There is a woman named Wendy Wood

who did a study when she was at Duke,

and what she found was that about 45% of all the behaviors

that someone did in a day was habit.

It wasn't decision-making.

And this gets to sort of the way that habits work,

which is that there's this thing called the habit loop.

There's three parts to it.

There's first a cue, which is a trigger for behavior,

and then the behavior itself,

which we usually refer to as a routine.

And then there's the reward,

and the reward is actually why the habit happens

in the first place.

It's how your brain sort of decides,

should I remember this pattern for the future or not?

And the cue and the reward become neurologically intertwined

until a sense of craving emerges that drives your behavior.

If you take this framework and sort of apply it

and look at the behaviors that you do, for instance,

backing your car out of a driveway,

or why you suddenly feel hungry

when you see a donut box on the counter at work,

but you weren't hungry five minutes earlier,

you can find these cues and rewards

that kind of explain the behaviors.

So it's enormously important.

- Between 1990 and 2000,

that is deemed the decade of the brain.

There was a lot of money

into studying brain illnesses, brain disease.

There was a lot of money

in terms of learning about the brain.

And during that time,

we're looking for some neural footprint of addiction.

And we thought that once cocaine interacted

with these dopamine neurons,

it just had this almost magical power

over the person's behavior.

We've learned that that's not necessarily the case.

So when we think of drug addiction,

it's important for the lay audience

to keep the focus on the person's behavior.

Are they not showing up for work?

Are they not meeting their obligations at home?

Are they not meeting their obligations in school?

All of these are important indicators

of whether someone is drug addicted or not.

And notice, I didn't look at anyone's brain.

I'm really looking at the person's behavior.

(cellphone ringing and buzzing)

- Behavioral addiction is a lot like substance addiction

in a lot of ways.

Basically what has to happen is that there's a behavior

that you enjoy doing in the short term

that you do compulsively,

so you keep returning to it over and over again,

but that in the long term harms your wellbeing

and it can harm your wellbeing

in lots of different respects.

And it's much newer. It's a much more recent phenomenon.

And I think the reason why

we've got these new forms of addiction,

there are two main reasons.

The first one is that technology is much more sophisticated

and advanced than it was even 20 years ago.

You're able to deliver the kinds of rewards that you need

for a system to be addictive.

So basically what people are looking for is unpredictability

and the rapid feedback of either rewards

or if it's negative then negative experiences.

And you actually need that mix

of positive and negative feedback.

Just as, for example, when you post something online,

sometimes you're gonna get a lot of hits,

sometimes you aren't

and it's that unpredictability that we find so compelling.

Whenever we're bored,

whenever we're feeling a little bit lonely,

whenever we're not really sure

what to do with ourselves next,

whenever we don't feel particularly efficacious,

like we're having an effect on the world

that we'd like to be having,

those are the moments when you're looking

for what some people call the adult pacifier.

And smartphones tend to be a great adult pacifier

because at those moments, you turn on your screen,

you swipe and you feel relaxed again.

- If you just try and say, "I'm gonna use willpower

to make this behavior go away," it's not gonna work.

And we know this from study after study.

Every scientist who's worked on habits will tell you,

once a neurology of that habit is set,

it's always there in some form or another.

So what you need to do

is instead of thinking about eradicating this bad habit

or just using willpower

to sort of blast your way through, ignoring it,

is to change it.

And there's this thing that's known

as the golden rule of habit change,

which is if a habit is made up of a cue,

a routine, and a reward,

you can't change all three parts at once.

In fact, you shouldn't even try.

What you really wanna change

is you wanna change the routine, the behavior.

And to do that, you need to keep the same cue

and deliver the same reward,

and you'll be able to shoehorn that new behavior

into your daily pattern.

You can't change everything overnight.

You can't suddenly say, I want a brand new habit tomorrow,

and expect it to be easy and effortless.

It's something you have to give yourself permission

to take a little bit of time to practice

because you're building up neural pathways

associated with a certain behavior,

and those neural pathways just build up over time.

You can't speed up that process any more than is natural.