Your brain is fundamentally lazy...
When it can, it wires thoughts, emotions, or behaviors into circuits deep below the surface where they become automated. Automated thoughts, feelings or behaviors ARE habits. And habits allow your brain to work on autopilot.
During the course of a day, hundreds of habits—automated chunks of thought, emotion, or behavior—come online and offline, usually with little conscious awareness.
Some habits you might think of as good, such as washing your hands after you visit the bathroom, brushing your teeth, or meditating daily.
Others you may consider bad, such as always being plugged into social media, negative self-talk or snacking on junk food.
But in reality, most of your habits are neutral—by habit, you drive along the same roads to work, position yourself in the same spot in a gym class, fill your shopping cart with the same food at the same supermarket, and tune your ears into the same music.
Where Habits Are Stored in the Brain
Your brain’s coordination center for habits is called the striatum, which is located deep beneath the cortex where it forms part of the basal ganglia.
The striatum is richly connected to the prefrontal cortex (involved in higher-order thinking, feeling, and sensing) and to the midbrain.
The midbrain provides input from dopamine-containing neurons (brain cells). Dopamine is a brain chemical strongly associated with creating positive feelings related to reward and events of emotional significance.
Once the negative self-talk habit is stored, another brain region—the infralimbic cortex—causes you to carry out the habit when you are triggered by a particular cue, situation, or event.
A malfunctioning striatum is seen when habits become disordered, such as obsessive-compulsive behaviors and addiction.
How to break bad habits using neuroscience
The Defining Features of Habits
Good, bad, or neutral, neuroscientists have found that all habits have a few defining features:
1) Habits are triggered by a particular cue, situation, or event.
2) Habits are learned over time by being repeated over and over.
3) Habits are performed automatically, often with little conscious awareness.
4) Habits are persistent—once formed, they are very hard to break.
26