As you have learned, habits will ‘take over’ in order to free up your conscious brain for other tasks that it may need to do. This has self-evident evolutionary benefits because your brain is one of the primary users of energy in your body (gram for gram), and of course your attention is limited. If you had to calculate every single action you complete on a day-to-day basis it would be overwhelming.
With that said, habits can become pathological. The individual who makes it a habit to go to the gym before work is using this brain region but so is their co-worker who eats a chocolate bar from the vending machine at work each day, a practice that often gradually results in steady weight gain. In fact, it has been shown that rats will habitually eat even when satiated, thus gaining weight.
As such, it’s important to engage your ‘mind’, which is conceptually separate from your ‘brain’. This abstract principle can be illustrated in the following way:
Habits, for the most part, can be thought of as processes that removes the mind from the equation and therefore mindfulness can be thought of as a practice that re-engages it.
Mindfulness has been hijacked by various unscrupulous, New-age philosophers to mean a wide range of things, most of which aren’t evidence based or even particularly well defined but for our purposes here consider mindfulness to be the conscious and volitional act of paying attention. The above individual gaining weight from her habitual chocolate intake could therefore notice this habitual behaviour and become mindful. Rather than acting out her practiced routine she could follow the four steps below, set out by Dr. Jeffrey Schwarz in his manual “You are not your brain”:
First, she would relabel. This would be the act of noticing the negative urge and call it what it is “Oh, I’m having a strong urge to go and get a chocolate bar”.
Next, she would reframe. “I’m having a strong urge to eat a chocolate bar because…”. This could be because she is craving readily usable energy, because she is hungry, because it makes her happy and she hates her job and the monotony of it, or something else. We will discuss this aspect far more in the next section.
Then, she would refocus. She could go for a short walk, go talk to a friend or colleague or make a better snacking choice. This, too, will be discussed in a different context in the next section.
Finally, she would revaluate. She would appreciate that the urge she is having for chocolate doesn’t have to be acted upon and, in fact, it’s just a signal from her brain sent because of habit. She would realise that she can opt to do something else and ultimately beat what it is that is holding her back.
By engaging mindfulness and practicing self-control she is able to take charge of her decisions. Note that this does not contradict what was said in the initial section about the irrationality of decision making – the final decision may be entirely irrational and not necessarily authored by her, but by paying attention to her thoughts she is able to use her mind rather than her brain and act with intent rather than on impulse alone. The important thing in this example is not changing her mind and having an apple instead of a chocolate bar, it is her deciding to pay attention and make a decision rather than act automatically.
To improve mindfulness one of the most effective methods is mindfulness meditation. Only 4 days of meditation practice has been shown to improve mindfulness, cognition and executive function, and monks well practiced in mindfulness meditation display greater thickness in their frontal cortexes, indicating that some of the effects of this practice are permanent and rooted in physical alterations. Taking regular breaks during prolonged tasks, walking in silence while paying attention to your thoughts, and exercise all seem to help improve mindfulness, executive function and/or inhibitory control (your ability to resist acting on impulse). This is exceedingly important to bear in mind because cortical thickness in the frontal cortex has been shown to be lesser in obese individuals compared to those of a healthy weight, indicating that a genetic (or life-long habitually programmed) reduction in the ability to inhibit behaviours via executive control, may play some role in weight gain.
If this proves somewhat difficult it can be efficacious to use self-affirmations. The term ‘self-affirmations’ has, much like mindfulness, been hijacked to some degree by new age philosophers and life coaches but it does have a specific meaning – self-affirmations are reflections upon one’s core values. Once you have reflected upon core values it can be far easier to refocus and revaluate your urges because it places them in a context more closely associated to what it is you truly desire. To do this, consider the things that matter most to you. Examples could include:
Then from this list pick the most important one or two factors (ideally just one). The thing(s) that mean more to you than anything else. After this, reflect upon how your behaviour feeds in to these values (or doesn’t) and then consider how you could act and how you could reframe those urges in your mind. This is not only behaviourally effective, there is a neuroscientific reason that it works.
Reflecting upon your core values activates the infralimbic cortex and some of the surrounding tissues, in an area most closely related not only to habits but to values. This activation, in theory, results in alterations to neural circuitry that is related to certain habits and subsequently changes your behaviour – in fact, when health messages are played to individuals who have undergone self-affirmations, their eating and exercise habits improve more than those who have heard the same messages without the reflections. Engaging an outside-in objective view of your inner experience is powerful, and by tying it to values, you are able to use this view to alter what it is that you do far more easily.
Changing your habits can be difficult. It is not the case that we need to only pay attention and recognise when habits are leading us to change what those habits are. We also fall victim to cravings. As you learned already, habits are closely tied to reward circuitry and the removal of that reward is not without consequence.