Why it’s hard to change bad habits, and what you can do about it
by Patrick | Published in Faster Better Stronger, Featured | 16 Comments
Use a little neuroscience to cure your bad habits
There’s plenty of great advice out there on how to change your life for the better. So after reading lots of websites on the topic why aren’t you perfect? Don’t feel bad: blame basic human biology. Unfortunately for you though the excuses end here, because by understanding how our biology lets us down, we can design a plan that works.
How it works – Memory formation is the key to everything
The human brain owes its ability to form memories almost entirely to one small region buried in the middle: the hippocampus. This brain region is the gateway to forming and recalling memories. It’s also a pretty damn strict concierge on deciding what gets to become a new memory. It keeps most of the things you see and experience in short term memory while other regions of your brain are working out if it’s actually important. If what you’ve seen or learnt is important, then the hippocampus will record it. If it’s not important then it’s quickly lost, and you’re unable to recall it easily.
What did you have for breakfast on Tuesday last week?
What color was the car in front of you while you were waiting at the lights this morning?
You don’t remember because they didn’t have enough lasting impact on your memory or your life. Unfortunately it’s also the same reason you can’t speak fluent French after just one lesson. You can’t really consciously decide what’s important any more than you can consciously decide that you are going to be instantly great at painting. The way you can learn French or how to paint is by constant repetition to let your hippocampus know that this is actually important. Without some sort of reinforcement, everything is relegated to be forgotten.
What’s the advantage of forgetting almost everything?
While you might have enjoyed your breakfast and even spent some time on deciding what it is you wanted to eat, it’s just not necessary for your survival to remember these details.
Imagine you’re living in the Stone Age and food and calories are hard to come by – you really can’t afford to be wasteful in your actions even at the cellular level. It’s just a waste of energy for your neurons to record inconsequential events permanently. This is ties into the reason why it’s so hard to change your behavior – it’s actually an evolutionary advantage not to.
If you live in the Stone Age and you’ve figured out after many years how to make a spear and hunt mammoths for food, then it’s a great benefit to your survival to remember exactly how you did it so you can build and hunt the same way every time. Don’t change what works and remember what does is the brain’s motto here.
But this explains only a little of why behaviors become fixed and why you only remember important things. The flipside to this is that there is great value in forgetting too.
In fact remembering every little boring detail and every word on every website we’ve read could actually be a deadly distraction. Imagine this: You are driving your car to work, remembering the route, braking at traffic lights, observing the other cars on the road. You don’t want to be thinking about the texture of each and every one of the thousands of cornflakes you’ve eaten over the last 10 years while you’re driving.
And this is also part of the reason it’s so hard to change your behavior. It’s also useful to forget things that are more substantial than breakfast. Constant reliving of a traumatic event is debilitating and a serious problem for many people, leading to the inability to function in even simple day to day tasks.
Is changing your behavior important?
When the brain does remember things it’s because there has been some importance attached to it, often because of repeated exposure. This isn’t really a surprise, it’s how you learned the alphabet and your multiplication tables in school. It’s how you learnt to drive a car. It’s how you’ve learnt nearly everything. Repetition and reinforcement that these things are important to remember are the triggers your brain requires to begin forming long lasting memories and behavior patterns.
Once you have learnt a behavior and formed memories around it (like driving) you can then consider it as something that’s filed away as an automatic function that you’re not even consciously aware of anymore when you use it. Don’t be fooled though, your brain is still working hard to do these things even if you’re not explicitly aware of them. Try not driving for a year and then be surprised by how much you have to consciously think about shifting gears the first time you get behind the wheel.
And that’s the reason reading most “life hacks” and “top ten tips to improve your life” are useless to you. Reading them is a nice distraction and even enjoyable, but that’s where it ends. They become last Wednesdays breakfast. If you’re a regular of the life improvement blogs ask yourself this question right now: What life tips did I read and was impressed with 2 weeks ago?
Merlin Mann recently had a couple of excellent posts at 43folders about how a lot of productivity sites are actually more distraction than cure. He coined the term productivity porn to describe the aimless browsing of these life improvement sites where the act of spending your time looking for and reading life hacks on how to manage your time better takes more time than actually getting things done.
The irony that the existence of self help blogs could be stopping you from helping your self is hard to admit, but undoubtedly true. I’ve been guilty of browsing many as a way of putting off researching writing.
I’m not sure the situation is as dire as Merlin see’s it though. If you’re browsing around the web for life tips as a form of entertainment then I think that’s just as legitimate as reading a bunch of cookbooks for fun. If you’re hungry for a change though, it might be a good idea to try and cook something different once in awhile. You might not follow the recipe perfectly the first time and it might not work well instantly. But as long as you go back and try it again it will get better and you will be rewarded with a new outlook on life.
There’s only one thing you need to do to
And that’s the hardest ingredient to every life hack on this site and every other: you have to actually try something different. And you then have to then repeat it and practice it until your hippocampus realizes it’s important and you remember it, and act on it automatically.
So if you truly want to change your life then stop reading this and start working on one of the great productivity or life hacks that you’ve been reading for weeks. Right now.
If you’re not quite ready then remember the above paragraph -The hardest part of actually changing your behavior is consistently repeating the positive action you want to take. I can give you knowledge but I can’t give you discipline.
But I can help you remember. Click to subscribe to our RSS or Email updates and every time you see a new article your hippocampus will remember this page and the first time you took action rather than just read.
Original Image taberandrew remixed by Patrick
January 12th, 2009
January 12th, 2009at 9:04 am(#)
Your post is thought-provoking and offers useful insights.
It is significant that you raise the idea that advantages exist to conscious forgetting. It is not always in a person’s interest to remember certain things. This goes way beyond a language or what a person ate last meal. This forgetting is why the unconscious and other layers of the mind have different perspective than the conscious mind. Different layers of a person’s mind determine what kinds of details are okay to remember and which ones would be better repressed, such as trauma or other information that a person is not consciously ready to accept without fear.
Some human beings believe the soul has the most universal, all-knowing perspective. The same human beings tend to believe that this soul perspective connects everything and everyone and senses everything going on simultaneously. That is, the time and space dimensions used by layers of the human conscious mind to frame “reality” do not exist for the soul-level perspective. Instead, it abides in a kind of emptiness, a place of all-knowing.
January 12th, 2009at 9:45 am(#)
That was really a nice article by you. But it depends on the people how they take. I hope people with bad habits read this and do something for that.. Good Job
Actually good try…Hope your effort works..
January 13th, 2009at 3:57 am(#)
Man, that article hit the nail on the head! I know many people who are stuck in the “reading, and not doing” thing. I thought it was just a phase (how strong it is depends on one’s intellectual drive). For instance, when I started personal growth, I went on a rampage of reading and not practicing. It lasted about a year, before I found something I really liked, and then I started doing. Do you think it’s just a phase everyone has to go through, or is it something else?
(I still read and experiment, but more to satisfy myself intellectually.)
Cheers,
Albert | UrbanMonk.Net
January 13th, 2009at 7:45 am(#)
Albert,
I like your thoughts on how it might be a phase we need to go through. I think it’s perfectly fine to spend a year, two years, five years even, reading and learning and taking it in as you did. In a way it’s a good idea – I mean why should you latch onto the first advice you come across on the web and then stop there? Research is always a good idea. However at some point you need to apply (some of) what you’ve learned otherwise you are a just a book collector.
I see from your site that you are applying (and sharing!) what you’ve learnt – good advice too.
Keep reading and experimenting though – learning and applying what you’ve learnt aren’t mutually exclusive.
Patrick
January 13th, 2009at 7:51 am(#)
Interesting perspective. I hadn’t delved much into the neureoscience behind behavior change, though I love pulling various disciplines into the way that I think. Do you have any suggestions, though, for ways to translate “importance” to the brain? I’m sure many people who read personal productivity blogs would like to make change, i.e. they already think personal productivity is important, but according to your article there exists a disconnect between thinking it is important enough to browse for articles but not important enough to store in long-term memory. Love to hear what you think
.
January 13th, 2009at 7:55 am(#)
Liara,
Yep there’s a lot of processes going on in our wet grey sponge that we are not consciously aware of. And it’s only recently that we’ve become scientifically aware that they exist at all. Still, lots to learn yet!
Patrick
January 13th, 2009at 10:42 am(#)
Hi Patrick,
This IS good stuff! It’s in the “doing” that we can change our habits. All the reading in the world, all the remembering everything we’ve read – won’t help us one bit if we don’t just do it… Great reminder!
January 13th, 2009at 2:08 pm(#)
@Jessica,
Good question – I shall explore it more thoroughly in a future article. Briefly, a good way to convince your stubborn hippocampus that you want to change some aspect of behavior is to couple it with a different kind of change, like a change of venue.
For instance I use my laptop for fun, browsing, music and writing. I separate these tasks by doing the writing in a different room from the entertainment parts. This says to my brain “okay you’re in a different environment now, one where you don’t play, but one where you work”.
@Lance
Cheers Lance – I enjoy reading your site, you are certainly “doing” with good results.
Patrick
January 13th, 2009at 2:34 pm(#)
This is really good stuff.
It’s nice to see a scientific take on personal development. Thanks!
January 13th, 2009at 11:42 pm(#)
Patrick, the physical world would come across as very different if human beings all assumed they had nothing more to learn. Some people even believe they would not be alive in a physical body if their lessons were finished. For them, death of the physical body is perceived as the next great awakening or, the next big adventure.
January 14th, 2009at 2:09 am(#)
Hi Patrick
Great post! I like the way you put things,you got your own style. It is interesting to read “forgetting almost everything…” I think it is good cause if give us a chance to start fresh with a blank page.
Thank You,
Giovanna Garcia
Imperfect Action is better than No Action
January 14th, 2009at 1:43 pm(#)
Patrick,
I did not see the link back on my blog admin console – so I apologize for not acknowledging the link – but I am so glad to be linked in such a great article!!
I am a true believer of learning from doing. The good part about learning that way seems to be the fact that I forget the “bad” and seem to remember only the “good” …
I love your explanation – once something bad happens in my life, I try and try until I figure out how to set things right – and I fail a lot – but then I finally get it right – and what lingers on is the good stuff – the self-developed life hacks – tried, tested and true.
I am loving your blog Patrick!
January 14th, 2009at 6:18 pm(#)
Excellent post, loved the read and await further intellectual insight. This is a refreshing from the other generic posts I read.
January 14th, 2009at 8:48 pm(#)
I agree that reading and knowing about life hacks is just one part. What we often miss out on is taking action. It’s also funny that we are moved to take action only when our situation becomes dire. Mostly, we choose to sail along, never truly happy but preferring to keep repeating the same behavior and getting the same unsatisfactory results.
January 15th, 2009at 7:20 am(#)
Thanks for the insights, Patrick! I’m looking forward to your next post that elaborates further on using further types of changes as stimulus. In fact, I may need to borrow your tip on moving to a new room to write (to be honest, I’m pretty sure I’ve read that tip somewhere before, but when you couple it with an explanation of how the hippocampus works it gives me extra motivation to go out and make it happen! Your words in action. Interesting.)
Keep it up!
January 18th, 2009at 2:03 pm(#)
Great article, and terrific web site! I don’t usually get this enthusiastic with a site I just met, but I can tell that you’re really something special.