How to build habits the neuroscience way

In this post, I was inspired by two people.

1. 1. James Clear, author of the book Atomic Habits which offers evidence-backed tools from behavior change science to build habits. And …

1. 1. Dr. Andrew Huberman, who did a very well-rounded podcast explaining how to build habits the neuroscience way.

Don’t worry, this won’t get super nerdy. We will dig into the science rabbit hole just enough to understand the mechanisms involved in habit formation. Most of what you’ll discover are practical tools you can use in your daily life to step up your habit game.

Ready to revisit that New Year’s resolution list?

Let’s Go.

Why should you care about building habits?

Is a life made of habits boring?

Imagine a life where everything you do is habitual and embedded into a solid routine. You wake up and repeat the same thing over and over again forever. It sounds boring, right? 

Should we then build habits only to live a boring life?

Lately, I have become a proponent of spontaneity and going with the flow, but I still believe that if you want to achieve anything in life, habits are mandatory. The ultimate goal is to achieve that delicate dance between habit and spontaneity.

And by the way,

You’re unconsciously building habits anyway

Whether you like it or not, you’re always building habits. It is estimated that 70%(according to Andrew) / 40% (according to James) of our waking behaviour is made up of habitual behaviour. 

It is how your body gets efficient at processing and executing the million tasks it has to do each day.  It is one of the physical mechanisms that allows us to optimize the number of decisions needed to execute a task. Wouldn’t it be better then, to build habits that we actually want to build?

Excellence is all about leveraging compounding habits.

I appreciate excellence in most things in life. A well-crafted piece of writing, a perfectly executed exercise movement, or an intricately made dish …. Which makes me feel bad sometimes that my writing or cooking isn’t as good and I assume that people with excellence have a talent that I don’t have. While part of it might be true, it is most likely that these people were doing it long enough to perfect their work. If you want to write better, write more. If you want to cook better, cook over and over again. The consistency of doing it repeatedly is what leads to excellence. 

This is called the magic of the compounding effect as James Clear points out in his book. If you get just 1% better each day you’ll end up with results 37 times better than what you started with. And this consistency is usually achieved through building habits. You do not have to each day negotiate with yourself like a mad little kid whether you want to write or work out. You unconsciously do it like brushing your teeth before going to bed.

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”

Achieving big goals is in creating effective systems:

It would be stupid for J.K Rowling to think of the whole Harry Potter book each time she sits down to write. Writing a book is about writing each page, each sentence and each word at a time. Establishing a writing process is what enabled JK Rowling to write great books. Having a good system in which you integrate this process is the key to success. And in this system, you’ll put in all of the tools and methods that help you form the habit of writing.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Now let’s find out how the body magically builds these habits.

The Biological process of habit building

Building habits is biologically identical to learning. They both involve neuroplasticity which is how our nervous system changes in response to a given experience. 

Our nervous system is composed of neurons (nerve cells) connected by circuits through electricity and chemical signals. The process of learning new habits occurs when we form new pathways in the nervous system. The more you perform the habit, the more you reinforce these pathways. 

It’s like driving to work. The first time you go there, you’d have to check Waze and pay attention to every direction. The second time, you can recognize that in the next roundabout, you should go left. After a month of commuting, you get in the car and suddenly find yourself at your desk. Your brain has created new pathways for your commute and reinforced it to the point that you don’t have to make a conscious effort to think about it.

If you decided to get into the habit of working out, the pictures below show how the brain circuits responsible for this habit would evolve. The first picture on the left represents the initial state of the neural network before training. The one in the middle is 2 weeks post being exposed to the stimulating experience and the last one on the right is 2 months after the stimulation. You can see the number and the density of pathways that have been formed from picture to picture.

How strong are your habits? Limbic friction & Habit strength

We’ve mentioned before that one of the primary reasons why we benefit from building habits is to make the behaviours unconscious or in fancier words, not requiring too much conscious override. This resistance to perform the behaviour is called “limbic friction” (a term coined by Andrew Huberman). The stronger the habit is, the less limbic friction it requires from you. 

Another important aspect to consider while evaluating the habit strength is how context-independent it is. Does the habit stick even if you’ve changed your location or an element of your environment?  Brushing your teeth before bed is a very context-independent habit for most people. You do it if you’re at someone else’s home or a hotel. we tend to do it no matter what time we go to bed. (unless tired, which I am guilty of).

HABIT STRENGTH = CONTEXT INDEPENDENCE + LIMBIC FRICTION.

You can then say that you’ve achieved a strong habit once it becomes second nature to you to the point that it requires no effort to execute and you can do it anywhere anytime

Tools for Stronger Habits

Tool 1: Visualization (Procedural memory)

There are two types of memories in our brains: procedural memory and episodic memory. The latter is the usual memory you use to remember events from your life like what happened on your last birthday. And the procedural is what you use to remember your mother’s cake recipe. It helps us recall specific sequences of things that need to happen to achieve a certain outcome.   

With each repetition of a habit, the signal between the neurons involved in the activity is sent and the connections are fortified in the procedural memory. This is referred to as Hebbian learning; another fancy word to remember.

How can we then use procedural memory to build habits?

Before engaging in the activity, try to visualize the specific set of sequences required to execute it. This engages your procedural memory and shifts your brain to readiness mode and reduces that limbic friction by having the neurons already fired up. If you’re trying to get into the habit of working out, thinking through your workout plan, the various sets and reps you will be performing, will make it easier for you to do it.  During the thinking process, the exact neurons involved in working out will already be ready to fire up making it easier for these neurons to fire once you physically carry those dumbbells.

Tool 2: Cueing your habits: Task bracketing 

Another part of our brain we can leverage is the basal ganglia which contains the neural circuits responsible for our GO/NO GO decisions. If you’re actively thinking of an action and deciding whether to engage in it, you’re firing these neural circuits. Inside the basal ganglia, there’s an area called the dorsolateral striatum that helps us establish the behavior associated with the habit but not the habit itself. One of the habits I would love to one day establish is doing a set of pushups every morning while I’m waiting for my coffee to brew. My dorsal striatum will help me remember that the cue for the push-ups is making my morning coffee and at the end of those push-ups, I get to savour the first sip of it. This area of the brain becomes active at the beginning of the habit (making coffee) and at the end of the habit (sipping coffee) and acts as a bracket for it. We can then make habits stronger by using task bracketing as a cue to get us ready to start the task we want to make habitual.

Tool 3: Day phasing

Your brain doesn’t have a clock to recognise it’s already 06 am and you need to go for your run. It simply functions based on its state and its level of activation. This active state is biologically associated with the phases of the day you’re in.

This is why it is better to program habits using phases of the day rather than a specific time.
According to Andrew, we can define three main phases:

PHASE1: 0h->8h after waking up. 

• • Norepinephrine and dopamine, hormones that make us more alert and focused, tend to be higher.

• • To further support your alertness, It’s good to do physical exercise, a cold shower or caffeine.

Your whole system is in “I can do anything I set myself to mode”. So it’s better to choose tasks that you’re not particularly fond of and require a high level of energy.

PHASE2: 8h->15h after waking up

• • The amount of norepinephrine and dopamine and cortisol start to drop making us less alert.

• • The hormone Serotonin starts to rise which leads to a more relaxed state. If you want to enhance this biological state, you should reduce the amount of bright light you’re viewing and take a hot shower/bath.

Your system is in a more laid-back mode. It is the perfect time to engage in activities that you’re already doing and/or that you enjoy and don’t require much fighting yourself.

PHASE3: 16h->24h after waking up

In this phase, you better be asleep. Building and reinforcing the habit requires changes in your brain’s neural circuits that only occur at night when you sleep.

Your system wants to be asleep which is the perfect time to reinforce the habits you’ve worked on building throughout the day.

Tool 4: Rewarding yourself:

The reward system is a very fascinating biological process. That exhilarating feeling you get when you win something, achieve a milestone or even the first bite of food is associated with the hormone dopamine. Your brain remembers the exact behaviour that led to the reward and will tend to do it again. 

When you start working on your task and unconsciously anticipating the reward, that anticipation is also a dopamine release. And it’ll help you get through the task because it changes your whole system. It increases your energy and makes you more attentive.

If you tell your kid you’ll buy him something if he cleans his room, he’ll be excited. But he’ll be more excited if you bring him the reward without telling him so. Dopamine levels tend to be even more elevated if the reward is not expected.

Sadly, we cannot surprise ourselves (biologically, you cannot lie to yourself).

To leverage this dopaminergic process better, try these two methods:

1- Reward yourself through the process of the habit execution not just after the execution. This relates to the procedural memory (visualization) tool that we’ve talked about above. If you want to get into the habit of running, try to anticipate having that banana as a pre-workout snack, putting your favourite shoe to run, leaning into and enjoying the hardship of running like an athlete. And at the end that great feeling of accomplishment and endorphin release you’ll have after your run. 

2- Try to gamify the reward to introduce the surprise element. You can, for example, write reward suggestions on paper and put them in a jar. When the time comes to reward yourself, pull one of them. This will help keep the level of anticipation elevated. 

Now let’s put it all together. 

21-day habit framework :

Andrew H. suggested this 21-day habit-building framework you can use to leverage all the tools we’ve discussed above.

• Set out to adopt 6 new habits over 21 days, with the expectation that you only complete 4-5 of them a day
• Do not punish yourself for not doing all the habits, and no compensation for them in the long term (you don’t try to make up for skipping 2 habits the day before, by doing 8 the next day
• Use the Phases of Day above to decide when to implement the habit.
• Use visualization, task bracketing and reward tools to reinforce those habits
• Then you review after 21 days whether you have a need for these habits at all.

Tool 5: Identify to your habits :

One of the important ideas that James Clear brings out in his book is the importance of making habits part of your identity. While this idea may contradict the point of how we cannot lie to ourselves. But maybe there’s a truth to how if we repeatedly tell ourselves something positive or negative, we start believing it. 

The idea behind making the habit your identity is instead of focusing on the goal of running more, for instance, you start first by identifying as being a runner. You start with the identity first and the outcome will come naturally. The same can happen if you use negative identifications. If you want to get into the habit of waking up early to run and you always repeat to yourself that you’re not a morning person, you may be unconsciously sabotaging yourself along the way. 

“Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.” – James.Clear