New year, new me? How to make habits stick (with a bit of neuroscience)

With each new year comes the obligatory rush of motivation to set and stick to our New Years resolutions. But most of us don’t manage to. With the help of neuroscience, we may finally begin to work with our brains and take control of our habits for good.

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What would you give to wake up at 7 a.m. every day and intuitively pop outdoors for a jog? Or to be able to instinctively pick up a book rather than going down a TikTok rabbit hole on your phone for hours again… 

Humans are inherently habitual animals. As social psychology researchers eloquently put it: most of what we do, is what we do most of the time. We brush our teeth every day (I hope!), get a cup of coffee (or make one, if your resolution is to stop using your friend’s Pret subscription) and put on our shoes without so much as a thought. But something about forming and maintaining new healthy habits, like our New Year’s resolutions, just seems to slip through our fingers as the year wanes on. After all, it’s now March – are you still successfully sticking to yours? Thankfully, not all hope is lost, as scientific research in the world of neuroscience may hold some of the answers to regaining control over our behaviour and actually making our resolutions a reality. 

How are habits formed?

Habits refer to actions or behaviours that we do automatically and subconsciously. All habits are acquired from our environment, which distinguishes them from instincts. When we form a new habit, our brain forms new connections and reorganises different neuronal pathways. Just like friends who brunch together, ‘neurones that fire together, wire together’. But in order to achieve this, several cognitive and neural steps must be met. The first and most obvious is to achieve automaticity. This involves the brain’s limbic system, which is responsible for regulating our behavioural and emotional responses, especially the more reflexive, emotion-led ones. Therefore, whenever you feel the urge to pick up your phone in between tasks, your limbic system is responsible for this automatic behaviour. The second step is to evaluate their habit strength. This ultimately predicts how likely we are to continue carrying out that habit even when circumstances change. For instance, if the weather is particularly gloomy before we go on a jog, would we pack away our running shoes or brave the storm? A key feature of habit strength involves shifting our habits from being context-dependent to context-independent. Context dependence occurs when we carry out behaviours only within certain time frames and situations, whereas context-independent behaviour can freely occur without constraints, and it is these behaviours that stick and form habits in the long run.

With this mental toolkit of habit formation in hand, here are three practical tips to guide you along the path of creating and maintaining successful habits! 

Tip 01. Stepwise Thinking 

So, why does it seem as if you can’t stop scrolling on your phone, despite knowing that you should start that book that’s gathering dust on your shelf? The notion of limbic fiction, first coined by Dr Andrew Huberman, describes the amount of resistance it takes to overcome your reflexive limbic system with its rational sibling, the cerebral cortex. When limbic friction is very high, you are unlikely to put down your phone and reach for a book as it requires too much mental resistance. In order to form the new habit, this limbic friction must be reduced so as not to get overwhelmed by this resistance that often lays waste to our good intentions. One way to do this is to tap into our procedural memory, which stores information on how to perform certain tasks. With each repetition, small cognitive and neural changes occur in our procedural memory which strengthen our habit formation. Even performing a single mental visualisation of doing a new habit can engage our procedural memory and increase the probability that we keep repeating these actions in the future. This would include thinking about the sequence of steps required to complete a task in a systematic manner. In this way, our brains fire the exact same neurones when we imagine completing a habit as when we actually do it. Thus, the corresponding neurones are more likely to ‘wire together’ and help us achieve establishing the habit with newfound ease.

Tip 02. Task Bracketing 

Another important aspect of habit formation is to differentiate goal-directed behaviour, which can hinder habits long-term, from habit-directed (or context-independent) behaviour. While both involve similar connections in the brain, each are characterised by distinct neural pathways. Goal-directed behaviours occur when there is a visible reward waiting for us, whereas, habit-directed behaviours are able to operate independent of extrinsic motivation. To develop the habit-directed behaviour, it is crucial to engage the region of the brain responsible for it, known as the basal ganglia. In fact, studies have found that this brain region becomes specifically active at the start and end of an activity, which ‘brackets’ a habit – otherwise known as task bracketing. Task bracketing plays an essential role in determining how context-independent a habit is, meaning that we still go on our morning runs even if the weather is particularly miserable. This involves a crucial component of motivation, known as dopamine, which is released in our brains not only when we complete a particularly rewarding behaviour, but also when we positively anticipate it. Therefore, Dr Huberman suggests ‘bracketing’ a habit by positively anticipating the onset and offset events, and even attaching motivational rewards in the form of dopamine spotlights to those tasks.  For example, you might think about the reward of drinking a warm cup of coffee after your morning run. This way, we can keep our habits flexible and achievable by situating them between larger pleasurable events that trigger dopamine release.

Tip 03. Breaking Bad Habits

Lastly, knowing how to break bad habits is equally as important in keeping up with our New Year's resolutions. In order to override our reflexive bad habits, we have to essentially reverse the tips above to work with our brains to stop these unhealthy behaviours. When neurones stop firing at the same time, it weakens the connection between them, and frees up energy to encode new information — better known as “long-term synaptic depression”. In order to engage this and get two neurones to fire asynchronously, we can link a bad habit with a good one such that a “double habit” is created. The more we do this, the more your brain starts to weaken the sequence of neural firing associated with the bad behaviour, and build the neuronal connection instead for the new good behaviour, eventually breaking your bad habit over time.

Thanks to neuroscience, it’s becoming easier to understand and guide our brain chemistry to improve our daily lives. As the ‘new year, new me’ motivation starts to dwindle, perhaps applying some of these cognitive tools will kickstart more sustainable habit formation, helping us to end the year as strong as we started it.