Long Story Short

Habitual behaviors have two main parts. One part is biological and one part is choice. These do not operate as two separate pieces but together as one. Sometimes people are more likely to engage in habitual behaviors or have what are called "predispositions" to certain things like depression or anxiety. Sometimes that is based on genetics and something called neural pathways but, there is a choice in there too. Making new choices or habits is not easy.

You can think of your brain like a city. Inside the city there are many different roadways. The busier a roadway is, the larger it becomes.

Think of the difference between a country road with low amounts of traffic versus a super highway. When you make a choice for the first time, you can think of that as a country road. When you make a choice or do something over and over (habitually), you can think of that as the super highway.

Building a super highway is costly. It costs time, energy, effort and money. The same is true about the super highway paths in our brains. These take time to build and once they are built they are what we tend to do.

If you tend to have a bad habit every day... then that is your super highway. Now that the highway is built, it can be hard to close down and even harder to replace it with a new super highway altogether.

Our brains will opt to do the easier thing when they can. Whatever conserves energy, even if it is painful or something we do not want to do, is often what our brain will guide us to do.

But, we can make a choice. We can choose to do the harder thing, to make our new highway. It is not a simple process, and we have to choose it daily again and again until it sticks.

Unlearning a behavior takes a lot of time and effort. If you stop focusing on it for one second, you'll just revert back to the way you were before. Check out this video to see a more visual representation of that idea that we discussed above.

Long-term Consistent Work

The only way to rewrite a bad habit is to unlearn it through choice. Think of going to the gym. Going one time does not make you fit or ripped. You have to go over and over to build those muscles. It is the same process for your brain. You have to choose the path you want again and again.

Change is possible.

There is always potential to change. The video shows that. The man in the video learned to ride a "backwards bike", but it took him 8 months. Then in the blink of an eye he went back to his old habit of riding a bike the normal way. So, if you feel like you can't change because you easily slip into old habits then you only need to work on building your new highway slowly but surely by choosing a different, better path each day.

Text Lesson: Neuroscience Made Easy