New Neuroscience Reveals the Best Way to Form Powerful Habits That Stick New research proves that willpower and rewards aren't enough to build sustainable habits. Here's what else you need.
By Leah Borski Edited by Kara McIntyre
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Our brains are lazy — but not without good reason. Comprising only 2% of the body's mass, the brain gobbles up 20% of its energy. About 86 billion neurons fight to fulfill their staggering metabolic needs. Laziness is an energy-conserving necessity for the brain.
If we want to create powerful habits that stick, it doesn't make sense to waste that energy. But that's what most of us do when trying to change our habits. We scold and punish ourselves into adopting new habits. We bend over backward trying to justify unhealthy ones. These mental gymnastics deplete vital mental energy. We engage in thoughts, beliefs and actions that don't actually support change. Instead, they stifle it.
You've no doubt heard quotes like "no pain, no gain" and "good things happen to those who hustle." Societal and cultural expectations have cemented these mindsets for the majority. They perpetuate the idea that the things we want most in life must be difficult to achieve or that there is only one path to success. If it's not hard to get, it must not be worth having, right?
While we wage this internal war, our brains seek an easy button. It's necessary if we're going to manage necessary functions with little leftover energy. What some label as lazy, I call efficient.
What if, rather than fighting our preprogrammed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace it, even use it to our advantage?
~ Greg McKeown, Author of Effortless
The first step to sustainable habit change is releasing outdated beliefs. Easy does not, in fact, equal lazy. The idea may seem farfetched, but new neuroscience backs it up.
Typical habit change protocols rely on executive attention skills (also known as effortful control). Executive attention involves monitoring and resolving conflicts among thoughts, feelings, and actions. Thus it's heavily rooted in self-control: the ability to regulate one's thoughts, emotions, and actions in accordance with internal goals. This requires a massive amount of mental energy.
New neuroscience reveals willpower isn't as effective as we'd thought
Fortunately, we can bypass the mental energy strain caused by reliance on willpower. All that's required is to follow our brains' natural tendency to take the easy route.
Habits, by definition, are actions we carry out on autopilot. In fact, most of our daily behaviors are so automated, we don't even think about them. But when deciding to change our habits, we usually take a forceful approach. We create a vision of our intended outcomes and try to use willpower to get there. Unfortunately, willpower is yet another energy-sucking process.
For example, the need for healthier habits is a well-known issue for many people. But, most individuals have difficulties in initiating and maintaining health behavior change. This is no surprise. Everyday life exposes humans to temptations that promise immediate pleasure. The only thing our brains love more than ease is fast rewards. This is the basis for many methods of approaching habit change. For decades, we've focused on things like information-based counseling, external accountability, and financial incentives.
Related: Improving Yourself Takes 9.6 Minutes of Work Each Day
There are a few big problems with methods like this. A major one is that they rely on short-term wins (rewards). In the long run, these are futile because long-term habits are the only way to sustain the reward. For example, financial incentives for weight loss are effective up until the payoff. Then they actually tend to produce weight gain in the weeks following.
The reason for this is that rewards, in themselves, lose motivational clout. Let's say you're an BIZ Experiences whose main focus is a monetary goal. Your focus on money makes you more likely to fail to maintain the daily habits required for success. In this example, one of two things can happen:
- You reach your initial benchmark, then push back the finish line. As a result, you never feel like your goals are actually reached.
- You set such unrealistic goals, they're almost impossible to achieve. Often, this leads to feelings of defeat. Thus, you drop the habits that, with persistence, could get you there.
There's nuance in the reasoning behind these findings, but one simple fact is clear. The way we've 'always done' habit change is ineffective at best. At worst, it can damage our mental well-being. The repeated sense of failure leaves us feeling inept and unfulfilled.
Forming powerful habits that stick requires one thing: Ease
So how do we make new habits feel easy? The answer is clear when we look back at redefining habits. We can see that autopilot = easy. Automation makes habits more effortless.
To start, it helps to understand conscious vs. unconscious behavior. San Francisco State University Associate Professor of Psychology, Ezequiel Morsella's "Passive Frame Theory" suggests that "people confuse what consciousness is for with what they think they use it for."
Our conscious minds are the drivers of willpower. But they don't actually do as much work to influence outcomes as we give them credit for. The real master of behavior, no matter our conscious intent, hides deep within the unconscious brain.
The amygdala is the root of the unconscious pathway. This is our brain's integrative center for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation.
Related: Creating Systems Is More Important Than Establishing Goals
Emotions create effortless habits
How does this actually work? It requires us to develop emotional intelligence skills. Instead of wasting precious energy trying to overpower our emotions, we can use them to our advantage. Emotional awareness and mastery allow us to go with the flow of our unconscious mind. This is counterintuitive to the typical approach of relying on self-discipline and willpower.
The fact is, developing a new behavior into an automated habit takes time. For most of us, it's way more time than we'd like. Remember, our brains love instant rewards. Many worthy goals require an upfront investment in habit change, usually with no immediate reward. This delayed gratification is what makes sticking with new habits feel hard.
But we can stay consistent with a simple strategy. If emotions drive behavior, then we can create successful habits by using emotional rewards. Take physical health improvement, for example. If you're trying to achieve this through fitness, don't choose swimming if you fear or dislike being in the water. Instead, base your new habit in actions that feel good. Maybe you actually enjoy walking in the local botanical gardens, biking to work or joining friends at the gym. These are habits that stick.
As an BIZ Experiences, knowing that the reward of financial gain is fleeting can help you adjust your goals and actions, as well. Instead of dwelling on dollar signs, go deeper. What would that money in your bank account mean to you on an emotional level? It might afford you the opportunity to live and work in a dream location. It could provide freedom to build your daily schedule in a way that supports your health and happiness — two tenets of success often neglected, by the way. Take time to ponder this and see what comes up.
Related: How to Deploy Emotional Intelligence for Work Success
Habit success is more likely when we focus on the process, not the outcome
Yes, it still requires effort. But we have adequate energy for the effort when that energy isn't spent on spinning our willpower wheels. Instead of bullying or guilting ourselves, we just do the thing. We do it because we want to.
And when we find something we like to do for the joy of it, even more than the reward, nothing can hold us back from sticking with our habits.
