Mindlessly scrolling through apps. Drinking too much coffee. Biting your nails.
If you’ve ever tried to quit a bad habit cold turkey, or replace it with another action, you probably know that neither method gives you the same degree of satisfaction. Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Judson Brewer has a strategy for you to try instead: Train your brain to no longer see the value in doing the thing you once loved.
“When we become disenchanted with unhelpful behaviors or addictions our brain, it leaves this space in our brain where it says, ‘OK, give me something else,'” Brewer, the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, said on an episode of the “10% Happier” podcast that aired last week.
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The advice is derived from Brewer’s own 10-plus years of studying and practicing Buddhist mindfulness, he said. Mindfulness practices have been linked to higher self-compassion, life satisfaction and an overall sense of well-being, studies show.
You can retrain your brain to devalue a specific habit in three steps, said Brewer:
1. Recognize your bad habit loops
This first step is straightforward: Identify the behavior you want to change and, slightly trickier, what causes it. Maybe you procrastinate more when you’re stressed, for example, or your shopping habit rears its head more frequently when you’re bored.
2. Ask yourself, ‘What am I getting from this?’
Don’t just think about your bad habit. Really closely evaluate how you feel when you’re doing it, Brewer said: Chances are good that it has more consequences than rewards, in ways you haven’t consciously thought about before.
Brewer tested this theory firsthand with chronic smokers, he said in a 2015 TED Talk. The majority of his test group had previously tried to quit, and failed, six times on average. “Go ahead and smoke. Just be really curious about what it’s like when you do,” Brewer told the participants.
Afterward, Brewer recounted, one of the smokers’ feedback was: “Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals. Yuck!”
“She knew cognitively that smoking was bad for her. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like s—,” Brewer said. “She moved from knowledge to wisdom … from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones.”
3. Embrace the big-picture reward
Most people fail to give up bad habits because they can’t find something that feels better, said Brewer. Their fidget toy didn’t compare to skin-picking. Reading a book didn’t beat binging on TV shows.
You can regain cognitive control by exercising some more curiosity over why you’re so drawn to the habit you want to ditch, Brewer said in his TED Talk. The more you can think about your habits in a big-picture way — why you’re feeling this craving, how your body and mind respond to it — the more effectively you’ll be able to guide your own actions and ditch your automatic response, he said.
Such mindfulness is more likely to lead to long-term changed behavior than simply cutting yourself off from your guilty pleasure, he added.
“That’s not how we change behavior. That’s not how habits change,” said Brewer. “Even if we could dopamine fast, which you can’t really do, it’s not going to affect anything except make somebody miserable because they’re depriving themselves of all these things that they were addicted to.”
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