It's never too late to take up a new good habit or kick a bad one, and now could be the perfect time
Whether you resolve to eat more healthily, scroll less, start running or read more, a combination of neuroscience and behavioural research is bringing us new insights to help make good habits and break bad ones.
In a recent study, researchers at Trinity College Dublin proposed a blueprint for habit formation as the balance between two systems in the brain.
The first one triggers automatic responses to cues, like the compulsion to pick up your phone when you see it. The second is about goal-directed behaviours, like putting your phone in a drawer because you’re already late on a deadline.
The balance of those two systems has a strong influence on your ability to make or break habits, says Dr Eike Buabang, who led the research and has studied the neuroscience of habits for the last nine years.
He says much of the early research in the field wasn’t replicated and gave rise to misconceptions about habits, like the idea that it takes 21 days to form one.
“Habits are complex, humans are complex,” Buabang says. “You can’t just put one number to it and say this is how many days it takes to form any habit.”
Buabang’s research has, however, created a kind of playbook for habit forming techniques backed up by the latest neuroscience.
“Forming new habits tends to be a little bit easier than breaking old ones,” he says. “One key is, of course, repetition. This is based on the principle that neurons that fire together, wire together.
“If you keep repeating the same thing, ideally in a stable context, that will strengthen those neural connections and make it more likely that you repeat the behaviour.”
The goal is to create a sense of automaticity, he says. Doing a morning workout right after you wake up is a good example.
It’s something that you can control and repeat, while the stable environment – also a crucial ingredient – might be a yoga mat set up in a spare bedroom, a ready-to-go gym bag next to the front door, or running shoes laid out at the bottom of the stairs.
“There’s no magic number to it – how many repetitions you need for something to become habitual,” Buabang says. “But there are other levers you can pull. One is reinforcement – rewards are great for getting us to repeat something.”
One 2020 study found that if the rewards of a new behaviour were great enough, it could lock in the habit faster than just repeating the behaviour by itself.
This could also be why health behaviours are easier to encode if serious health consequences are on the line – the reward of living longer can be compelling.
Another tactic Buabang recommends is habit stacking. This is where you slip a new habit to the end of an existing habit, using the automaticity of the existing behaviour to support the new one.
That could be adding some skincare to your dental routine or updating your LinkedIn profile at the end of a morning email blast.
One last tip to keep you on track is something called implementation intentions. This is an evidence-based strategy where people create ‘if-then plans’ to avoid falling into old habits.
“This is about planning ahead,” says Buabang. “If you know you’re going to be in a situation where there are triggers that tempt you to engage in your habits that you want to get rid of, have some strategy to deal with them.”
Let’s say your new habit goal is to exercise more to improve your health. When a friend asks you to meet for a calorie-dense latte (the if), suggest instead that you go to an exercise class together (the then).
“You’re basically making an explicit plan to link a situation with behaviour that you want to engage in. The more specific you make it, the better.”
Breaking bad habits will always be more difficult because the behaviour you want to remove is already automatic. “It’s not a great strategy to just rely on your ability to inhibit or not engage in your bad habits,” Buabang says.
“Quite frankly, the best way to kind of get rid of your old habits is to just build new ones.”
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