You’re relying on the thing anxiety takes away to fight anxiety. This is why using willpower is so problematic in fighting bad habits. Under stress, your PFC doesn’t perform very well. Plus, you’re a little stressed by The Itch. It squeaks, “Excuse me, kind sir, but weren’t we assiduously endeavoring to do less of those behaviors you just mentioned…?” But the PFC can’t shout as loud as the OFC. Now your PFC is not silent through all of this. Dopamine’s about craving something in the future.
Serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins are more associated with “here and now” good feelings. It’s not about pleasure it’s about prediction and anticipation. People have a lot of wrong ideas about dopamine. When you did stuff in the past, the OFC chunked the feelings that resulted and assigned it a pleasure “credit score.” So the OFC shouts over the PFC saying, “WE FEEL BETTER WHEN WE AVOID WORK, CHECK SOCIAL MEDIA AND EAT FRENCH FRIES!” This all happens in the blink of an eye and you’re rarely cognizant of it.Īnd now that neurotransmitter dopamine is on the case. The OFC is like a big database of what you’ve done and how good it felt. The PFC would say, “Fresh vegetables, getting enough sleep and properly managing your 401K.” But the part of the brain most eagerly raising its hand in class, shouting to the teacher “PICK ME!” is the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Problem is, it’s not the rational thinky part of your brain – the prefrontal cortex (PFC) - that answers the loudest. So your brain asks itself, “What makes me feel better?” (We’ll also draw some insight from The Molecule of More.) Jud Brewer is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist focusing on addiction at Brown University’s Medical School. Three or four hundred times, yes, but never twice.) Instead, we’re gonna go to the expert of experts… I am a one-man bad habit nightmare colossus.
So whether you’re engaged in a semi-abusive relationship with your smartphone, Doritos, or your Xbox, mindfulness can help. And smoking is the hardest chemical addiction to quit-yes, harder than cocaine, alcohol, or heroin.Īnd it works for all habits. …we found that mindfulness training was five times better than the current leading treatment in helping people quit smoking. When it comes to bad habits, mindfulness is a penicillin-level magic bullet. Call it the ouroboros of our bad habits or the samsara of self-discipline, but the cycle of not learning lessons when it comes to bad habits needs to be broken. But why don’t any of our solutions work?īecause most of them are shallow fixes that ignore the neuroscience of how our brains actually function.
We’d like to quit bad habits but we all know how difficult that can be. We waste time we could be using for fun or meaningful stuff and often make our lives worse in the process. A hum of agitation followed by bad habits doesn’t feel like compulsion - it just feels like who you are.īad habits are a barnacle on the side of life, casting us into a recursive Hades of our own making. And once things have been abnormal long enough you don’t know what normal is anymore. Good lord, do something to assassinate that feeling so we can get back to autopilot. The reason we don’t recognize The Itch more often is because about 0.3 seconds after feeling it we’re already self-medicating with bad habits. It’s always something different which means it’s always the same. Nope, sit still for too long and it’s a three-second countdown to feeling bored, or FOMO, or “I should be productive.” Call it what you want. That unease that prevents you from just sitting still and placidly enjoying life like a Zen Master. Some are already responding, “ But I’m not anxious!” (That was probably said anxiously.) If you don’t like the word anxiety, fine, call it something else. Best example? Bad habits.īut what triggers these bad habits to keep happening? Usually, it’s anxiety. It’s quite rare that we deliberately weigh costs and benefits and make explicit choices about anything. How many times a day do we really make deliberate, rational choices? People fall into college majors, into jobs, into relationships. We weigh the options and pick the thing that is likely to make us happiest…
Why do we do the things we do? Aristotle said everything we do was in service of happiness. Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
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