The new science of habit formation offers several smart strategies for breaking bad habits, none of which rely on white-knuckling it.
“There are other parts of our minds that are much better suited to helping us stop certain patterns of behavior and create newer, better ones,” says Wendy Wood, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and the author of“There are ways to do this in spite of the challenges of everyday life that tend to throw us off course.”Bad habits are born from wanting to feel good.
A few million years later, the possibility of famine is less of a daily issue for most of us, “but plenty of other things came into existence with the ability to make us feel bad,” says Dr. Brewer—work drama,, the perfect Facebook lives of others. “These are new problems, but our primitive brain wants to use the same old programming, so it sends the message, ‘You’re not feeling great. Try doing something that will trigger dopamine and maybe you’ll feel better.
In other words, it became a habit. Karmarkar pointed out a similar pattern of behavior among longtime smokers. “They don’t talk as much about the pleasure they get from having a cigarette during a smoke break, but they do talk about how much they miss that smoke break if they can’t have it.” That extra mile and a half , Wood says, is what habit formation experts call friction—environmental factors that render us less likely to engage in a particular behavior. Friction is everywhere: the impossible-to-resist cookies stashed in your pantry that make you less likely to stick to nutrition goals; the social media apps on your phone that distract you from work; the Netflix autoplay feature that cues up the next episode of your favorite show when you really should get to sleep.
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