Hacking your brain's "reward system" to change habits

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NARRATOR: Why does your brain prefer cake to broccoli? This seems like a simple solution. Cake tastes better, but it's not as simple as you might think.

And the real answer gives us insights into why we act certain ways and how to break bad habits. Ready to dive in?

Let's start with why and how our brains form habits. The why is simple. Habits free up our brain to learn new things.

Think about it. If every day you woke up in the morning and had to relearn how to walk, put your clothes on, tie

your shoes, make coffee, cook food, and eat, you'd be exhausted before you even finished breakfast.

Habits help us learn something once, and then we can automatically act that behavior out without thinking--

simple, right? So how are habits formed? Notice how every single action you take

doesn't become a habit. Your brain has to choose what to lay down as a habit and what not to do again.

How do we do this? We learn a habit based on how rewarding the behavior is.

This is called reward-based learning, and it has three components-- a trigger, a behavior, and a reward.

Let's say you see your shoelaces untied-- that's the trigger-- tie your shoes-- that's the behavior-- and then don't trip when you walk.

That's the reward. The more rewarding a behavior is, the stronger the habit.

In fact, our brains set up a hierarchy of behaviors based on their reward value. The behavior with the bigger reward is the one we act out.

This goes all the way back to our caveman brains that are set up to help us get the most calories we can so we can survive.

For example, sugar and fat have lots of calories. So when we eat cake, part of our brain thinks, calories, survival, so we start

to prefer cake over broccoli. Our brains remember which foods are more rewarding, which is why our parents never served dessert at the same time

as dinner. Given a choice, we'd fill up on cake before we ate our vegetables. But it's not just calories that count.

Our brains also learn the reward value of people, of places, and things. For example think back to all of the birthday parties

you went to as a kid. Your brain combines all of that information-- the taste of the cake, as well as all the fun

you had with your friends, the presents, and the ice cream, of course. All of this information goes into a single composite reward

value, and this reward value gets reinforced with each party we go to. When you are grown up and see a piece of cake,

you don't have to relearn what cake tastes like or remember any of the fun from the times you ate it. The association you learned as a kid kicks in.

You just know that eating cake makes you feel good, and it triggers that automatic and habitual response

to eat it. Think of learning a habit as set and forget. Set the reward value and forget about the details.

This is also why it's so hard to break bad habits. If you're trying to cut down on automatically eating

every piece of cake you see, what is the standard advice that you get? Well, use your willpower and just don't eat it.

Think of all the calories, and what-- think your way out of eating? This might work sometimes, but more often

than not, in the long run, it fails. Why? That's not how our brains work.

To change a behavior, you can't just focus on the behavior itself. You have to address the felt experience

of the rewards of the behavior. If it were as easy as thinking our way out of a behavior, we'd just tell ourselves to stop smoking, stop eating cake,

stop yelling at our kids when we're stressed or whatever, and it would work. But it doesn't.

The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value. That's why it's called reward-based learning,

after all. So how do we update reward values and break bad habits? One simple ingredient, awareness--

to change a habit, our brains need new information so they can see that whatever the value that they had learned in the past is outdated.

By paying attention to the results of the behavior in the present moment, we can jolt our brain out of habit autopilot

and see and feel exactly how rewarding or unrewarding it is for us right now.

This new information resets the reward value on that old habit and moves better behaviors into automatic mode.

Here's an example. In our Craving to Quit program, we don't tell users to force themselves to stop smoking

or that smoking's bad for them. They already know this. Instead, we teach people to pay attention when they smoke.

Most people start smoking when they're a teenager, so they've laid down a strong reward value for cigarettes-- being young and cool at school, rebellion

against their parents, all of that. We have them pay attention when they smoke so they can see how rewarding smoking is for them right now.

What do they notice? After doing this exercise, someone in our program commented, smells like stinky cheese

and tastes like chemicals-- yuck. Did you notice how this person paid attention? They weren't thinking, oh, smoking's bad for me.

They brought awareness to their experience of smoking as they were doing it, noticing the smell and tasting the chemicals in cigarettes.

Yeah, smoking tastes like crap when we actually pay attention. This kind of awareness helps us reset the reward value

in our brain, which in turn helps us break that habit. Can awareness really help us change deeply ingrained habits?

We wondered the same thing, so we actually did the scientific studies to see for ourselves. In our Eat Right Now program, where

people use an app-based mindfulness training to learn to pay attention when eating, we built in a craving tool to measure exactly how rewarding certain eating behaviors are.

The craving tool has them pay careful attention as they overeat or eat a certain type of food so that their brain can accurately

update the reward value. We have found that it takes as few as 10 times of using the craving tool for people to update the reward

value of their habitual behaviors and change their habits. In one study of our Eat Right Now program,

we saw a 40% reduction in craving-related eating. Just think about this for a moment.

This is huge. These studies show that people are no longer habitually reacting to their triggers.

They don't have to force themselves to stop. They can move beyond willpower.

How are they doing this? They're leveraging their brain strength, the very same processes that set up their own habitual behaviors,

to break free from them. Now that you know how your brain actually works,

it's time to update your approach to changing habits. Quit relying on willpower and go to the source, reward value.

And don't forget-- a little awareness goes a long way. [MUSIC PLAYING]