WASHINGTON — Uh-oh, the new year has just begun and already you’re finding it hard to keep those resolutions to junk the junk food, get off the couch or kick smoking. There’s a biological reason a lot of our bad habits are so hard to break — they get wired into our brains.
That’s not an excuse to give up. Understanding how unhealthy behaviors become ingrained has scientists learning some tricks that might help good habits replace the bad.
“Why are bad habits stronger? You’re fighting against the power of an immediate reward,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and an authority on the brain’s pleasure pathway.
It’s the fudge vs. broccoli choice: Chocolate’s yum factor tends to beat out the knowledge that sticking with veggies brings an eventual reward of lost pounds.
Just how that bit of happiness turns into a habit involves a pleasure-sensing chemical named dopamine. It conditions the brain to want that reward again and again — reinforcing the connection each time — especially when it gets the right cue from your environment.
People tend to overestimate their ability to resist temptations around them, thus undermining attempts to shed bad habits, said experimental psychologist Loran Nordgren, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“People have this self-control hubris, this belief they can handle more than they can,” said Nordgren, who studies the tug of war between willpower and temptation.
In one experiment, he measured whether heavy smokers could watch a film that romanticizes the habit — called “Coffee and Cigarettes” — without taking a puff.
Upping the ante, they would be paid according to their level of temptation: Could they hold an unlit cigarette while watching? Keep the pack on the table? Or did they need to leave the pack in another room?
Smokers who had predicted they could resist a lot of temptation tended to hold the unlit cigarette — and were more likely to light up than those who knew better than to hang onto the pack, Nordgren said. He now is beginning to study how recovering drug addicts deal with real-world temptations.
But temptation can be more insidious than how close at hand the cigarettes are.
Always snack in front of your favorite TV show? A dopamine-rich part of the brain named the striatum memorizes rituals and routines that are linked to getting a particular reward, Volkow said. Eventually, those environmental cues trigger the striatum to make some behaviors almost automatic.
Even scientists who recognize it can fall prey. “I don’t like popcorn. But every time I go to the cinema, I have to eat it,” Volkow said. “It’s fascinating.”
Steps in the right direction
Researchers say there are some steps that might help counter your brain’s hold on bad habits:
• Repeat, repeat, repeat the behavior — the same routine at the same time of day. Resolved to exercise? Doing it at the same time of the morning, rather than fitting it in haphazardly, makes the striatum part of the brain recognize the habit.
• Exercise itself raises dopamine levels, so eventually your brain will get a feel-good hit even if your muscles protest.
• Reward yourself with something you really desire. You exercised all week? Stuck to your diet? Buy a book, a great pair of jeans or try a fancy restaurant.
• Stress can reactivate the bad-habit circuitry.
• Cut out the rituals linked to your bad habits. No eating in front of the TV, ever.
