Habits are a significant part of our daily behavior, and understanding the underlying neural mechanisms of procedural memory and task bracketing can provide powerful tools for forming, maintaining, and breaking habits.
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habits are a big part of who we are what
we do habitually makes up much of what
we do entirely in fact it's estimated
that up to 70 percent of our waking behavior
behavior
is made up of habitual behavior
people are highly variable and if you
can't form one habit easily it doesn't
mean that you can't form other habits easily
easily
it takes 21 days to form a habit some
people say 18 some people say 21 some
people say 30 days some people say 60
days so which one is it does it depend
on the habit that one is trying to form
or does it depend on the person that's
trying to form the habit there's a study
published in 2010 first author lally l-a-l-l-y
l-a-l-l-y
this study found that for the same habit
to be formed
it can take anywhere from 18 days to as
many as 254 days for different
individuals to form that habit
so what i'd like to do is to take the
scientific literature of how the nervous
system learns and engages in
neuroplasticity and apply that to habit
formation habit maintenance and
if so desired how to break particular
habits i'd like to give you a particular
tool that's gleaned from the research
psychology literature
with each repetition of a habit
small changes occur in the cognitive and
neural mechanisms as a sodium associated
with procedural memory so i just want to
talk for a second about what procedural
memory is
in the neuroscience of memory we
distinguish between what's called
episodic memory and procedural memory
episodic memory is a recall of a
particular set of events that happened
whereas procedural memory is holding in
mind the specific sequence of things
that need to happen in order for a
particular outcome to occur so think of
it like a recipe or a protocol or if for
the sake of exercise it's like sets and
reps or a particular course that you're
going to run or cycle or the number of
laps you're going to swim and how you're
going to perform it
it's very clear that for anyone trying
to adopt new habits
getting into the mindset of procedural
memory is very useful for overcoming
that barrier that we call limbic
friction how do you do that well
a simple
visualization exerciser doesn't even
have to be done eyes closed you know
oftentimes we hear visualization
exercise you think about sitting in the
lotus position eyes closed
trying really hard to visualize
something doesn't need to be anything
like that it can simply be
if you are deciding to
adopt a new habit to just think about
the very specific sequence of steps
that's required to execute that habit
and i'll use a trivial example but this
could be applied to anything let's say i
want to get into the habit of making
myself or someone else in my household a
cup of espresso every morning
i would actually think through each of
those steps
walk into the kitchen turn on the
espresso machine draw the espresso
walking through each of those steps from
start to finish and turns out just that
simple mental exercise done once can
shift people toward a much higher
likelihood of performing that habit
regularly not just the first time but as
they continue out into the days and
weeks that follow so that's remarkable
to me and the literature is really robust
robust
so now i'd like to discuss a second and
what i think is perhaps the most
powerful tool for being able to acquire
and stick to new habits
the tool that i'm referring to
is something called task bracketing and
the neural circuits associated with task bracketing
bracketing
are basically the neural circuits that
are going to allow you to learn any new
type of habit or break any habit that
you'd like to break
we have in our brain a set of neural
circuits that fall under the umbrella
term of the basal ganglia the basal
ganglia are involved in action execution
meaning doing certain things and action suppression
