Name: Neuroscientist: TRY IT FOR 1 DAY! You Won't Regret It! Habits of The Ultra Wealthy for 2023
Uploaded: 2025-12-07T03:22:14.000Z
Duration: 11 min 13 s
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Adverbs of degree

What we do habitually makes up much of what we do entirely.

Basic passive voice

In fact, it's estimated that up to 70% of our waking behavior is made up of habitual behavior.

if you can't form one habit easily, it doesn't mean that you can't form other habits easily.

Some people say 18, some people say 21, some people say 30 days, some people say 60 days.

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.

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 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, so think of it like a recipe or a protocol or 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.

Well, a simple visualization exercise, or it 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, and you're trying really hard to visualize something.

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.

It 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.

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 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, not doing certain things.

In the experimental realm, these are referred to as go, meaning do or no go, don't do certain things.

And some of us fall more into the category of we find it very easy to do certain things, but

Some people have a lot of no go type circuits that are very robust and they have a lot of behavioral constraint, but

they have a harder time getting into action.

And some people have a perfect balance of both.

Task bracketing involves a particular set of neural circuits within the basal ganglia.

We have particular circuits in our brain that are devoted to framing the events that happen just before and as we initiate a habit, and

In other words, it acts as a sort of marker for the habit execution, but

This is very important because task bracketing is what underlies whether or not a habit would will be context dependent or not, whether or not it will be strong and likely to occur.

Even if we didn't get a good night's sleep the night before, even if we're feeling distracted, even if we are not feeling like doing something emotionally, or if we Are, you know, completely overwhelmed by other events.

If the neural circuits for task bracketing are deeply embedded in us, meaning they are very robust around a particular habit, well, then it's likely that we're going to go out for that zone 2 cardio no matter what.

That, that we're going to brush our teeth no matter what.

In fact, brushing our teeth is a pretty good example because for most people, even if you got a terrible night's sleep, even if everything in your life is going wrong, chances are, unless you're very depressed, if you're going to leave to work, or even if you're not, that you're going to still carry out the behavior of brushing your teeth in the morning.

But you are probably less likely to perform particular habits that are not what you deem as necessary.

But if you think about it, brushing your teeth, exercise, eating particular foods, maybe engaging socially in particular ways, you are the one that places any kind of value assessment on which ones are essential and which ones are negotiable.

So task bracketing sets a neural imprint, a kind of a fingerprint in your brain of this thing has to happen at this particular time of day, so much so that it's reflexive.

While it is important to think about the sequence of events that would be required in order to engage in that behavior, that procedural memory visualization exercise we talked about before, that will help, there is a way also that you can orient your nervous system toward this tax bracketing process so that your nervous system is shifted or oriented towards the execution of a given habit.

So this is sort of like warming up your body to exercise.

When the dorsolateral striatum is engaged, your body and your brain are primed to execute a habit, and

then you get to consciously insert which habit you want to perform.

If you are considering adopting a new habit, or if you are trying to break a habit, it's very useful to think not just about the procedural aspects of what you're going to do, but

also think about the events that precede and follow that particular habit and the execution, or at least the effort to execute that habit.

What you're doing is you're casting a kind of a spotlight around a bin of time or a set of events for which dopamine can be associated.

What does this look like in the practical sense?

Well, again, I'll just try and use very simple concrete examples, but this could carry over to anything.

Let's say I were somebody who has a hard time getting in that 30 to 60 minutes of zone two coffee, cardiovascular exercise, mid morning.

What I should do is positively anticipate the onset and the offset of that session.

So thinking about leaning into the effort, going out and doing that zone two cardio session, and

I should think about how I'm going to feel after.

So not just thinking about how great I'm going to feel after, but

also thinking about how hard it's going to be at the beginning and then trying to reward myself subjectively for the entire experience.

In other words, start rewarding task bracketing.

In addition to rewarding the execution of the habit itself.

I'll get into the specific tool for breaking habits.

Capture the sequence of events, not that led to the bad habit execution, but

actually to take advantage of the fact that the neurons that were responsible for generating that bad habit were, were, were active a moment ago and to actually engage in a replacement behavior immediately afterward.

Now this is really interesting and I think powerful because I would have thought that you have to engage in a replacement behavior that truly replaces the bad habit behavior, right?

That you would have to be able to identify your state of mind or the sequence of events leading into the bad habit, but

rather the stage or the period immediately after the bad habit.

Execution is a unique opportunity to insert a different type of what we would call adaptive behavior.

But that could be any behavior that's not in line with the bad behavior.

Let's say you find yourself, you're trying to do focused work.

You pick up your phone, you're disappointing yourself for picking up your phone.

You could of course, just put it down and re engage and the work behavior.

But if you were good at that, then you probably wouldn't have done it in the first place.

And so what turns out to be very effective is to go engage in some other positive habit.

The first one is you start to link in time the execution of a bad behavior to this other good behavior.

And in doing so, you start to recruit other neural circuits, other neurons that can start to somewhat dismantle the sequence of firing associated with the bad behavior.

In other words, you start to create a kind of a double habit that starts with a bad habit and then ends with a good habit.

And that seems to create enough of a temporal mismatch so that then recognizing when you're heading toward the bad habit becomes more apparent to you.

So again, I want to make this very, very concrete.

Let's say that the behavior is reflexively picking up one's phone.