Lessons - Why Willpower Doesn't Work and What Actually Breaks a Habit | Dr. Jud Brewer - Brown University Neuroscientist & Author of Unwinding Anxiety

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In this lessons episode, discover why willpower alone is not enough to change behavior.

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Understand how habits form through automatic and rewarding patterns.

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Explore how everyday behaviors can gradually become addictive and uncover how positive and negative reinforcement shape the habits that influence everything from eating to daily life.

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Why do you think, I mean, so you've put your life into this work, so you understand it intimately.

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Why do you think there is such an incorrect leading paradigm about habit formation?

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Or willpower, rather, excuse me.

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Yeah.

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I can give you some, how about some baseless speculation, some BS?

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Because who knows historically where this started?

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You can look, you know, in ancient Greece, there was a relief that was, you know, that was carved into the Parthenon that depicted a horse and a rider.

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It was really highlighting the struggle between our passions and reason.

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Yeah.

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And reason is the rider, you know, not nearly as strong as the horse.

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And so, you know, you can look at ancient Greece, you can blame Descartes, you know, who, you know, got us into this whole thinking thing and thinking that because we can think that we're suddenly in control.

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And divorce from our bodies, which is pretty interesting.

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We can even come back to that because that is a major issue with willpower where we think that just because we can think our way through things that that's going to change behavior.

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But that is so far from the neuroscience, it's not even funny.

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Honestly, I think that people like to think that they can be in control.

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And so we tell ourselves this story that I can be in control and will power is part of that story.

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And so it's so facto, you know, if I'm in control and I can tell myself to do things, therefore, I should be able to tell myself to change whatever the behavior is that I want to change.

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And obviously that doesn't work out so well.

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I mean, so your background, it's in psychiatry and neuroscience.

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And I'm curious, I mean, you focus on so many things over your career.

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Just like playing off that point that you just made about we think we're in control and we're really not.

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Because there's a lot of lessons in your book, The Hunger Habit, and you focus on eating and you focus on applying that particular thesis to eating.

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Why are there so many lessons just in that particular activity of eating, of gaining weight, of feeling out of control?

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It seems like to be this little Petri dish that we can learn from that can affect almost every other habit that we have in our life.

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Yes.

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What was it reminds me of this quote from Ted Lasso where Danny, the football player, says football is life, you know, and I think of it this way.

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Eating is life.

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And it literally is more so than some people really believe that football is life.

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And I can't argue with them.

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And I will say that eating literally is life.

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We have to eat to survive.

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And so you can look at it from the entire spectrum of survival.

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all the way to comfort, to habits, to addiction.

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And you can place eating anywhere along that spectrum very easily and all along the spectrum.

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For a lot of people, it is all along that spectrum.

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So it just encompasses so many aspects of life from survival to habits.

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And actually, I want to describe, so for people listening, what is the actual clinical definition of a habit?

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Because I think that setting the baseline so people understand what we're actually speaking about, because I think people also, I mean, I don't want to jump too deep in before they even understand how you understand a habit.

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Yeah, I'll actually give you a twofer.

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Let's define habit and let's define addiction as well so that we can differentiate those two.

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So habit is basically something that we do automatically.

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You know, that's a simple operational definition that generally holds pretty well.

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And habits are set up so that we can learn things and then have the energy the next day to not have to relearn that and learn something new.

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So most habits are extremely helpful, and it's an efficiency process for our brain.

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Imagine waking up every morning and having to relearn everything from walking to making breakfast.

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We'd be exhausted before we'd even relearned how to make coffee.

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So that's, you know, habit is automatic behavior, something that we see a cue and that cues this process, this automated process to just do the thing.

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In contrast, addiction, I think of habit along a spectrum and at the far end of that spectrum is addiction.

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And the definition of addiction I learned in residency was continued use despite adverse consequences.

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And the reason I bring that forward as well is that often people think and they describe their addictions in terms of a habit.

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I'm in the habit of smoking.

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I'm in the habit of overeating or whatever.

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But if you look at that definition, continue juice despite adverse consequences, we can see how they're the obvious ones like smoking, which aren't helpful for survival.

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But then the ones that are not so obvious where it overlaps between these survival mechanisms like eating, we all have to eat to survive, and alcohol.

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Doing that same behavior despite adverse consequences where we, for example, overeating and clinical obesity has been linked to anti-survival, you know, a lot of negative health consequences from not being an ideal weight.

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So that's how I think of habit.

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And then that's how I think of its relationship.

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We can be in a habit of doing something where we're continuing to do it despite adverse consequences.

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So addiction, it could even fall into that addiction spectrum as well.

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Does that make sense?

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It does.

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And it's very interesting because some things seem to be more black and white.

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So I think that most people in 2024 would agree that smoking is...

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is more of an addiction than a habit.

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But I'm curious about food in particular, and maybe we can just extrapolate to other habits that maybe turn into addictions.

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And what is that bridge that we cross when we're not aware?

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Because I think that's where people...

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predominantly get into trouble.

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I don't think people wake up and are like, hey, I want to be clinically obese or just out of shape or eat more than I really need.

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People don't go into life thinking that, but that's the output after five, 10 years.

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So how does that happen in the brain?

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We turn a habit into an addiction.

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Yes.

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Well, let's use eating as an example.

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Yeah.

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Our brains learn to do behaviors based on how rewarding they are.

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And often we'll set up these habits early in life.

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So, for example, if we, you know, we're five years old and we go to a birthday party, you know, our parents aren't sending us to that birthday party saying, you know, why don't you go and get some nutritious food at this?

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You know, this is going to substitute for lunch.

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You know, they're sending us probably trying to have us eat some healthy meal before we go so we don't overindulge on the cake and ice cream.

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But the point there is that we're already starting to learn to associate ice cream, cake, things like that with celebrations, with connection with people and all of that.

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And you can see as we go through life, we start to learn to eat in the absence of hunger.

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So we set up these habitual behaviors, celebrations, that we're overindulging in ways that are not –

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aligned with our physiology.

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Our brain and our body aren't saying, hey, you're hungry, go eat that cake.

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Typically not, right?

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At an office party or whatever, it's like, oh, here's a celebration, here's some cake, it looks good.

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And so we just go into the habit mode of eating.

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So these habits get set up in the way that we are doing the thing because it's now associated not with a survival strategy, like I need calories now, but with something else.

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And if that something else is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it to the point where it is habitual.

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So with eating, it could be celebrations.

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It could also be consolations.

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where we learn, you know, we're bored one day and we go into the, we're rummaging around the kitchen, just looking for something we eat, you know, and that boredom gap is filled with some, typically some type of a comfort food.

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And so we learn, oh, if I'm bored, if I'm sad, if I'm mad, if I'm lonely, all these things, we learn that food becomes this consolation mechanism that can make us feel less bad.

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And it's rewarding enough that it gets set up as a habit.

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So we've got these two reinforcement learning processes.

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One is called positive reinforcement, where it's all the celebratory stuff.

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It's like, ooh, you just had a good meal, go have some dessert.

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And the other is this negative reinforcement loop where it says, oh, you feel bad, make yourself feel better.

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And this is just using food as an example.

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Almost every habit falls into the same category where if we're continuing the pleasant, the behavior gets reinforced through positive reinforcement.

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If we're making the unpleasant go away or avoiding it.

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We're reinforcing that habit through negative reinforcement.

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And this, you know, honestly, this process, not that sea slugs eat birthday cake, but this has been shown, you know, Eric Gendel got the Nobel Prize back in the year 2000 showing that this is a very evolutionarily conserved process all the way back to the most basic of nervous systems.

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Thanks for tuning in.

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