Russell A. Poldrack
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
How do you define it in your world? I guess I think of a habit as something that we do that's kind of triggered by the world without us thinking about it. And, you know, so we there's lots of things that we do every day in our behavior that we don't really think about at all. Right. Take driving. Right.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
You know, you get into your car and you have to press pedals and move levers and all these various things. And when you're first learning to drive a car, you have to think about all of those different things. Right. You know, which pedal is which, which is the brake, which is the gas. But if you've been driving for 20 years, you never think about which pedal is doing which thing, right?
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
You just get in the car and drive and you're thinking about where do I need to go and what's the traffic going to be like and all those sort of things. So habits are the things that our brains do to basically kind of offload us needing to think about all these things that kind of –
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
don't change in the world and usually habits are a good thing we we notice them when they're a bad thing you know when we have bad habits that we want to get rid of and we can't but um i think you know one really important thing that that neuroscientists know about habits is just how fundamentally important they are and that's why our brains are kind of built to make them
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
I think that's certainly true, that the habits that we talk the most about are the ones that have this emotional or what neuroscientists call incentive salience, that there's something in the world that we really want to get and it's almost like a craving or a powerful drive to do the thing.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And you're right that most of the habits that we have in the world, when I'm going to lock the door as I leave the house, I don't feel a craving to do that. But what we know is that it's actually the same machinery in our brains that creates the habit of locking your door when you leave and the habit of needing to go have another cigarette.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
The main difference is that if you think about what are the things in the world that cause these kinds of habits we're talking about, the ones where we kind of feel compelled to do something, they're mostly driven by these features of the modern world that weren't there when we were evolving millions of years ago. The world has these really powerful. stimuli that impinge on our brains.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And the chemicals that we ingest are the big ones. So think about why is it that you have to have the cigarette? Well, it's because every time you have a cigarette, the nicotine goes into your bloodstream and it goes and affects some neurons in your brain. And those ultimately cause changes that strengthen that habit. It's happening through the same machinery that generates all the other habits.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
It's such a much more powerful driver of brain activity than anything we ever kind of ran. If you think about what were the things people were eating You know, back when we were, you know, sort of hunter gatherers, they weren't they weren't as tasty as, you know, potato chips or candy bars. Right.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
They were like, you know, you might find a little berry or maybe you go like, you know, kill an animal and eat some bone marrow or something like that. We now have these stimuli that affect our brain and in just a fundamentally different way than the things that we evolved with. And that's often what kind of drives these sorts of habits.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
I think in general, it's true that if you take exercising, the way to get yourself to exercise regularly in the long term is to make it part of a routine. And a routine is kind of like a habit where you don't One way to think about it is you don't have to think about whether you're going to the gym or you don't want to have to think about whether to go to the gym today.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
You want to just have that be what you do. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I go to the gym and I don't want to have to get up every morning and decide whether I'm going. I just know that that's what I do on Tuesday and Thursday. And if you have that sort of routine in place, then it becomes kind of self-sustaining, right?
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Whereas if you kind of pick and choose every morning, well, I go to the gym today, and if I am, will I go at 9 a.m. or 3 p.m. ?
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
becomes a much harder thing to ingrain in part because you're just you know you're it's open to you having to think about it and then it's easier for you to decide at each point in time kind of not to do it and the only way something becomes a routine is when you do it over and over again now there are these there are these kind of pop culture ideas about you know it takes 28 days to create a habit or you know whatever the number might be that the the person will give you
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And in general, you know, what we know from the little bit of research that's been done on this is that it really varies across people and it varies across habits. But, you know, for the same habit, one person might need a month to make it kind of, you know, a part of their routine and one person might need a lot longer.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And I don't I don't think we understand, you know, where those differences between people come from, but we know that they exist.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Yes. A routine is often going to be kind of a chain of different things. Like, you know, going to the gym involves putting on your gym clothes and then, you know, Like getting to the gym and then signing in at the gym and then going and getting on the treadmill. So there's a whole bunch of things there. We usually think of habits as more sort of smaller, like atomic pieces of behavior.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
So like each of the little things I have to do, you know, putting on my clothes or getting in the car or driving to the gym. Each of those little things we might think of as a habit and a routine you can sort of think of as like a bunch of habits put together in some sense. You know, addictions are...
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
I think of addictions as kind of like the hijacking of the habit system by these unnaturally strong stimuli that the modern world gives us. And the thing that differs about when we think about what is an addiction versus a habit, the thing that really differs is this kind of, as you mentioned earlier, this kind of emotional craving or this incentive to need to do something.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
A few people really feel like they need to go for a run or need to go to the gym, but not in the same way that somebody who's addicted to a drug feels the need to get that drug. The one other difference, one of the things that we've learned about addiction is that one of the reasons that addictions are so hard to break is because over time, instead of taking the drug and getting a high out of it,
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
The drug just gets the person from sort of an emotional low back to their normal state. So the brain in general is kind of an adaptive machine, and it'll adapt to whatever the world is doing.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And so that's one of the big changes is people who become addicted, when they're in withdrawal, they feel this very kind of unpleasant, negative emotion, and the drug just sort of takes them back to their normal emotion.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
You certainly can create habits. And I think the thing that's most important for creating a new habit is sort of consistent, regular experience or practice, if you will. So if you decide, for example, that you want to let's say that you want to start flossing every night because your dentist told you that you need to floss. What you need to do is first have a way to trigger that behavior.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Once it becomes a habit, then you'll walk into the bathroom and start doing it without really thinking about it. When you're starting out, it's not going to just happen on its own. And so you can imagine sort of building scaffolding to help make it happen, right? Put a post-it note on the mirror saying, hey, did you remember to floss or some other way to kind of to remind you to do the thing.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And then once you've done it often enough, then it can become a sort of a thing that you just do without thinking about it. So is it harder to break a bad habit or create a good one? I think it's hard to say in general. It's generally hard to do both. Like nicotine addiction is incredibly hard to break.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Of people who try to stop smoking, the data show that after a year, only about a third of them have succeeded in not smoking for a year. And so that's that's incredibly hard. I don't know what the numbers are on people who decide they want to start exercising. They're probably not much better.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
But I think that, you know, the the reason that that bad habits are so hard to break in part has depending on the bad habit, if you're talking about things like like addictions.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
you know has to do with the fact that we have like our bodies have these kind of physiological reactions that go along with the kind of you know the mental stuff that that happens in a habit whereas you know we're mostly not having cravings to you know floss our teeth or go to the gym or anything like that and and we also we don't get a physiological rush out of those things
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
So in general, I think that there's some bad habits that aren't that hard to break. I used to bite my fingernails, and I was able to stop doing that after my wife pointed out what I was probably ingesting when I was biting them. But it must have taken me at least a couple of months where...
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Part of breaking a habit is just realizing when the habit is happening and what are the things that drive you to do it and then figuring out strategies to get around that. And that's a lot easier for habits like fingernail biting than it is for things like ingesting substances or food or things like that.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
I think that's definitely one of the important ingredients. Because one of the things we know is that once a habit gets triggered, it's really hard to kind of stop oneself. And so a much more effective way to prevent oneself from... engaging in the habit is just avoiding the trigger. So if you're a smoker, a well known trigger of smoking is walking into a bar, right?
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
You smell smoke, you have a drink, and that often will drive people to smoke. Avoiding the bar is a pretty good way to do that. Not everybody can avoid the triggers of their bad habits. And then you have to think about how can I not engage in the habit even when the triggers are there?
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
One of the techniques that comes from psychology that seems to be useful, there's evidence of this working, is it's called an implementation intention. And the idea is basically that you kind of role play in your mind how you're going to behave. So you'll say you don't want to smoke and you have a friend who you always smoke with.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Sort of think through some scenarios of how you're going to actually behave when you see them and they bring out the cigarettes and you want to tell them that you're not interested in smoking. And the more detailed the plans, the better. On the flip side of building new habits, I think giving yourself as much scaffolding as you can to help
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
keep the behavior going in the early days until it becomes kind of more of a routine. That's probably one of the most effective ways to do it. But I think one of the other things to take away from a lot of this research is that both breaking and creating habits is really hard. Neuroscience tells us why in a lot of ways.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And so we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves when we fail to either change our behavior to break a habit or to generate a new one and sort of have a little more empathy for ourselves and for other people who we see in our lives who are having trouble changing their behavior.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Certainly, yeah. I mean, I think that they're, you know, just as we can have habits in terms of like, you know, the things we eat or drink or, you know, put in our bodies. There are sort of, you know, social habits and emotional habits. One common thing in couples, right, is that, you know, people start to have
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
habitual responses they start to have you know the um a particular negative response to like something that their partner does right and those can be those can become like really overwhelming to a relationship right um and similarly once you've worked with colleagues for a number of years you can come to predict how they're going to behave in certain situations and those are very persistent behaviors so they have many of the same hallmarks as habits now whether
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Those are much harder things to study. Part of the reason we know a lot about the habits of ingesting things is because we can study them in rats.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
because you keep doing it it goes back to this idea that you know in general the brain is always trying to kind of automate as much as it can right and if you do something a lot that will tend to get automated so it might be you know either because of you know a particular personality quirk or just because of some experiences that a person has they start doing something and over time that thing becomes
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
more and more of a, you know, kind of a routine that they engage in or, you know, like anytime they're in this situation, they behave in that particular way. And often that's good because we don't have to think about how we're behaving in any particular situation, but sometimes it can lead to these sorts of, you know, bad behaviors.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
That that's definitely true. You know, it's like you can't really read about how to play guitar, right, and be able to play guitar, you know, based on just that you needed it. It requires kind of, you know, personal experience and motivation and actually doing the thing because the you know, the systems in the brain that develop habits are.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
are basically the same systems that allow us to kind of choose what we're doing from moment to moment. We call it the action selection system. It's basically determining, am I going to go left or right at this particular fork in the road? Am I going to pick the candy bar or the piece of fruit at the grocery store? Am I going to say something nice or something mean to this particular person?
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
The systems in our brain that let us do that are kind of fundamentally tied in with how habits are built.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
That's exactly right. And so one of the things that people in the behavior change literature talk about is – something called a commitment device, which is basically a way of announcing your particular intention and having there be some kind of consequence
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
if you fail to uh to achieve it so for example um there's a there's a radio lab episode a while ago that talked about this woman named zelda gamsen who had been a kind of a like lifelong activist for racial equality and she really wanted to stop smoking and so basically um she at some point said to one of her friends if i ever smoke again i'm going to give 5 000 to the ku klux klan um
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And so, you know, that and assuming that she was going to be held to that bargain, you know, that's a very powerful motivator, right, for much more powerful than you can imagine it would have been if she had said that to herself. And there's some work showing that, you know, people have set up kind of apps to do these kind of like commitment devices.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And the research shows that if you do it publicly, it's substantially more powerful than if you just kind of do it for yourself.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
know i think that in the future we may understand more about exactly how to more kind of almost surgically get rid of habits there's some really interesting stuff some findings with people a small number of people who've had strokes in a particular part of the brain who basically wake up after their stroke and are no longer interested in in smoking they were smokers before their stroke the stroke causes a lesion in this particular part of the brain called the insula and suddenly they no longer have the desire to smoke
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
And so the question is whether you can harness – obviously, we don't want to go like damage people's brains just to stop them from smoking because that could have other impacts as well. But to the degree that that tells us something about how we might go in and sort of more precisely –
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
alter the function of the brain for people where that sort of thing would be worthwhile to help break a really kind of a life-damaging habit. I think that, you know, in the next few decades, we're going to understand a lot more from neuroscience about how to potentially do that.
Something You Should Know
The Transformative Power of Play & How Habits Stick - SYSK Choice
Usually habits are a good thing. We notice them when they're a bad thing, you know, when we have bad habits that we want to get rid of. You know, one really important thing that neuroscientists know about habits is just how fundamentally important they are, and that's why our brains are kind of built to make them.