I once had a dog named Bear. He was a bit of a goofball. As with many dogs, he would eat almost anything. However, he developed a particular liking for the flavor of whipped cream. We bought the kind that was pressurized and thus made a particular sound when squirted from the can -- compressed air volumizing the whipped cream, making it fluffy.
One time a few months after Bear discovered his love of whipped cream, my mom left the door open when shaving her legs. Bear was in a room nearby, and when my mom started squirting shaving cream from the can, which produced that familiar sound, he came running in and started licking the shaving cream right off her legs.
Habit learning can be summarized as the “acquisition of associations between stimuli and responses;” that is, our brains learning to associate causes and effects, enhancing certain neural pathways. To simplify things, let’s just say the brain builds “roads” between various memories, and the more these roads are travelled the easier they become to travel. The more you think something, the easier it is to think it again.6 This happens regardless of why you thought something or if it is correct or incorrect. For instance, being in a bad mood can cause us to have different morals than we’d have when in a good mood.7 From the “bad mood” nodes of our brain, the easiest roads to travel are often those with “bad” morals.
Furthermore, once these paths are created, our subconscious travels them whether we like it or not. They may even form new paths without us knowing -- shortcuts to feelings whose origins are then forgotten, the result of countless choices that we made sometime in the past.8 (I once had a friend who trimmed her nails to calm herself down. She picked up the habit by being calm, then trimming her nails). Even our emotions can manifest as these “unconscious habits.” 9 Let me say that again: our emotions can be habits whose origins we’ve forgotten.
Negative habits can compound themselves by leading to other negative habits, and pretty soon, you’re on a downward spiral with no roads out (literally -- as long as “road” is synonymous with “neural pathway,” of course). When most of your thoughts are negative, you might exhibit symptoms of depression. When most of your thoughts are fearful, you might exhibit symptoms of anxiety.
Replacing the destination of a well-traveled road can be effective as well (we might call this the “bait and switch”).14 For instance, one of the reasons video games are so appealing is because they provide social interaction combined with a challenge. These are both legitimate psychological needs, but it might be that video games aren’t satisfying anymore. We can’t simply replace them with reading a book -- reading isn’t typically either social or challenging -- but we might replace it with a sport. When your brain feels the need for a challenging social activity, it will think video games. But before long, you can have it thinking soccer, and all the associated thoughts along with your new favorite sport.
Habits are both physical as well as mental. Our brain learns from what we think -- consciously or subconsciously -- but we can build new roads for it to travel. Roads that lead to positive thought.
Just don’t get confused between the whipped cream and the shaving cream.
1A. Earling, The Tetris Effect: Do computer games fry your brain? Philadelphia City Paper, March 21, 1996.
2K. Leutwyler, “Tetris Dreams,” scientificamerican.com, October, 2000.
4Stickgold et. al, “Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics.” Science, October 13th, 2000, Volume 290, Issue 5490, pp 350-53.
5Gasbam et. al, “Habit learning and memory in mammals: Behavioral and neural characteristics.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, October 2014, Volume 113, pp 198-208.
6Bayley, P, et. al, “Robust habit learning in the absence of awareness and independent of the medial temporal lobe.” Nature. July 2005, Volume 436, pp 550-53.
7Bauml, K.H., et. al, “To push or not to push? Affective influences on moral judgement depend on decision frame.” Cognition, March 2013, Volume 126, Issue 3, pp 373-77.
8Prince, M. The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality, Normal and Abnormal. The Macmillan Company, 1914.
9Boorstein, S, et. al, All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance. Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boston, MA, 2014, pp 11.
10Nemeth, C.J., et. al, “Creative idea generation: harmony versus stimulation.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 28, 192-99.
11Graybiel, Ann. “Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain” Annual Review of Neuroscience, July 2008, Volume 31, pp 359-87.
12Emmons, R. A., et. al, Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377-89.
13Casey, S. Believe Re-Patterning: The Amazing Technique for “Flipping the Switch” to Positive Thoughts.” Hay House, Inc. Carlsbad, CA, 2012, pp 40.
14Duhigg, C. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business. Random House, Inc., New York.