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FeedChange: A Primer
It’s difficult to break old habits—but not impossible.
(page 1 of 2)
If you’re like 45 percent of Americans who made a New Year’s resolution, it’s a good bet that your plans now seem as tiresome as an old party hat. That’s because, depending on what survey you listen to, only 8 percent succeed in sticking to their goals and making it part of their everyday routines. No wonder New Year’s resolutions have become the butt of jokes. (Say, did you hear about the woman who couldn’t change? It seems her resolution went in one year and out the other.)
Fortunately, science has intervened to help us understand why it’s so difficult to break old habits and adopt healthy behaviors. Thanks largely to developments in brain-imaging techniques, researchers have discovered how habits or routines actually become embedded in a region of our brains called the basal ganglia.
Scientists have long been aware that this region is critical to habit change, addiction and procedural learning. It’s also where Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other neuropsychiatric disorders occur.
But only in recent years have scientists gained insight into how the brain processes familiar routines versus unfamiliar ones—especially in the way new synaptic connections occur whenever we’re learning something new. The most important discovery came at MIT’s McGovern Institute, where researchers linked the basal ganglia to creativity and innovation. These studies show that, when we break from our comfort zone and consciously try to develop new habits, we create new synaptic pathways—even new brain cells—that allow us to bypass procedural ruts and produce firing patterns that are the hallmarks of creative, innovative thinking.
But before you draw up another life plan in celebration of your new goals, there are other things to consider. Those new neural activity patterns aren’t embedded overnight. The brain needs time to sort through and organize its new input, ultimately creating a pathway if the pattern is repeated frequently enough. But more often than not, the brain reverts back to its old firing patterns.
In fact, neuroscientists now know that old pathways can be reactivated when something sparks the old habit again. Hence, an ex-smoker might resume his old ways simply by continuing an associative behavior like drinking. The process of training the brain to accept new behaviors is one reason experts recommend finding support and trying methods that have worked in the past.
Gael Chiarella Alba, a yoga instructor turned spiritual life coach, won’t consider any change without daily reflection to help stay the course. Alba, who lives in Phoenixville on the aptly named Onward Avenue, concedes that she’s a case study for change. She moved from Long Island, N.Y., to be closer to her aging parents in Devon. She formed new social networks, dated and married. Recently she started a new business, Yokibics Productions. “What generally happens is that you are too ambitious, and you need to tailor your goals,” she says.
Another aspect of change to consider: You’re not merely coming up with a goal (I will change jobs, I’ll get out of debt, I will enjoy life more), it takes real work—even some visualization of the future—to rewire your circuitry. This is where other parts of your brain come into play.
Every decision you make involves the insula (emotions) and its counterpart, the cortex (rational thought). The limbic system—via the insula—sends the body into “fight or flight” mode, while the neocortex system tends to control or override the emotional brain’s need for pleasure and safety. How these two areas interact is one reason why behavior psychologists and life coaches make the recommendations they do. Most agree that we often sabotage our best intentions by making it difficult for our emotional brain to cooperate.
M.J. Ryan, a best-selling San Francisco-based author and contributing editor to Health and Good Housekeeping magazines, writes extensively about the mind-body connection—especially the way in which the emotional brain can determine a successful outcome for long-term change. She addresses the importance of what she calls the “stretch zone”—a place between a stressed-out state of being and the “comfort zone.”
