Willpower likely won’t save you from your bad habits. Science explains why（原声文稿）

So here's the thing to recognize about your bad habit.

You cannot eradicate your bad habit. You have to trick your neurology.

being driven primarily by understanding the neurology of where habits come from.

the problems that we were seeing in our community.

It turns out not only was I wrong, society was wrong.

Basically we tend to develop addictions when we have a psychological need.

great vehicles for providing the hits that you need when you need them.

when a bad habit strikes that people know that they have a bad habit.

the most successful people, don't necessarily ability to form habits is one of the most important human race has come up with in all primates, When you form a habit, you can execute a fairly about other things.

But the downside of a habit is that you stop thinking while you're doing a habit.

the negative consequences of that behavior.

There is a woman in Windywood who did a study when she was at Duke.

all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

is that there's this thing called the habit loop.

There's three parts to it. There's first a cue, which is a trigger for a behavior.

and then the behavior itself, which we usually refer to as a routine.

reward is actually why the habit happens in the first place.

remember this pattern for the future or not.

of craving emerges that drives your behavior.

instance, backing your car out of a driveway work, but you weren't hungry five minutes earlier.

You can find these cues and rewards that kind of explain the behaviors. So it's enormously important.

Between 1990 and 2000, that is deemed the decade of the brain.

There was a lot of money into studying brain illnesses, brain disease.

There was a lot of money in terms of learning about the brain.

And during that time, we are looking for some neural footprint of addiction.

And we thought that once cocaine interacted with these dopamine neurons, it just had this almost magical power over the person's behavior.

We've learned that that's not necessarily the case.

important for the lay audience to keep the focus on the person's behavior.

Are they not showing up for work?

Are they not meeting their obligations at home?

Are they not meeting their obligations in school?

All of these are important indicators of whether someone is drug addicted or not.

And notice, I didn't look at anyone's brain.

I'm really looking at the person's behavior.

Behavioral addiction is a lot like substance addiction in a lot of ways.

the short term that you do compulsively so you keep returning to it over and well-being in lots of different respects and it's much newer it's a of addiction there are two main reasons the first one is that rewards that you need for a system to be addictive.

either rewards or if it's negative, then negative experiences.

And you actually need that mix of positive and negative feedback.

to get a lot of hits, sometimes you aren't.

And it's that unpredictability that we find so compelling.

ourselves next, whenever we don't feel particularly efficacious like moments when you're looking for what some people call the adult pacifier.

turn on your screen, you swipe, and you feel relaxed again.

use willpower to make this behavior go away, it's not going to work.

of blast your way through ignoring it is to change it.

a reward, you can't change all three parts at once.

really want to change is you want to change the routine, the behavior.

you'll be able to shoehorn that new behavior into your daily pattern.

You can't change everything overnight.

habit tomorrow and expect it to be easy and effortless.

pathways associated with a certain behavior.

And those neural pathways just build up over time. You can't speed up that process any more than is natural.