A simple way to break a bad habit | Judson Brewer.
Have you ever struggled with a bad habit you cannot stop from doing and wodered why? I do everyday with eating, binge texting, and being late to work. I think this talk about temtation and neurology/psychology on the loop of bad habit formation can give you the key for answering that question.
Video
Jane’s Summary
“Trigger-behavior-reward”, the speaker repeats. He gives an example of smoking as a bad habit. You get stressed at work, you crave, smoke, you feel a lot better. This leads to bad health and less focus and it becomes your routine that cannot be stoppped. Why? It’s all because of prefrontal cortex, that is in charge of cognition, deos not work well when you are stressed. So, if you try to stop smoking all of sudden, you stress yourself too much and preforntal cortex go blind, or go “offline”, and you get to drop tryinig to quit to reward again to ease off your stress. In order to cut a habit out, we need to do it gradually, in a way that does not stress us all of a sudden, so you don’t fail and make a bad memory by negative reinforcment and grow resillence to stopping a bad habit. But, also the speaker says. just constant thought of doing the habit activated posterior cingulate cortex, the same region that lights up when you do the habit and stepping out by reasoning deactivated the area, in turn. So, the speaker suggests to meditate, to think in depth about why it is a bad habit and why we do this habitually in detail, reduce stress by stopping gradually, and replace it with a new good habit little by little.
Vocabulary
- go on a retreat: avoid or draw back
- drift off: to fall asleep
- daydream: thinking something away from your present, procrastinate, distracted
- urge: repeated want toward a goal
- evolutionarily conserved: hard-wired, passed down form the past
- postive and negative reinforcment: postive reinforcment, you do a behaviour, get award and you repeat the behavior, and negative reinforcment, you do a habit, you get punished, you don’t do it as often.
- context-dependent memory: you do more of that behaivour when you are in the place you fromed your memory of doing the behavior
- morbibity and mortality: sadness and life span relaitonship.
- know in someone’s bones: understand and know it by hard
- disinchanted with behaivor: disappoint
- inherent: what’s in your gene or what you have to begin with.
Comment
Level: intermediate
Topic: science
Very intersting scienctific knowledge on habits and quittinig the habits. I realized that you have to know how the brain works to understand and reverse habit to quit it. Linguistically, it is a bit hard to understand the logic if you listen to it only once. I think it would be good exercise to improve your reasoning skills for essays, as when you are providing evidence and formiong thesis.
-Jane Lee
Thank You.