354. How to break a toxic habit

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Before we get into it, I want to let you guys know that this episode you're about to listen to is also on YouTube. Yes, we now do video podcasts over on YouTube, so if you prefer to watch episodes rather than listen to them, go and check it out. There will be a link in the description. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here. Back for another episode as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, we're going to talk about the psychology of toks habits, the little rituals that you know, we swear we're gonna quit, the behaviors that we hide, that we justify, that we laugh off, the ones that make us promise ourselves like tomorrow it's gonna be different. You know, when I turn twenty seven, I'm gonna quit smoking. When I turn twenty eight, I'm gonna quit drinking, and then surprisingly it never happens. And you know, it could be procrastination, it could be smoking, it could be using your phone way too often, it could be self sabotaging. We're gonna cover them all. I think what's so difficult about these toxic habits is that so often, let's be honest, like, we want to stop, and we really do want to, you know, create a good future for ourselves in our twenties, and we simply can't, not because we don't know any better, not because we don't care about ourselves, but because our brains are doing what they've been trained to do, perform a pattern rather than learn a new one. This isn't a discipline problem. It's not a will power problem, as people may have you believe. It is deeply rooted in psychology, in coping, in how we relate to our emotions. But it can also be rewired using that same psychology if you understand it. So today I'm going to give you the ultimate guide to breaking toxic habits, from why they form, to the four biggest mistakes we make when we're trying to change, and what we can do instead, what actually might help us become better people, become the people we want to be. Without further ado, let's get into how we can break a toxic habit cycle. We do this at the beginning of every episode. I know, but let's firstly pin down what we mean by a toxic habit cycle. The idea of toxic habits is a very tidy phrase. It could probably mean anything from I go to bed too late, too I can't stop replaying the same relationship pattern. Really, what we're referring to is a behavior that is repeated regularly, often automatically, that is reinforced by some kind of reward that can describe either a positive or negative habit. When a habit becomes toxic, really, it's just that the outcome that follows the behavior is deeply harmful to us, or something that we actually don't want to occur that doesn't align with who we want to be. A habit also becomes toxic when it crosses three thresholds. We call them the three seas see number one. Compulsion. You feel an urge to do it, often without conscious thought that you find it incredibly hard to fight back against. The second se control, You struggle to stop or limit this behavior, and the final CEE. The third C is consequences. It costs you in time, health, money, trust in yourself in relationships. Now, not every habit we dislike is necessarily toxic in that you know we can't stop it and it's really harming ourselves. But habit is really toxic when like, the cost outweighs the comfort, the comfort of something, when it starts to make your life feel smaller. I think that ability, that questioning of like could I actually stop? Is when you're asking yourself that question, that's when you know you probably should, when you are questioning your control, when you tell yourself this is the last time, and you genuinely do mean it, but you can't go more than a few days without, you know, trying to continue to pursue that new habit. Something is you know, probably really bothering you, that keeps bringing you back to this thing you don't want to do anymore, like a toxic relationship. You know you are so committed, you genuinely do want to do better, and then you get stressed, you get lonely, and you get bored, you have a long day, and suddenly you're right back in it. This is because in that moment you are in a territory of what psychologists call the intention behavior gap. This is the space between what we truly do intend to do and what we actually do. A lot of the research suggests that your intentions your desire to change a behavior only actually predicts around thirty to forty percent of your actual behaviors, meaning that simply wanting to change, even if you want it bad enough, isn't always enough. It's just not. And that's a really hard thing for people to realize because we like to think that we would be in control and that our emotional decisions would affect our rational ones. The thing is, the more emotionally loaded a habit is, the wider the gap between intention and behavior actually becomes. Because often that means that this habit is doing the job of regulating your internal emotions and internal systems, not just occupying time. It becomes so psychologically hard to break when there is actually a deep emotion attached to why you are doing these things. You know, toxic habits are more emotional than any other kind of habit. You're not choosing to vape, or choosing to overspend or chasing bad relationships because it aligns with your values. Because it aligns with your goals. You're doing it because it might be the only way you know to regulate internal states of stress and distress and discomfort and loneliness and heartbreak. So that's the biggest sign that a toxic habit is a toxic one. It's deeply emotional. Another sign is the mental choreography that begins to form around the behavior. You start justifying it, hiding it, delaying, thinking about it, becoming preoccupied with it. The amount of thinking about the behavior grows larger than the behavior itself, so it's a living in your head. Even when you're not doing it. You're thinking about your next drink, you're thinking about avoiding spending, you're thinking about what you should be thinking about so that you don't smoke, like those kinds of things. Another subtle indicator is when you're not thinking about doing it and you are doing it, you're slowly escalating the intensity, frequency, severity of the behavior to the point where we really emotional relief becomes harder to find. You have to do more, take more, experience more of this habit in order to produce the same calming feeling that it initially developed to provide for. You know, your brain is doing what brains do, repeating what has worked to help you survive uncomfortable feelings and adapting to that comfortable feeling until you need more to produce it. What's really interesting is that your brain actually doesn't care whether the reward is healthy or harmful. It really doesn't care. It only cares that it provides relief. If something soothes you, then of course it's going to be repeated if you don't have other mechanisms to help. This process is supported by a very famous theory, a very famous process that we know called neuroplasticity. This is your brain's ability to basically physically rewire itself based on experiences. Synaptic connections strengthen through repetition through long term potentiation, Meaning the more you perform a behavior, the more that you perform a behavior to eliminate distress or to make yourself feel better, the more your brain begins to structure itself around that behavior and make those neural connections a more fortified mental highway. You know, something again that comes up a lot when we talk about this is like, how come I want to change so badly and I can't? Like? Is it just me? Is there something wrong with me. Do I just not have the mental strength? And I want to be clear, every single person at some stage in their life has picked up a less than desirable habit. It's not unique to you. It doesn't make you weaker than other people. Some people are just more vulnerable to developing certain habits and to having them stick, not because of any moral reasoning, not because they lack discipline, but because of the way that their brain and their emotions have developed and evolved. This is a combination of genetics. It's a combination of genetics upbringing trauma. Some of us as well, are just more emotionally sensitive than others, me included. Sometimes our emotions just run a little bit louder, and so therefore they need something a little bit stronger and more severe to counterbalance them. We feel stress more intensely. Loneliness doesn't just feel uncomfortable, it feels unbearable. Boredom doesn't feel neutral, it feels horrendous. We might refer to this as high emotional reactivity, and research shows that people who experience emotions more strongly are more likely to resort two toxic habits to regulate those feelings. For example, as a study published in twenty nineteen in the Netherlands that found that people who displayed higher quartersole reactivity were more likely to try to get out of a maze using the same roots that they'd already tried, compared to people with a lower quartersole reactivity who engaged in flexible goal directed decision making, who tried new things. Can you see where I'm getting with this? Your brain, if you have a high high courtersol levels, if you're particularly prone to stress, prone to deep emotions, your brain is like, oh my god, it just keeps trying to use the same exit that doesn't open and doesn't let you reroute, find new paths, build new habits. It just keeps going back to the same places all the time. That's one part of this. There is then the brain's reward system itself. I think we tend to think that we all have the same systems kind of available in our brain. We have the same amygdala, we have the same frontal lob of the same brain stem dopamine systems. True, but not true. The function, even the form of these systems does actually vary person to person. Some people have differences in how their brains signal dopamine, particularly when it comes to genes like the DRD two gene and this DOMT gene if you want to get really scientific with it, if you want to look it up. Basically, these genes influence dopamine regulation and how strongly your brain responds to rewards and quick dopamine, like the quick dopamine you get from your phone, like the quick dopamine you get from drugs, from alcohol, from nicotine, from impulse purchasing, from impulsive emotional decisions to do with the love. Research shows that certain variants of these genes are associated with more and stronger rewards seaking behavior and faster reinforcement learning. So basically, you pick up toxic habits quicker. Another example, individuals with lower availability of what we call d two dopamine receptors may experience not just reward more intensely, but the absence of reward more painfully. So it's harder to break the habit cycle you get in quicker, it's so much harder to get out. It sounds very complicated. Basically, your brain may just code certain behaviors differently and is more important and more worthy of repeating because of how your brain receives dopamine it's pretty unfair. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean you can't change. It just means that you have to understand those systems a little bit better and how to navigate the differences in your dopamine systems compared to somebody else. When you're trying to break a habit, that is the nature element of it. We can't forget the nurture element as well. Well. The environment you grew up in is a huge contributor to the toxic habot cycle. And what it really comes down to is whether you were allowed to express emotion or whether you were required to suppress it. If you grew up in a household where feelings were ignored, mocked, punished, you went to a school where or you encountered teachers even who told you to be quiet, who thought your emotions were disruptive, if you were bullied and you knew that being out with the emotion would encourage more intense behavior, if you were taught to be self reliant and self regulate, you are going to learn to manage your emotions in the most direct, quiet way possible, often using things that end up becoming toxic habits. Basically, what this means, the first thing that you encountered that allowed you to soothe yourself because you weren't allowed to soothe yourself outwardly. Is going to be the thing that your brain keeps coming back to and keeps falling in love with until it replaces it with something that's even better at suppressing your feelings. So maybe you know you were like twelve when you first someone first like offered you weed or somebody first offered you alcohol, and it just gets better and better and better, Like you just keep getting deeper and deeper into the belly of this beast because that was the first thing that made you feel okay. What's hard is that these habits are often built on years of self repression and self silencing, so they feel more familiar than feeling our feelings. When a habit becomes tied to your way of coping, to your identity, to your sense of self, it's harder to let go of, not because the behavior is even necessarily pleasurable, but because it feels like a familiar part of who you are, and your brain will always choose the known for the unknown, even when the known hurts us. Okay, now that we kind of understand why these habits form, why they are so hard to shake. Let's talk about the mistakes people make when trying to change them and what you can do instead after this short break. So, if you want to quit procrastinating, quit getting it sucked into your phone constantly, quit eating food that doesn't make you feel good, here are the four common mistakes you're probably going to come up against initially. Mistake number one. When most of us try to break a toxic habit, we tend to approach it with this really great intensity, which is amazing. We're very motivated. We have this like this ends now idea. We suddenly decide that tomorrow will be different. We will be stronger and more disciplined and more determined than ever before, and that will be it. We will be done with this, We will be free of this habit. We genuinely mean it. The thing is, though, willpower is actually a short term resource, not a long term fuel source. Willpower isn't designed to carry you long term. It's designed to be the spark, and it is deeply impacted by sleep, stress, hormones, mood, hunger. So if you're relying on sheer effort to overcome a behavior that is an automatic part of your brain you are literally fighting your neurology, your neurologically ingrained patterns with a fleeting feeling of desire to change. And what often happens is that life happens. You know, you get tired, you have a bad day, something triggers you emotionally and crucially. You may have willpower, but what you don't have are other skills or habits to manage the feeling. And suddenly we find ourselves right back where we started, repeating the thing we swore we wouldn't and then we also fall into this self blame cycle. This is all my fault. I wasn't strong enough. No, it's because when you created this plan, you didn't plan with an alternative in mind. You can't just expect yourself not to scroll if you don't know what to do instead. If you don't have a book you're interested in, you don't have a project you're working on, you don't have a diary to write in. You have to have a plan be you know, a plan be habit for smoking, maybe chewing gum, a plan b habit for always saying yes to plans, maybe putting standing appointments with yourself in your calendar. You have to have alternatives available. Another powerful thing we can do to counteract this error is a just your environment, so that the habit that you don't want to do becomes harder to perform than the habit that you do want to do. Your brain loves the path least resistance, so create some resistance for the things you don't want to engage in and reduce resistance for the things you do want to engage in. If alcohol isn't in your house, you can't reach for it. If the phone is in the other room, you can't hit snooze. If you stock your fridge full of bright, yummy, colorful food, you're less likely to order take out. So by creating less friction between you and your ability to carry out more positive habits, these are the behaviors that are more likely to be done. Our second stumbling point is that we tend to, you know, not just rely on willpower, but start too big. We set perfect, dramatic rules for ourselves, often multiple rules at the same time, and we go cold turkey all at once. We plan to do multiple things every single day, and our brain is overloaded. This is why things like the seventy five Hard Challenge are so difficult. Mentally, and why the fail rate is like one estimate I saw, it's over ninety five percent. There's too many rules to follow all at once that differ from your norm and differ from your baseline. I have so many thoughts about the seventy five hard challenge. We could do an entire episode on it. But psychologists know if you want long term change rather than an incremental one off change, we as humans don't respond well to dramatic shifts. We respond to consistency and baby steps. When the bar is set at perfection, the first slip up feels detrimental, So instead of continuing, we abandon the effort altogether. Not because we're incapable of change, but because we've made the terms of change impossible to sustain. How do we counteract that? Make just one small rule for yourself, one rule at a time. I won't vape until midday. I can scroll on my phone, but only in this position, only for one hour. I can drink, just not on weekdays. I can buy things I want, but only after I sell something. I already own one rule, one rule that minimizes to begin with, and take that one rule seriously, then you can build from that platform. Of self trust, of proving to yourself that you can do it, and you can build the house one brick at a time, rather than starting with the roof, rather than starting with like a complete overhaul that you don't actually have the mental resources yet to see through. The third common pitfall that most people do fall into is they try to change the behavior. We don't address the emotion that drives it. You know, we decide to stop doom spending, but we don't ask, you know what am I avoiding my spending all this money? We want to stop drinking when we feel socially anxious, but we don't explore, you know, what is it about meeting people that feel so uncomfortable? What am I actually afraid of? If the habit is soothing something within us, moving the habit without understanding the beast that it's actually trying to slay is pretty pointless. Your brain's just going to return to the fastest source of relief it knows. The alternative is obviously therapy, but also confronting the fear that the habit is asking you to avoid. Here are like some initial questions that you can just sit with right now, to maybe just give yourself a few answers. What are you afraid might happen if you don't engage in this behavior? And why does this outcome scare you so much? What need is this habit trying to meet? Comfort? Connection, control, maybe distraction? What are some other ways I can give that to myself? What would it look like to face that uncomfortable feeling? Would I survive it? Would I survive it even for just thirty seconds? This kind of brings us to our final point. We often can't quit a toxic habit because we tell ourselves that we're bad for doing it in the first place, rather than acknowledging why we are trying so hard to escape. You know, I know people have different ideas on this. People think tough love works, shame works. You have to get to your tipping point. You need to like stop making excuses for yourself. But we know what the evidence actually says. Having unconditional love for yourself and your mistakes in this process creates the internal emotional environment to fortify you from the inside, to give you that sense of trust and love that you can try time and time again. You can fail, It's okay, and you understand why this is happening, so that you can provide alternatives. So those are the pitfalls. What are some of the other things that we can do. One of the most effective plans of attack if you want to change a toxic habit cycle is identity based. Change. Behavior follows identity, not the other way around. When you begin to see yourself as someone who is capable of change, who is learning new things, who is showing up differently, the behavior begins to align with that story. If you want to stay within the confines of I'm just someone who's impulsive, I'm just someone who's lazy. This is just who I am. And you don't challenge those core beliefs, you are not going to change. You need to flip the script and challenge the parts of your identity that have fallen into these patterns, like who believe that this is just who they are? So what I want you to do is write down five statements about the kind of person you want to be and the kind of person who would beat this habit or who wouldn't engage in it, things like I'm someone who values health, i am someone who is in control. I'm someone who is naturally a good spender. If you've read Atomic Habits, which I'm sure a lot of you have. This will sound familiar to you. Identity based change. Believing first that you are the kind of person who performs its behavior before attempting it will help you do it. But you know the science and the research backs this up. When a new behavior feels aligned with your identity or your desired identity, you are more likely to do it. Another way we can teach our brain and new pathway is through mental rehearsal. There is so much research on the overlap of neural circuits that we use when imagining doing something and actually carrying out that thing. For example, a twenty eighteen paper from the University of Colorado, Boulder found that mentally imagining a fear inducing situation helps people process and unlearn that fear just as much as being in that situation themselves in person. Having that in person exposure. You know something crazy that I heard the other day. I cannot remember where I heard this, but this woman was talking about how people who exercise a lot, when they were put into an experimental condition when they were asked to visualize themselves exercising, visualize themselves lifting heavyweights for twenty minutes a day when they came back after not exercising for a number of weeks. They were actually stronger. Their muscles actually showed a response to these positive thoughts they'd had about their strength and about their ability. That's crazy to me, that's wild. So just picturing yourself being able to beat this habit, picturing yourself denying yourself the behavior saying no, pausing that rehearsal like that is not wasted effort because the moment that that que actually arrives and you actually encounter and you have imagined yourself being able to avoid it say no to it in the past, you have a mental script to follow. This is the thing I feel like we just keep coming back to this. Micro movements, micro moments, micro changes, just these small acts of resistance are so powerful. It's also why people talk about the five minute rule when we want to break toxic habit cycles. If you can just avoid the toxic habit for five minutes, you can avoid it for five days, five years, for the rest of your life. Just avoid it for five minutes, and when that's done, five more minutes, five more minutes, even thirty seconds. The research behind this basically says that five minutes even just a small chunk of time is enough for your frontal lobe to switch on or for your conscious decision making to overwhelm outweigh into your unconscious decision making. We've spoken a lot about how the reason toxic habits remain is because we've never actually asked our brain to do something differently or relate to our emotions differently, and so it's become an automatic response. Time is the easiest way to counteract something that is automatic and happening instantaneously. If you can just give yourself a few seconds a few minutes, the rational executive functioning part of your brain will switch on and will allow you to really start questioning from a value point of view. Do I want to do this? Do I actually want to do this? Or is there something else I can do? The final way you can really engage in breaking a toxic habit is to learn that long term gratification is so much more enjoyable than immediate gratification. When you truly wait for something, work for something, want something, the reward is so much sweeter. When you only drink on a Saturday, you know, the alcohol suddenly tastes better when you only buy items that you really care about and that you know you're gonna wear you treasure them more. When you delay something for a more fruitful worthwhile exciting outcome, you become addicted to this idea of hard work and effort towards something bigger. So what you need to do is give yourself three rewards in the next three months, a reward for not doing the behavior for one week, a reward for not doing the behavior for one month, and a reward for not doing the behavior for three months setting And they can't be small, these rewards, by the way, like they have to be significant, and you have to ensure that you're going to deliver them to yourself, but that you're going to wait. Whether it's like an item of clothing, it's a trip, it's an experience, it's I don't know, a moment of indulgence, whatever it is. You have to start to train your brain and show your brain, show yourself that when you wait for things, they feel better. By giving yourself just this opportunity, this three month exercise to prove that to yourself, you will only learn this feeling, this feeling of long term gratification through experience. It's the only way that you will know that the feelings are different. So challenge yourself to do this exercise. Write down the three rewards are going to give yourself, make sure they're big enough, and then use all of these other tips that we've given you to get to those points to chase that more enriching feeling. I want to remind you this is going to take time. There will be days when your old habit wins. And this is well, the most important part of all relapse is not the end of the process. People will tell you it's part of it. You do not unlearn a pathway in one quick motion. Their entire industries worth billions of dollars supporting, you know, built on the fact that people cannot break toxic habits like the ones that you are injuring. The thing is is that despite that, you will still you will still win. Like I know it, you will still beat this. You want to. You want to, and you're putting things into place to help yourself, and you're taking advice on it. And there is a part of you who deep down knows that your life is going to be better because you are changing this about yourself. You have a deep investment in your future that only someone who knows they're going to win. Has you care enough about this and you're putting in the work, so you're going to be willing to try and try again and try again and learn every single time you maybe fail, and know that you have to sometimes have those failures to build the future strength to be able to beat this and to be able to replace this toxic habit with better ones. If there's one thing you take away from this episode, it is that you cannot do anything change anything about yourself. You will never be able to if you do not change how you relate to yourself, and that is tend to work. It asks you to look at the parts of you that have been surviving in the best ways they know how. It asks you to be honest about what you avoid, your patterns, your needs, and recognize that your current habits are nothing more than a band aid. They are not helping you. And the version of you that you want to be, who you want to see, who you care about enough to be wanting to change, to change right now, really needs you to be understanding of the place you're in here in this moment, this starting line position, where you have everything to gain and everything to lose, and you're doing it anyways, and you deserve tenderness and you deserve compassion for the habits that you've built so far to survive. I hope that that is like the message you really take away from this. Thank you so much for listening. If you have made it this far, I appreciate you listening to the full episode. I'm appreciative that I have kept your attention for this long. Leave a little message down below, what's the toxic habit you're trying to break? I bet that there will be other people who are also in the same boat. I also want to remind you that this episode was also on YouTube, so if you prefer watching future episodes rather than listening to them, you can go and subscribe there. We are also on Instagram that Psychology Podcast if you want to keep up to date with what we're doing behind the scenes with really cool guests that we have coming up this December, or if you have an episode suggestion, you can d and me there. Special thanks today to Libby Colbert for her research contributions to this episode. Big shout out to Libby. She is just the legend behind the scenes and we appreciate her. But until next time, stay safe, be kind, especially today, Be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very soon.