Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Breaking Free From Bad Habits | Dr. Jud Brewer - Neuroscience of Addiction Expert

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Lessons - Breaking Free From Bad Habits | Dr. Jud Brewer - Neuroscience of Addiction Expert · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, uncover the science behind habits and addictions,
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  learn why automatic behaviors form to conserve energy and how reinforcement learning sets the stage
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  for unhealthy addictions, understand how paying attention to the true rewards of a behavior can
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  transform negative patterns into opportunities for healthier change.
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  And actually I wanted to describe, so for people listening, what is the actual clinical definition of
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  a habit? Because I think that setting the baseline to people understand what we're actually
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  speaking about, because I think people also, I mean, I don't want to jump too deep in before they
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  even understand how you understand a habit. Yeah, I'll actually give you a two-fer. Let's
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  let's define habit and let's define addiction as well so that we can differentiate those two.
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  So habit is basically something that we do automatically. That's a simple operational definition
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  that generally holds pretty well. And habits are set up so that we can learn things and then
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  have the energy the next day to not have to relearn that and learn something new.
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  So most habits are extremely helpful and it's an efficiency process for our brain.
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  Imagine waking up every morning and having to relearn everything from walking to making breakfast.
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  You know, we'd be exhausted before we'd even relearned how to make coffee.
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  So that's, you know, habit is automatic behavior. Something that we see a cue and that
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  cues this process, this automated process to just do the thing. In contrast, addiction, I think of
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  habit along a spectrum and at the far end of that spectrum is addiction.
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  And the definition of addiction I learned in residency was continued use despite adverse consequences.
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  And the reason I bring that forward as well is that often people think and they describe
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  their addictions in terms of a habit on the habit of smoking in the habit of overeating or whatever.
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  But if you look at that definition, continue use despite adverse consequences. We can see how,
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  you know, they're the obvious ones like smoking, which aren't helpful for survival.
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  But then the ones that are not so obvious where it overlaps between the survival mechanisms
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  like eating, we all have to eat to survive. And doing that same behavior despite adverse consequences,
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  where we, for example, overeating and clinical obesity has been linked to anti-survival.
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  You know, a lot of a lot of negative health consequences from not being an ideal weight.
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  So that's how we think of habit. And then that's how we think of its relationship. We can be in
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  a habit of doing something where we're continuing to do it despite adverse consequences. So addiction,
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  it can even fall into that addiction spectrum as well. Does that make sense? It does. And it's very
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  interesting because something seems to be more black and white. So I think that most people in 2024
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  would agree that smoking is more of an addiction than a habit. But I'm curious about food in particular
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  and maybe we can just extrapolate to other habits that maybe turn into addictions. And what is that
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  bridge that we cross when we're not aware? Because I think that's where people predominantly get into
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  trouble. I don't think people wake up and are like, hey, I want to be clinically obese or just
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  out of shape or or eat more than I really need. People don't go into life thinking that. But
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  that's the output after five, 10 years. So how does that happen in the brain? We try to have it
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  into an addiction. Yes, let's, well, let's use eating as an example. The our brains learn to do
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  behaviors based on how rewarding they are. And often we'll set up these habits early in life.
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  So for example, if we were five years old and we go to a birthday party,
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  you know, our parents aren't sending us to that birthday party saying, you know,
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  why don't you go and get some nutritious food if this. You know, this is going to substitute for lunch.
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  You know, they're sending us probably trying to have us eat some a healthy, you know, meal before
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  we go. So we don't over indulge on the cake and ice cream. But the point there is that we're
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  already starting to learn to associate ice cream cake, you know, things like that with
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  celebrations with connection with people and all that. And you can see as we go through life,
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  we start to learn to eat in the absence of hunger. So we set up these habitual behaviors,
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  you know, celebrations that we're overindulging in ways that are not aligned with our physiology.
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  Our brain and our body aren't saying, hey, you know, you're hungry. Go eat that cake,
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  typically not right at it at an office party or whatever. It's like, oh, here's a celebration.
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  Here's some cake. It looks good. And so we just go into the habit mood of eating.
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  So these habits get set up in the way that we are, we're doing the thing because it's now associated
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  not with a survival strategy like I need calories now, but with something else. And if that's
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  something else is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it to the point where it is habitual.
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  So with eating, it could be celebrations. It could also be consolations where we learn,
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  you know, we're bored one day and we go into that we're rummaging around the kitchen,
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  just looking for something we eat, you know, and that boredom gap is filled with some,
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  typically some type of a comfort food. And so we learn, oh, if I'm bored, if I'm sad, if I'm mad,
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  if I'm lonely, all these things, we learn that food becomes this consolation mechanism that can
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  make us feel less bad. And it's rewarding enough that it gets set up as a habit. So we've got
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  these two reinforcement learning processes, one it's called positive reinforcement where it's
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  all the celebratory stuff. It's like, ooh, you know, we just had a good meal go have some dessert.
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  And the other is this negative reinforcement loop where it says, oh, you feel bad,
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  make yourself feel better. And this is just using food as an example. Almost every habit falls
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  into the same category where if we're continuing the pleasant, the behavior gets reinforced through
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  positive reinforcement, if we're making the unpleasant go away or avoiding it, we're reinforcing
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  that habit through negative reinforcement. And this, you know, honestly, this process,
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  not that sea slugs eat birthday cake, but this has been shown, you know,
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  Ergindal got the Nobel Prize back in the year 2000 showing that this is a very evolutionarily
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  conservative process all the way back to the most basic of nervous systems. Well, because I think
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  that I mean, there's again, your work helps a wide spectrum of people, but I think that the people
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  that I really want to tap into, especially with the audience listen to this show, people that
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  overwork and get addicted to work. And then it actually has averse impacts, even though
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  it starts off as just a very, a very healthy habit, right? You're motivated. You're putting in
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  the hours. You're waking up every morning and you're going to the office or you're building your
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  thing. But then there's like you just mentioned, people lose track of that habit turning into some
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  some addiction. And I think that's really where a lot of people look back and they're like,
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  shit, what have I become? And that's really, that's really a scary, at the very scary space and
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  a very scary place to find yourself in. And I want to, we'll talk about sort of how to
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  overcome that. But I still want to stick on hunger and food and eating because you speak about
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  hedonic hunger. And I want to speak about that. I want to understand it and how it relates to
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  emotional eating because that's a very big, so this is, if we're looking at the spectrum of,
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  or the sort of the journey of the person that has all these reinforcement mechanisms that
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  eventually turn into an addiction, where does hedonic hunger fit into that journey?
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  Yeah, it's a great question. So scientists, we scientists, I'll let you in on a secret.
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  We make up new terms so that we can sound smart, okay? So relatively recently,
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  a scientist came up with a term called hedonic hunger, which interestingly is a misnomer.
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  So hedonic is about, you know, emotion, basically, pleasure. Yeah, pleasure, right. And so we're
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  eating, it's a misnomer because it's about emotional eating. And so it's not about hunger itself.
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  It's not physiologic hunger. That's called homeostatic hunger. But this hedonic hunger basically relates
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  to what you're talking about, which is we're eating due to an emotion, whether it's a positive
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  emotion or a negative emotion, rather than direct physiologic hunger itself. And that's where these
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  habits come into play because then it bypasses our physiologic mechanisms that are putting on
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  the brakes and saying, hey, you're not actually hungry. Why are you putting stuff in your mouth?
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  That turns into the emotional eating. So help me understand, help me understand, what is the,
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  what is this strategy to start to reverse this process once you've developed this addition?
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  And we'll use food as an example. But then I know you work with, you work with
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  Olympic athlete to work with business leaders. So I want to start to unpack other addictions.
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  I want to even understand what an Olympic athlete is addicted to or what a business leader is addicted to.
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  I can speak from experience is probably working too much. And maybe, you know, I see a lot of
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  people that have been very successful. They have broken in families and divorces. And I think that's
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  probably the end result of addiction. But you tell me, so how do we start to reverse, you know,
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  this, this progression into addition? What we found over the last couple of decades,
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  and it, and it spans every habit and addiction that we've studied. So we studied alcohol, cocaine,
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  you're smoking, eating, anxiety, you know, all of these. And the, the basic, there seems to be a,
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  you can break it down into three steps. The first is just understanding how habits form. If we
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  don't know how our mind works, there's no way that we can work with it. And so that's the first,
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  the simplest and the most basic piece to start with. So, you know, you can break it down to,
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  you know, what's the behavior and what's the result of the behavior. We can also map out what's
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  queuing the behavior, what's triggering it. But that's actually the least important part of the
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  equation. So that's the first step is just recognizing that we're doing something and that it is a
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  habit. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So with eating, it's not the, you know, we're eating
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  because we're hungry. That's not a habit. That's helpful. But it's that we're reaching for food when
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  we're bored, lonely, sad, celebrating, you know, as we talked about earlier, often because of
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  emotions, we're emotionally eating rather than eating because we're at a collard deficit.
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  So being able to recognize the behavior then helps us shift into this second step,
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  which really highlights the how our brains learn to differentiate behaviors, which is all about
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  how rewarding a behavior is. So I have people start paying attention to the results of the behavior.
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  And it's interesting. This goes all the way back to ancient Buddhist psychology where they talk
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  about cause and effect. If you look at modern psychology, this is really about reinforcement
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  learning, which highlights that if a behavior, a cause is rewarding effect, we're going to keep
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  doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop doing it. So the key here with a habit is
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  we've already established a reward value of a behavior to the point where it's automatic. And so
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  we're not even paying attention to how rewarding it is. So for example, if we have learned to overeats
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  or stress eats a long time ago, we're just going to do that automatically. And we're not going to
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  be asking ourselves, hey, you know, what what am I getting from this? So that's really what the
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  second step is all about is asking this simple question, what am I getting from this? And for example,
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  my lab did a study within app that we'd felt called E right now, where we help people pay attention
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  to the results of eating. And we found that within 10 to 15 times of somebody paying attention
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  when they're overeating, for example, that reward value dropped below zero, meaning that they were
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  updating the reward value to the present day. Like what are they getting from overeating? Typically,
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  it doesn't feel good. They feel bloated. They feel lethargic. They're they feel guilty. All these
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  things that are not rewarding, they're anti rewarding. Almost you think of it as punishing is not the
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  best term for it. But is that college just like to use that term? So there when people see very
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  clearly that something is not rewarding, it makes it much easier to stop doing the behavior.
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  Ancient Buddhist psychologists describe this as disenchantment. We become disenchanted with the
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  behavior. So it's actually pretty straightforward. And you can we could talk, you know, if you want,
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  we can talk for a long time about the brain mechanisms, but they're that's not actually as
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  pragmatically important as understanding the psychological process, which is, you know, asking
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  ourselves this question, what am I getting from this behavior? So if it's overeating, asking,
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  what am I getting when I over you? How does it feel in my body and letting our body tell us the
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  answer, which typically is, this doesn't feel very good. And that's enough. It typically pretty
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  quickly to start shifting that behavior.