[MUSIC] So we've been talking about all these strategies we can use to hack our habits, to actually change our behaviors, our thoughts, and our feelings. And one of the best things we can hack to influence our behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, is our habits. What our habits we're going to define them is these automatic behavioral responses to some situational cue, where your behavior has been reinforced in the past, where it's been associated with some reward back in the day. You probably have a lot of things in your life that are habits. Hopefully, you have a half brushing your teeth. Maybe you get up in the morning and the first thing you do is brush your teeth. You probably also have a habit of certain things you do when you study, maybe you like to grab a hot chocolate or eat something particular after you study or study at a particular time. You might even have bad habits about your phone where every time you plop down and go to sleep you pull it out and scroll through a particular social media or something. And these are the habits that we have. But the key misconception that we often have about habits is that they're just things we do every day, there are things you do a lot, but that's not all that habits are, this is a misconception. We need to think of habits as a special pattern of behavior turns out it has a special neural structure that we can understand and hack to build in good habits. What is this sort of special pattern of behavior? This is a special way that habits work. We can understand it by looking at what's called the habit loop. All habits have a particular form, there's a cue in the environment that causes you often quite automatically to do a particular routine, this behavior, and you often get a reward at the end. You feel something, you get something delicious, something happens. But the key about the habit loop is that it's a loop. The most important part of the habit loop is that bottom arrow where you're kind of connecting the reward in the cue. Because what happens is when you experience anything rewarding in the world, just like on a daily basis, your brain is, wait a minute, that was rewarding. What just happened? What did we just do? We need to figure out when I can get that reward again, right? And so this is how the loop continues. And so just to kind of dig into this a little bit more, let's first talk about the rewards, right? because this is what our brain is on the lookout for all the time. We're going to define rewards. It's just a positive outcome that you get from some behavior. All kinds of different rewards. If you're in a neuroscience class, it would be a rat who got a piece of cheese or a piece of chocolate for some reason in this picture here. For us as humans, there can be all kinds of rewards, a wonderful feeling you get when you solve the puzzle is a good reward, tasting something delicious is a good reward, getting money and getting paid for something, the trophy, the grades, the likes, all of these things are rewards. But the key about rewards is that our brains love them and they're always on the lookout for them. So whenever you get a reward, your brain was, what was the cue that triggered it? And it creates this really strong path that whenever that cue happens, your brain is, a reward, right? So that gets us to the second part of the habit loop that we need to look at, the cue. What is a cue? The cue, we're going to define as some stimulus in the world that winds up triggering this habit. It was associated with that reward in the past. So your brain is, every time I see that cue, do the thing, right? It's worth noting that lots of different stuff can be cues. If you take an AP psych class, you might have heard about Pavlov and his dogs where they rang a bell as a cue, right? We think of that as a cue, but in real life there's all kinds of stuff that can be cues. One thing that's often commonly a cue is time, you might have a particular time in the morning on Mondays when you wake up 7 AM. Your cue is wake up, brush your teeth, blah. For you all this summer who are coming, Wednesdays at 5 PM, you walk over here and you come hear me talk. Those of you who are listening online in schools, you might have a particular classroom time where you hear this, right? So time can be a really powerful cue. Location can be a powerful cue. It winds up cueing certain behaviors that we tend not to do in other places. You think of a movie theater, how often in your normal life or you just, popcorn, musty popcorn, but when you're in a movie theater, it just kind of happens, right? Your school will probably triggers all kinds of behaviors, raising your hand, you don't do that at your kitchen, dinner table, at night when you're home, having dinner with your parents, but you definitely do that in school. Preceding events can often be really powerful cues. The thing that happened right before, tells you what to do next. So, you wake up, brush your teeth. Your phone buzzes, you pick it up and you look at what's happening, right? These are events that happened right before that wind up cueing these sorts of behaviors. In addition, different emotions can also be cues to stuff, right? You might be feeling bored and as soon as you feel bored, pick up your phone. You might be feeling kind of depressed and when you're feeling depressed, I don't know, eat ice cream, call for pizza, call your friend, right? Feelings cause us to do certain things. And a big one that really affects our behavior a lot is other people. They are cues in our life for behaviors that we tend to do. You might have your workout buddy that cues, I should be working out now. You might have your study buddy that cues, I should be studying now. You might have your video game buddy whenever you see him you're, my gosh, must sit down and play the PlayStation. You might have your grandma that whenever you see it's, now I'm going to eat, some incredibly delicious thing, right? These people cue a set of behaviors that have been rewarded in the past, right? So all these things are cues. And the key is that once we see the cue for a loop that's been reinforced a lot, when we see the cue, we automatically want to do the routine. So that gets us to the routine, which we're going to define as the physical, mental, or emotional action that you take whenever the cue is present. And it's worth noting sometimes it's physical, you're going to take this out and brush your teeth. Sometimes it's mental, right? I see my phone beings and all of a sudden I want to check my email, it's caused a craving in you. And sometimes it's emotional, your mom says that thing that annoys you and now you're upset or pissed off. Your brother does a particular thing and now you're annoyed with him, right? So all these things can kind of be routines. And the key about routines is that they have these two important features we need to understand. Important feature number one is that when you have a habit loop that's really established, when you've gotten rewards a lot, as soon as you see the cue, it's really easy to do the routine. Habits mean that it's really easy to do a routine when the cue is present. What do I mean? You get up, you just brush your teeth, you don't have to make a long decision about it. It's not like this morning you're, do I brush my teeth or not? Today is whether the pros and cons, you just do it, right? You're putting on shoe number one, you don't have to think about shoe number two or make it, it just happens really naturally. And that's why habits are powerful for changing our behavior. It's just naturally going to happen whenever you see the cue, you naturally want to do that behavior. But the second important feature that we need to understand habits for to deal with our happiness is habits also make it really hard not to do the routine when a cue is present, right? Your phone dings, it is really hard not to look at it, right? That behavior is reinforced and it's really hard not to go for it, right? So when we want to hack our bad habits, if there's a cue there, it's going to be really hard to do that. So, why does all this matter for our happiness? Well, you need to form better new habits for happiness. We talked about all these behaviors, social connection, meditation, and exercising more, that you want to do to feel happier, if you could turn them into a habit, it will be so much easier. You want social connection, meditation, all this stuff. You want to stop your bad habits, you want to get rid of those cues, if you can hack your habit loop, it becomes a lot easier. But how do we do that?
