The Neuroscience Behind How We Form Our Habits

HABIT: A usual way of behaving; something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way, like brushing your teeth in the morning. To automate healthy lifestyle choices like daily exercise and eating well, you need to understand the neuroscience behind how the brain forms new habits. You have to understand the “automatic mode” of your brain. There is a part of the brain responsible for pattern recognition and memories called the basal ganglia. It’s here that habits form using a trigger, behavior, and reward process that gets embedded in our brains and develops into a part of our everyday lives. And it’s here where we have to change the habits we don’t want. The process starts with a trigger that tells your brain to switch to automatic. If the habit is drinking a cup of coffee in the morning or smoking a cigarette, there is a trigger that puts your habit into action. It may be an alarm or turning on the radio. It’s something that tells your brain you want to do some
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