Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Hi ! Have you recently wanted to change something about yourself? Especially at the beginning of a new school year? Maybe you tell yourself this year I’ll listen in classes, I’ll learn my lessons, or I’ll excercise 3 times a week, … I’m sorry to tell you that but… the majority is going to fail! Not because you have a lack of self control or dedication. But according to Dr. Wendy Wood, a scientist at Southern California University, change rarely occurs through willpower alone. The key to changing our lives is habits. Habits are automatic behaviors. Instead of requiring intention, they occur in response to environmental cues such as time of day or location. Take a look at your daily behavior and you'll see that 40-50% of your daily behavior is habit. For example, I always eat breakfast in the morning, brush my teeth before going to sleep and check my phone when I wake up. I don't consciously think about them. It's because I've done them so often that they've become a habit. We know that habits are things we do automatically, unconsciously, like walking, eating, and checking our phone. We see that habits can be good or bad. For example, running on Sunday morning can be a good habit and staying in bed all day can be a bad habit for someone. So why do we form habits ? And how do we learn new ones, or un-learn old ones ? If you've ever taken the same route to school or work, it's likely to be embedded in your brain. You can probably walk it without really paying attention. Habits are built in the same way. New neural pathways are formed when you repeat a behavior. And the more a brain circuit is triggered, the easier it becomes for our brains to do what that circuit controls, without consciously thinking about it. Let's take an example. Think back to when you first learned to drive. At first, you had to press the pedal, turn the steering wheel in this particular direction, put on the blinker. You have to think consciously about each action. This happens in an area of your brain called the prefrontal cortex, the part associated with complex thinking. But now you've driven so many times that the actions you used to think about have become automatic. Driving has become a habit and is now controlled by another part of your brain, the striatum. Some scientists have realized that habits are made up of three key elements: a cue a behavior a reward A cue is something that triggers a behavior - for example, it's 4 p.m., so it's time to have a snack - and this behavior is followed by a reward: having more energy for the rest of the day. If you find a good signal and a good reward, you can adopt any behavior. But what they didn't know was that rewarding a behavior can actually create a craving, and that's what makes habits so strong. Scientists now know that special neurons in the brain can activate and give us chemical rewards. But the strange thing is that once a habit and a reward are linked in our brains, these reward neurons start to activate even before the habit is formed. This is what explains craving, why you pick up your bad habits when you see other people picking them up, and why it's so hard to break habits. So How do you train yourself to form a new habit? And if you have a bad habit, can you break it or are you stuck with it forever? Scientists used to think that our brains didn't change much once we reached adulthood. But it turns out that the brain is extremely flexible. Your brain chemistry changes constantly throughout the day. When a behavior is repeated often enough, a habit is formed. There's a famous saying that a new skill can be acquired in 10,000 hours of work, but that depends on the individual. What is certain is that when it comes to forming a habit, whether it's learning to play the guitar or to meditate, there's no substitute for repetition. The reason it's so hard to break bad habits is that you've literally woven new neural networks in your brain. And if you're trying to change a habit, it's usually better to replace the bad behavior with a new one rather than trying to erase the pattern altogether. For example, you want to stop checking your phone when you wake up. You can replace this behavior with a shower or breakfast. The good thing is that you now know you have the power to change your brain. Now it's up to you: which habit do you want to adopt in your life?