15 Ways to Hack Your Brain to Break Bad Habits

How many times have you tried to break a bad habit? 90% of people fail when they first start trying to break their bad habits, and it's because they're trying to break it in all the wrong ways. Habits are hardwired into your brain, and they have to be because you need the space for learning. This means that if you have a bad habit, you have to break it by rewiring the source code. You have to get into all the little parts of your brain that created the habit in the first place and keep it functioning.

And how on Earth can you do all of that? Well, here you go.

Number one, you actually have to hack your brain at the right point. When you break into something, you're not going to go for the hardest point, right? You're going to go for the weakest part and then get in that way. It's the same with your mind. You keep trying to hack and trick your normal conscious mind, and it's virtually impossible. Okay, that shit's kept behind lock key, alarms, and guards. The easiest way in is through your subconscious mind.

And look, okay, before you dismiss this as some kind of woo-woo advice, hear us out. It's really hard, almost impossible, to rewire anything with your conscious, normal, everyday thinking mind. There's just too much going on, and you can't get through all of that noise. But there's a moment when the noise is quiet, when it's still picking up steam, and that's when you have to slip in quietly like a burglar in the night, breaking into your own mind.

When you wake up in the morning, your brain moves through different wave states: delta waves which are deep sleep, theta which is deep relaxation, alpha light relaxation, and then beta which is very active. You want to catch those waves when it's not as active and more suggestible. So, the moment you wake up and just before you fall asleep, sneak in with some imaginary scenarios where you've broken the bad habit, and you feel good about it.

We'll go into some more details on how to do this in just a moment, but we wanted to get this out of the way first to make sure you're entering your mind at the right point.

Number two, make mistakes because they break old neural pathways and build up new ones. Mistakes interrupt the system and cause chaos, and this is exactly what you want when you're trying to break a bad habit. Mistakes are your brain's weapon for creating change. If you've been conditioned to think that failure means you're back to square one, well, you've misunderstood how your brain works.

Each time you make a mistake as you're trying to break a habit, use that error to gather new data. Understand what doesn't work for you. The mistake is fine; the problem is when you don't actually gather information from it. Because look, then you see the mistake as a failure, and you fall off track since it feels like there's no coming back from it. But when you gather the data, your brain will rewire itself to recognize other options for the habit you're trying to break.

The more mistakes you make, the better it becomes at predicting and avoiding those behaviors, but you must gather that data just like you would do with any work project. What caused the error? What's the most critical point of intercepting this error? And how can you make sure it doesn't happen again?

Number three, use emotional priming to set yourself up for success. Your emotions are the key to controlling your habits. You keep turning to your bad habits because they make you feel better when you experience negative emotions like stress, boredom, or anxiety. So when you feel stressed, you look for comfort, and since you find comfort in your bad habits, you'll use that habit to douse the feeling of stress.

In a way, your brain has been trained to connect that comfort to the habits that are usually bad because they take less energy to do and usually give you a short rush before a drop. So you need to train your brain to experience good emotions from good habits instead of just the bad ones.

Did you know that your body and your brain don't actually know the difference between what's real and what's imaginary? Whatever is happening in your mind, it's happening to you. With some emotional priming, you rehearse the feeling you want to get when you break a bad habit. Keep rehearsing this feeling. Think about breaking that habit, and think about the good feelings that will come with it.

Let's say you want to stop procrastinating and be more productive. Standard goal, right? Well, take a few moments each morning to sit quietly and imagine how you'll feel when you're in control of your time: calm, focused, accomplished. Let those emotions wash over you as if they're already happening. This trains your brain to expect those feelings. Over time, it'll begin to associate new, healthier behaviors with the positive emotions that you've primed, so it's easier to follow through on the actions that will get you to your goals.

Number four, mentally rehearse specific actions for success. Now that you've rehearsed the emotions, you have to rehearse the action in your brain. Habits are just neural pathways that are connected to each other. It's like dominoes all falling in the same direction each time because of the way they've been stacked. They're all connected because they're on the same pathway.

Now, when you mentally rehearse the action of breaking a habit, you take a different route, and that creates new neural pathways. You're moving the dominoes so they all fall a different way. Instead, rehearsing the action takes a little bit more practice and energy than the emotion because, well, instead of imagining a feeling, you have to imagine a whole scenario. It's like you're creating a short film in your mind.

You'll have to think of all the steps you have to do, outside obstacles you'll have to overcome, and how to play devil's advocate to the excuses that you'll inevitably come up with. Now, we just mentioned before that your brain and body can't actually tell what's real and what isn't. If it's happening in your mind, it's happening to you.

Okay, cool, but what does that even mean? So when you imagine the action you want to do, like breaking a bad habit, it's as if you've already done it. You now have new neural pathways that are in your control, and you've got a blueprint, which makes the physical changes a whole lot easier to achieve.

Number five, don't force change with information about how bad your behavior is. If the first thing you do when you're trying to break a bad habit is learn everything you can about how bad it is, you're never going to succeed. You already know it's bad. Okay, that is why you're trying to break it in the first place. You can't think your way out of a bad habit, and you can't shame yourself out of it either because the more you focus on your behavior, the more comfortable you get in that guilt and shame that comes with it.

So stop learning about how bad it is for you. Okay, it's not helpful. You're targeting the completely wrong thing, and you're not going to make progress that way. When you focus on how bad something is, you're activating guilt, shame, and anxiety, which actually triggers more stress—the very emotion that reinforces these bad habits.

So shift your focus to what you gain by letting go of the habit. Frame the change as something you are gaining, not something you are losing. The less mental energy you waste on berating yourself, the more you'll have available to build the habit that will actually serve you better.

Number six, take the power back from your body's automatic reactions. When something becomes a habit, you're no longer in charge of it, but that's kind of a good thing. It's your brain's way of saving energy. It's a great tool when you've got good habits because you won't have to hype yourself up for them every time you do something, but it's not so great when you've got bad habits. That's when you need to show who's actually in charge.

Your body becomes conditioned to respond to certain triggers. It acts before your conscious mind even has a chance to catch up. So you have to show it who's boss by interrupting yourself at the most unpredictable times. When you're sitting comfortably on the sofa, watching TV, and you've got this vague thought about getting up and doing some cleaning, and your body and brain both say no, you have to step in and say yes.

You are not the voice in your head. Okay? Every time you find yourself mindlessly doing something you usually do—driving, walking the same route, ordering the same food—kick down that door, take control, and make a random but powerful change.

Number seven, use routines to rewire the code. In neuroscience, there's a saying that goes: "Nerve cells that fire together, wire together." So the more you perform a habit, the stronger the actual neural connections in your brain become. It's like a code that's written and hardwired into you. You have to go in and rewrite that code.

Your first step is to find the strongest connection in that code and break it. It's basically the middle point where you think of doing something and your brain goes into autopilot mode. Now, usually you'll wake up from that state once you've performed your sequence, but you have to wake yourself up before that.

The most effective way to do this is to change the place where you perform that habit. It's the quickest and easiest way to upset the balance and comfort that you feel from your usual sequence of actions. Like, if you usually eat in front of the TV, you've got to change where you are. Every time you eat, you do it at the dining table, even if you're having a snack.

If you feel like you're drinking too much beer or wine in the evenings when you're sitting on the porch, well, take that glass to the storeroom or bathroom and drink it there. It sounds kind of funny and weird, but changing that space and taking the comfort away from it will make your brain wake up and go, "What the F? This is weird, not fun. Let's do less of this."

It sounds stupid simple, right? But you'll see just how uncomfortable and weird it feels when you try to do it yourself. Yes, that's partly because you've put yourself in a strange place, but mostly it's because that place is uncomfortable and the opposite of what you're looking for in the moment.

Number eight, find the emotional triggers behind the habit. Every bad habit is fulfilling an emotional need that you're lacking. But what are you lacking? Ha, that's what you have to find out! You have to find this out by first seeing which emotion is triggering the habit in the first place. Is it stress, loneliness, boredom, or just wanting some comfort?

Take a step back and notice what's going on before you indulge in that habit. Are you feeling anxious or overwhelmed? When you know the trigger, you can tackle it directly. Then you come up with a healthier but also easier habit that you can do instead when you get that feeling.

Like, if you're feeling stressed, do five squats and then five push-ups instead. Don't think too much about the exercise or action here; your goal isn't to become a squatting champion. It's just to break that automatic feedback loop of feeling an emotion and then turning to a habit to fix it. The awareness and then a deliberate action, repeated over time, is enough to karate chop that loop in half.

Number nine, you can and should shorten your emotional reactions. When you've got a strong emotional reaction to something, your entire system shouts at you to pay attention to what caused it. When you pay attention to the cause, you take a snapshot of it, and that becomes a memory. Then the neurological moves into the chemical—the snapshot or memory gets attached to an emotion, and when you remember the snapshot, you feel that emotion too.

You can control how long you want that reaction to last. This is called a refractory period. It can last for minutes, hours, days, and years, and the longer it lasts, the more it becomes a part of your personality. When you constantly think and remember this, it's not just creating a habit; it's creating your temperament.

Now controlling the refractory period can be hard because it becomes addictive. You get a rush of energy with the memory, so it starts to feel good. So you shorten that refractory period. If something crappy happens, look at it, take one or two lessons away from it, and only focus on those lessons. Every time that memory comes up, think of the lessons.

Right now, we can bet that you've got a memory from years ago that you'd like to call up and get that rush again, even if it makes you feel bad. That memory is attached to some bad habit. If you want to break that habit, you have got to get over that memory.

Number ten, reprogram your brain's reward system. Your most basic primal function, above all else, is to survive, right? If your brain sees something that it thinks is going to help you survive and reproduce, it's going to attach a high reward to it. The higher the reward, the stronger the habit for that reward.

For most people, the highest reward is calorie-dense foods. Why? Well, because more calories equals better chances of survival. It's an old, far-outdated system that we don't need in today's world, but these primal functions haven't caught up yet. So you have to trick your brain with high rewards for good habits, not bad ones.

When you don't perform your usual bad habit, give yourself a reward, but obviously make sure it's something healthier; otherwise, it kind of defeats the purpose. Think about the things that give you smaller doses of dopamine over a longer time. Don't compare the rewards side by side because when you weigh things up, like going for a walk, reading a few pages of your book, or listening to a podcast against scrolling social media, binge-watching shows, or procrastinating, you can clearly see what's easier and what takes less energy.

So don't even think of them that way. You have your list of rewards, and that's it. Every time you don't do the habit, you choose a reward from your list. You don't let your brain and body choose from whatever list they've been leaning on because, well, that is clearly not working here.

Number eleven, be curious, not critical. They say that to break the autopilot mode you're running on, you have to pay attention. But paying attention can be so hard. You have to focus on what you're doing, what you're thinking, what you're feeling all the time. It's so easy to forget to pay attention, even when you're feeling free, easy, and good.

So a little hack for this is to be curious about your surroundings because curiosity is one of your brain's superpowers. It breaks autopilot mode and forces you to activate its higher thinking centers. So get curious about the most random things, and you'll slowly train yourself to be more aware of what you're doing.

Like, look at a plant, but really look at it. Go close to it, pick up a leaf, look at the lines on that leaf, look at the bugs on the plant. Maybe it's kind of gross, but whatever. You might look silly to everyone else, but your curiosity trains your brain to take charge of your body instead of just allowing it to be on autopilot. You're still breaking that autopilot mode, but in a way more fun and roundabout kind of way.

Number twelve, the unknown will still be scary. Because listen, okay, your body is deathly afraid of changing its routine. It'll fight you tooth and nail when you try to make a change because it doesn't know what's coming next. It's like when you have to take your pet to the vet when they're sick. You know that you're helping them, but to your pet, well, they think it's more like torture. They have no idea what you're up to.

That's your body and brain when you're breaking a habit. It's freaking out. It's scared. It doesn't feel good. Even thinking about doing it right now doesn't feel good. So your body will influence your brain to do it tomorrow instead. You have to get used to this feeling, though. It's not because breaking the habit is truly uncomfortable; those emotions you're experiencing are fake. They're produced by your body to keep you in a more predictable and safe state.

To your body, the unknown is way worse than the guilt and suffering you feel from the habit. That's why it's so hard to just get started, and then once you do it, you're like, "Oh, that wasn't so bad." And when you try to do it again, it's hard again, but not as hard as it was the first time. That's your body putting up its defenses and slowly learning that unpredictability isn't so terrible and also it's not in charge anymore.

So it's putting up a fight that it actually cannot win. Eventually, your body will get the message that it should be sitting in the back seat. But first, you have to get used to feeling afraid of the change and just doing it anyway.

Number thirteen, you have to stop starting your day in the past. Every morning when you wake up and you have a thought, 99% of you are starting your day in the past. That thought is connected to a memory, and that memory is connected to a feeling. So when you think about that and you remember and feel it, you're literally reliving that event all over again, and you're doing it the moment you wake up.

It's crazy, okay? You can minimize this incredibly powerful force just by focusing on what you're doing right now and making yourself sound like a toddler who's just discovering the world. Oh hey, I'm waking up! There's my feet touching the floor!

And as you narrate these small present moments in your mind, you can begin to add some future stories in there too. Like, I've got a meeting today about the state of customer service. I've prepared everything, so let's just get to it!

Hey, lxer, we know this sounds childish and at times, well, way too simple, but your complicated brain is actually controlled by pretty simple motives. And yet, you know, it's actually because these motives are so simple and easy to ignore that we even struggle to take control at all.

Number fourteen, don't wait for something out there to change. Joe Dispenza, an author and expert in mind-body connection, says that one of the most dangerous lies that people tell themselves is that they'll change when something else changes. So they'll break a habit when some other situation that is causing them to stress out ends.

The end of that situation is not going to change your habits, though. In fact, it makes it harder because you're delaying that change, and the more you perform the habit, the harder it is to break. You're also still going to experience stress, even if it's in a clearer form. Your body isn't going through the motions because of that external issue; it's doing it because of an internal feeling, and you're going to have that feeling for most of your life to different degrees.

You absolutely cannot wait for someone else, for another situation, or for another day. It has to start now, okay? Even with the smallest change.

Number fifteen, meditation and mindfulness will fast track everything. You'll notice that so many of these hacks need you to go into your mind and intentionally change what's happening in there. Many of them are tools in meditation and mindfulness.

You don't have to practice them to use these hacks, but if you do, it will help a lot with these hacks. Unlike with traditional meditation, you're not sitting in silence for ages watching your thoughts go by; you are actively creating new thoughts and situations. So it's a little bit more entertaining, for sure.

But having the control over your mind that meditation brings can make the process easier. Then, instead of waiting for the morning or evening to get into your subconscious mind, you can put yourself into that state whenever you want, add in some experiences and thoughts, and then come out of it again.

Meditation also helps you to develop metacognition—your ability to think about your own thinking. With metacognition, you can look at your impulses objectively instead of following them blindly. So it becomes much easier to break a bad habit.

And the more you practice it, the more control you give yourself, so your entire personality doesn't lie in the hands of your kind of lazy brain and body.

And, Al, lxer, that's a wrap on this one today! Tell us what's your favorite Jedi mind trick for breaking your bad habits. We always love hearing from you in the comments. We'll see you back here next time, my friend. Until then, take care. [Music]