Blog Post #111: Breaking Type C Habit Loops
On Instagram Live, we recently talked to Dr. Judson Brewer, a New York Times best-selling author, renowned psychiatrist, and thought leader in the field of habit change. He shared some great brain science insights on how we can break out of Type C habit loops. Here’s a summary of our conversation (see podcast version here):
All of the sensory information coming in to us is more than our brains can handle and interpret. Our brains have evolved to see the world a certain way - think of this as a big giant habit. The only information we are going to let in is what deviates from our expectations and forces us to pay attention. Then, we bias the sensory information that does make it through our filters to fit our view of the world.
For Type C people, our world view is typically that we are peacemakers who don’t want to perturb or disrupt the system. We might look for things that could upset the system so that we don’t step on them and cause an upset, like walking on eggshells. We might bias neutral information, thinking it could be an eggshell, when in fact it’s not an eggshell at all.
To form a habit in our brains, we need three elements: a trigger/cue, a behavior, and a result. For our ancient ancestors, this might have looked like 1) find food (cue), 2) eat food (behavior), 3) stomach sends dopamine signal to brain - remember where food is (result). This applies to danger also - 1) see danger (cue), 2) run away (behavior), 3) avoid death (result).
Wires can get mixed with other wires that make habits antithetical to survival. For example, if we’re lonely and we eat, if we’re bored and we eat, if we’re celebrating and we eat - none of these pairings are necessary for survival. We learn to associate food with mood instead of hunger - this is called “hedonic hunger,” and it’s a modern day phenomenon.
For Type C people who default to saying yes when asked to do something - if we think about the three elements of habit forming, the habit loop would be 1) cue - someone asks us to do something, 2) behavior - automatically saying yes, and 3) result - what is this? Often, it’s a mixture of the pleasure of being generous, the relief of avoiding conflict or disappointing someone else, and the feeling of being valuable if we struggle with feeling lesser.
Of course, the negative aspects of saying yes too much are feeling exhausted and burning out, other health issues like migraines or stomach issues from too much stress, and a build up of anger and loneliness because we are unable to express how we are feeling and ask for help.
When generosity is fed to the extreme and it goes beyond just the pleasure of helping another person - when it becomes self-validating or about avoiding the fear of upsetting someone else, this is where the next step of habit-breaking comes in, asking “what am I getting from this?”
From a neuroscience perspective, we can’t really tell ourselves to stop helping people or stop being so nice. Our brains don’t work this way. In order to change behavior, we have to change up the rewards hierarchy.
If something is rewarding, we do it more. If it’s not, we do it less. When the downsides of saying yes too much become unrewarding, then our brains will register this. But, the key to this is awareness. We have to directly experience the downside, we can’t just tell ourselves not to do this.
The feeling body is stronger than the thinking brain. So if we feel exhausted, burned out, resentful - and we see that these are the costs of the habit loop, this will shift behavior.
The awareness is one of the hardest parts for Type C, because these habits have been so protective and helpful for such a long time, usually since childhood.
The last step of breaking a habit loop is finding a bigger, better offer. Curiosity and kindness are the keys here. For Type C, kindness to ourselves is lacking. We can ask ourselves, what is it like to be kind to myself and meet my own needs? Curiosity can help us explore whether we are in a Type C habit loop.
We can then develop new habit loops of curiosity and kindness, because they feel good.