New framework for habit-changing may improve treatment of OCD and addiction

A new framework for making habit change achievable and lasting has the potential to significantly improve approaches to personal development, as well as the clinical treatment of compulsive disorders, eg. obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction and eating disorders.

 

The research was led by Dr Eike Buabang, postdoctoral research fellow in the lab of Prof Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology at Trinity College and has been published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Our habits are shaped by two brain systems – one that triggers automatic responses to familiar cues and another that enables goal-directed control. For example, scrolling through social media when you are bored is the result of automatic response system, and putting your phone away to focus on work is enabled by the goal-directed control brain system. 

It is precisely the imbalance between these two brain systems that is key. The research found that such imbalance can lead to everyday action slips such as inadvertently entering an old password instead of the current one. In more extreme cases, Prof Gillan’s research has shown that it can even contribute to compulsive behaviours seen in conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder, substance use disorders and eating disorders.

Habits happen when automatic responses outweigh our ability to consciously control them. Good and bad habits are two sides of the same coin — both arise when automatic responses overpower goal-directed control. By understanding this dynamic, we can start to use it to our own advantage, to both make and break habits.

The new framework describes several factors that can influence the balance between automatic responses and goal-directed control:

• Repetition and reinforcement are essential to making our habits stick. Repeating a behaviour builds strong associations between environmental cues and responses, while rewarding the behaviour makes it more likely to be repeated. In leveraging the same mechanism to break habits, we can replace old behaviours with new ones to create competing automatic responses
• The environment also plays a key role in habit change. Adjusting your surroundings can help; making desired behaviours easier to access encourages good habits, while removing cues that trigger unwanted behaviour disrupts bad habits
• Knowing how to engage your own goal-directed system can help strengthen and weaken habits. Disengaging from effortful control, such as listening to a podcast while exercising, accelerates habit formation. However, stress, time pressure, and fatigue can trigger a return to old patterns, so staying mindful and intentional is key when trying to break them.