The Long Haul: How to Form Habits That Stick

Welcome to The Long Haul! Every week, I’ll explore a longevity topic and then give a roundup of the big news in longevity.

This week I wanted to figure out how to apply all the things I’ve been learning about through writing The Long Haul. So I researched how to get habits to stick.

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Today's Topic: Forming Habits

One of the keys to improving your health is being able to form strong habits to make changes. And there are ways you can get involved to speed up the habit-forming process.

I like to consider it as a “personal reward system” – what I do to reward myself for implementing new habits into my life.

A strong personal reward system can:

• Break bad habits
• Create new habits
• Make the process of effort feel rewarding rather than draining
• Increase baseline dopamine:
  • Aids learning & memory formation [1]
  • Manages sleep patterns [2]
  • Regulates bone mass [3]

Studies have shown that well-functioning reward systems help us cognitively in old age and it’s the best way to make changes in your life stick. Like all the stuff you learn in longevity newsletters.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Pick the habit you want to make
2. Build a plan of attack
3. Time rewards with task anticipation and completion

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The Science

We’re wired for rewards - this goes back to our ancestors trying to survive. The brain was adapted to make staying alive (eating, drinking, sleeping, mating) feel pleasurable through a reward system. [5]

These systems are called dopaminergic pathways and they provide dopamine, the “feel-good” hormone to the brain. [6]

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The habit-building process

The reward system runs on dopamine. These charts from James Clear’s Atomic Habits are great at showing the 4 steps your brain goes through to form new habits:

Step 1: When you have no habit, dopamine doesn’t arrive until you’ve completed a task:

Step 2: Once you start more consistently implementing the habit, dopamine spikes earlier, in expectation of the reward from previously:

Step 3: When you’re forcing a habit — you get the excitement of expecting a reward, and a dip when the reward doesn’t come:

Step 4: Then finally, when you’ve got it down you get dopamine before the habit and once the habit is complete:

How to build new habits

Training your brain through steps 2 & 3 where no dopamine is provided despite completing your habit is hard. The easiest way to do it is through providing yourself with small incentives.

Giving yourself a small reward your brain already recognizes as pleasurable (like a snack or a walk), helps your brain associate the new task with rewards and feel-good hormones.

Recap

1. Decide the habit you want to form
2. Provide yourself with a small reward (ex. A piece of chocolate) before you complete the task
3. Provide yourself with a small reward after you complete the task
4. Repeat!

The Haul: What you can’t miss in longevity this week

News

• ​Is it time to quit therapy?: a thoughtful opinion piece on therapy and mental health

Research

• ​Lifestyle changes stabilize Alzheimer's progression: changes in diet, exercise and stress management stabilized disease progression in a randomized controlled trial

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Thanks for reading.

– Robyn

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18772052/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17275369/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15758457/

[4] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.863580/full

[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618216000100

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8992377/​

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​DISCLAIMER: None of this is medical advice. This content is strictly educational.