The Science of Making & Breaking Habits

Limbic friction, task-bracketing, and the 21-day system. Most habit advice skips the biology. The actual levers are neurochemical states, not willpower.

With Andrew Huberman

"It's estimated that up to 70% of our waking behavior is made up of habitual behavior." — Andrew Huberman

Andrew Huberman, on the episode

Andrew Huberman, Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, dedicates this episode to the neuroscience and psychology of habit formation and habit breaking. The pop framing of habits tends to center on motivation and discipline. The actual operating system underneath is built on neurochemical states, specific basal ganglia circuits, and a process called task-bracketing that most people have never heard of. Huberman draws on a 2010 study by Phillippa Lally showing that the same habit took anywhere from 18 to 254 days to form depending on the individual, and on a review called Psychology of Habit by Wood and Ruenger in Annual Review of Psychology. This protocol extracts the operational framework he built from that research.