Buddhist Neuroscientist On: How To Quit Bad Habits And Why You're Not Keeping Your Resolutions | Dr. Judson Brewer

1. Use Mindfulness for Addictions

Leverage your innate capacity for mindfulness to reduce or eliminate everyday addictions like phone scrolling, shopping, or excessive coffee consumption, as everyone has a craving mind.

2. Map Your Habit Loops

Identify the behavior you’re struggling with and map out its habit loop by focusing on the behavior itself and its immediate result or reward, as this critical link sustains the habit.

3. Ask “What Am I Getting?”

For any unskillful behavior, ask yourself, “What am I getting from this?” to pay attention to the actual reward value and become disenchanted if it’s not truly rewarding.

4. Find Bigger, Better Offers

After becoming disenchanted with unhelpful behaviors, actively seek out “bigger, better offers”—intrinsically rewarding and always available alternatives—to fill the space left by old habits.

5. Substitute Curiosity for Craving

When a craving arises, instead of resisting or succumbing, get curious about what the craving or urge feels like in your body, using curiosity as an intrinsically rewarding alternative.

6. Ride Craving with Curiosity

Use curiosity to observe cravings as they arise, knowing that they are impermanent and will naturally intensify, then lessen, and eventually pass if you simply stay with the experience without acting on it.

7. Explore Gratification to Its End

To break an addiction, pay close attention to the actual experience and results of the behavior (e.g., smoking a cigarette). This process of “exploring gratification to its end” can lead to disenchantment and significantly higher quit rates.

8. Stop Fueling Cravings

Understand that cravings will diminish over time if you stop engaging in the behavior that fuels them, as each instance of the behavior provides fuel for future craving.

9. Abandon Willpower Reliance

Do not rely on willpower to break habits or achieve goals, as it’s not an effective long-term strategy and can lead to guilt and shame when it inevitably fails.

10. Prioritize Body Awareness

Recognize that the “feeling body” holds more power than the “thinking brain” in habit change, so tune into physical sensations and emotions to understand and shift behaviors.

11. Recognize Contracted States

Identify when you are experiencing “dukkha” or contracted space (feeling tight, wrapped up in your issues), as this is a clear indicator of suffering, and its negation (sukha) is a state of uncontracting.

12. Avoid Contracting Around Reality

Understand that suffering often arises from contracting around or resisting the way things are, rather than from the external reality itself.

13. Cultivate Self-Compassion

As a “bigger, better offer,” actively explore what kindness and self-compassion feel like, comparing it to the unpleasantness of self-judgment, as your brain will naturally choose what feels better.

14. Address Self-Judgment Habits

Apply the three-gear method to self-judgment: identify the habit of self-criticism, notice the unpleasant physical and emotional results of beating yourself up, and become disenchanted with it.

15. Reduce Stress for Learning

Understand that chronic stress puts your brain in a “fixed mindset” where it reverts to old habits and is unable to learn new behaviors, making it crucial to reduce stress to foster openness and growth.

16. Physically Release Acute Stress

After experiencing acute physiological stress (fight or flight), engage in physical release like shaking or dancing to help your body shift out of stress mode, similar to how animals adaptively “shake it off.”

17. Avoid Taking Things Personally

To reduce suffering and increase resilience, practice not taking things personally, as this often leads to contraction and prevents effective action.

18. Repurpose Energy for Change

Cultivate resilience to repurpose energy that might otherwise be drained by external stressors (like prejudice) into making systemic change, rather than letting it be “sucked from us.”

19. Prioritize Community Connection

Recognize that community and social connection are “the whole of the holy life” and are critically important for not just longevity, but also for quality living and overcoming addictions.

20. Seek Peer Mentorship

For addiction recovery, engage in peer mentorship programs, as community and trained peer support are critical components for effective habit change and recovery.

21. Mentors: Speak from Experience

If acting as a peer mentor, focus on sharing your own experience rather than giving advice, and establish clear boundaries to avoid taking on excessive burdens.

22. Reconsider “Healthy Anger”

Challenge the concept of “healthy anger,” as anger is a contracted state that narrows focus, prevents seeking new information, and is generally not the most skillful way to affect change.

23. Act from Compassion

When motivated to act, choose compassion over anger, as compassion is an expansive, selfless state that drives effective action without the suffering that often accompanies anger, which is typically self-focused.

24. Choose Compassionate Action

When seeking to affect change, prioritize an open, compassionate response that asks “what’s the most skillful thing to do right now?” over a narrow, anger-driven approach.

25. Notice Intrinsic Rewards

When performing skillful behaviors like kindness, pay attention to the intrinsic good feeling it generates, as this positive reinforcement will make you more likely to repeat the behavior.

26. Seek Lasting Happiness

Understand that lasting happiness does not come from satisfying sense desires, as even abundant external rewards will be fleeting and can perpetuate a cycle of wanting more.

27. Differentiate Curiosity Types

Recognize two types of curiosity: “deprivation curiosity” (seeking information to fill a gap) which can feel uncomfortable and “interest curiosity” (the joy of discovery) which feels expansive and is about enjoying the journey.

28. Use Experiential Language

When discussing mental states or practices, prioritize clear, experiential terms like “curiosity” and “awareness” over potentially confusing or vague terms like “mindfulness.”

29. Explore Causal Nature of Experience

Understand the causal nature of your experiences and how “this exists because of this” (dependent origination) to gain deeper insight into your habits and suffering.

30. Avoid Dopamine Fasting

Do not engage in “dopamine fasting” as a method to break habits, as it is not supported by neuroscience, doesn’t effectively change behavior, and will likely only lead to misery.