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The first car I ever owned was a 1996 Volvo sedan that I bought from my parents. It wasn’t necessarily the coolest car, but it got the job done. It aged gracefully for the most part, but every now and then something would break and I’d have to shell out a few hundred bucks here or there. It didn’t bother me that much until the seat belt started acting up, and forced me to come face-to-face with the irrationality of my brain’s habits—though really it wasn’t just a problem with my brain, but the brain in general, and how we get stuck in habits that we don’t want to.
It started simply enough: I got in the car, put the key in the ignition, and reached back for the seat belt. But when I tried to pull it down—CLUNK—it was stuck. I pulled and pulled, but quickly realized it was broken. I couldn’t get it out. So I gave up, and made a mental note to have it fixed.
I then turned the key in the ignition, reached back to grab the seat belt, and—CLUNK—it was still stuck. I laughed at myself a bit. Why had I tried to put the seat belt on again when I obviously knew that it was broken? I guess it was just a habit. I put the car in reverse, then reached back to grab the seat belt and—CLUNK. What the hell was I doing? Am I crazy? Why do I keep reaching back for the seat belt?
Once out of the parking space I put the car in drive, and, you guessed it—CLUNK.
When we first perform an action, it’s “goal-oriented"—that is, we do it to achieve a particular goal. But the part of the brain that controls habits, a deep reptilian structure known as the dorsal striatum, doesn’t care about goals much at all. It just wants to do things that it has done before. It drives our actions in a simple, unconscious stimulus-response way. It doesn’t care about goals; it cares about acting out a certain sequence of actions once it gets the right trigger.
It took me about a week to find time to get the car to the mechanic. (Sorry, Mom; I know I told you I fixed it right away.) And for that entire week, every single time I got in the car, I tried to put my seat belt on. Yes, I consciously recognized that pulling on the seat belt did not work, but my dorsal striatum did not care: As long as I received the right stimulus, it enacted the same habit. The only way to stop it was conscious awareness. If I told myself over and over, “Don’t reach for the seat belt,” then I could stop myself. But the moment I got distracted, like after turning on the radio, I would instinctively reach for the belt.
Reaching for the seat belt was a good habit in most car-driving situations. It helped to keep me safe. But when the seat belt stopped working it became a useless habit, and yet I still did it, because that’s what the dorsal striatum does. It does not care about whether a habit is good or not, it just tries to make us do the actions we’ve most often repeated.
The dorsal striatum fills an important role: If we didn’t have habits we’d have to constantly make complex choices and re-learn things and it would be exhausting. But while the brain circuitry that controls habits is useful, sometimes it can get in the way.
We often develop habits that are useful at one point in our lives, but then circumstances change and they become less useful, or even destructive. For example, as a kid maybe you dealt with stress by eating. That’s not the worst problem because you usually don’t have as much stress as a kid, and your parents control most of your access to food. And the food actually does make you feel safer and helps reduce your stress. But unfortunately, once you’re all grown up and you have access to every fast-food restaurant under the sun just as your life is getting more stressful, your dorsal striatum will drive you to McDonald’s one too many times. As a teenager, isolating yourself when you get sad may be a good way to recharge, but when you’re an adult and have no one to knock on your door and force you to go to school, it can be damaging. And maybe in college partying every night is a sustainable habit, but it isn’t so great if it continues through your 20s. Swearing at traffic can be somewhat cathartic, until you have a kid in the back seat who’s soaking up everything you say.
Take a look at yourself: What habits do you have that no longer serve a purpose or get in the way of your happiness? Awareness is the first step towards change. Now, it’s easy to get upset at yourself for continuing to enact old habits that are no longer useful. But getting upset at yourself only serves to stress you out, which actually increases the strength of the dorsal striatum and pushes you to act out those habits. The best path forward is self-compassion.
If you liked this post, then check out my book, The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time.
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