By Marti Webb Slay

Medical science offers a great deal of guidance on what to do for more healthy living: eat right, exercise, stop smoking, and cut down on alcohol, to name a few. But when patients need advice on how to do these things, physicians are often at a loss to provide guidance. UAB-educated neuroscientist Lindsey Smith, PhD offers insights into habits - good ones and how to develop them, as well as bad ones and how to break them.

First, Smith dismantles the myth that it takes 21 days to develop a new habit. “That’s a made-up number,” she said. “It could be anywhere from eight to 265 days. It depends on how much the habit is ingrained and what pressures the individual faces. Understanding how we develop habits is key to succeeding. Habits get established with repetition and because of our brain’s reward system. If it’s something you enjoy, it gets hardwired very quickly. Acknowledging the difficulty of habit change is important in order to manage expectations and remove guilt from the process.”

Smith offered the following tips as part of a habit-changing plan:

• Narrow the playing field by breaking the desired new habit into micro-steps. Tackle habit change in the smallest steps possible. “If you want to eventually run a marathon, you don’t start running two miles every day,” she said. “The first step in running a marathon isn’t actually running. It’s getting used to the idea you are going to be running and reframing it to take fear out of the equation. Make it manageable and unthreatening.

“Try putting shoes by the door, getting used to seeing them there, and adapting to the idea of putting the shoes on. The next step is to put them on and walk out to the mailbox. Now you are getting used to wearing them. Eventually you will start walking, and then jogging, and then running.”

• Make a plan. Know what the steps will be to move from the first small step to the final goal.

• Make it enjoyable. “If you dread what you are about to do, it’s going to be harder,” she said. “Focus on the positive outcomes of your intended habit change. That can help short-circuit the automatic reflex to negative information, so your body is more capable of handling the change without added internal stress.

“Your brain loves reward, and it doesn’t like harm. You have to give your brain data points, so go look up data. See what it’s doing to your body to eat junk food. Learn about it, make it less appealing. Then make the healthier choice easier by making it more rewarding. If you are telling yourself you don’t like it, you’re telling your brain this is harmful, and it’s not going to work. The first step is to start reworking your relationship with the new habit.”

“Telling yourself you don’t like a new habit activates stress in the brain. Focusing on how good it will make you feel instead helps activate reward centers in the brain. Those are two very different narratives in our head, and they do different things in our body. The first one causes a stress response. The second one brings on the reward systems. If you think about how great you’re going to feel, you’re activating a different set of molecular signaling cascades that support your success.”

After being diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, Smith knew she needed to walk more, but she didn’t enjoy it. Then she started applying principles of adaptive neuroplasticity. “I was telling myself every time that I didn’t like it. My brain remembered that and I didn’t want to do it, so I started reframing it, practicing positive affirmations while I walked. I could keep my mind positive while doing some guided visualization in my head. I imagined being successful. That felt really good, and all of a sudden five minutes would go by, then 10 minutes, and now I do 20 or 30 minutes without even thinking about it. I was approaching the reward instead of moving away from harm.”

• Fuel vs. Friction. The idea is to fuel good habits by making the change more appealing and eliminating friction that slows down progress and makes the change unappealing. “Fuel would be adding alarms and cues to remind yourself,” she said. “Reminders are important in retraining the brain. Sticky notes placed in home, office, and car, and notes on the mirror in chalk are some creative ways to be reminded of new goals and reinforcing in the brain why the changes are necessary. If you write it on your mirror, it’s the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.”

In the end, striving to eliminate guilt is a key part of the process. “Do you really think that you’re going to change a 20-year habit overnight, when it’s already automated and ingrained in your brain? Practice a positive internal dialogue,” Smith said.

Smith is developing classes on habit change, neuroplasticity, and stress resilience through her company, Synaptic Harbor LLC. For more information go to synapticharbor.com.