You want to lose weight or get healthier, so you make a resolution to go on a diet. You start out strong but, usually within a week, you suddenly find yourself back in your old bad dietary habits. Don’t feel too guilty about this. It is really hard to break bad habits with willpower alone. However, if you use these mind tricks, you'll have a better chance at reaching your goals.
Why Do Diets Fail?
Most diets rely on a combination of external motivators (“I want to look great in a swimsuit by July!”) and new habit formation (“I will eat a bunch of new weird foods for the next 30 days.”). But it is really difficult to form new habits based on motivators alone.
As talked about in this New York Times article, every single habit that you have was formed by the same 3-step process:
- Trigger
- Action
- Reward
For example, when your phone rings (trigger), you answer it (action) and talk to the caller (reward). If your annoying mother-in-law was the only person who ever called you on your phone, it wouldn’t feel like a reward so you probably wouldn’t get into the habit of answering it immediately when it rings.
This pattern of Trigger, Action, Reward is hardwired into your brain. In fact, neurological research is finally showing how it is hardwired. There are special protein receptors, which appear between your neurons when they fire. As Adam Piore discusses in this Discover Magazine, this phenomena can lead to addiction, the more times those neurons fire together, the more AMPA receptors appear, causing the link between the neurons to strengthen: “The strengthening at the synapses make them more likely to fire together in the future.”
So, to make your diet succeed, it isn’t just a matter of increasing your motivation or willpower. You’ve got to reset your brain to form new habits.
