We too often surrender to cravings and eat all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons – one expert weighs in on breaking the cycle.
What’s your bad food habit? Mine is feeling stressed at work, walking to the vending machine near my desk and buying a Snickers. For the short moments that I’m demolishing the sticky composite of caramel, nougat and peanuts, I feel happy. Afterwards, with the tang of sugar still on my tongue, I wonder why I can never stop myself. Despite the certainty that there will be a bitter aftertaste of self-loathing, I never manage to behave differently to produce a different outcome.
Diet lore would hold that I am lacking in a certain elusive substance; willpower.
Dr Judson Brewer, an internationally renowned addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has spent decades researching how and why we form habits and what we can do to break them, takes a kinder approach. What I am stuck in is a bad habit loop.
“Clinically I see so many people struggling, thinking that there is something wrong with them because they don’t have enough willpower to change their eating habits,” says Brewer. His message though, for all of us who sometimes feel shame and guilt is far easier to palate: “Don’t beat yourself up and think there is something wrong with you. It’s just mis-wiring. We need to develop kindness and self-compassion to be able to move forward.”
Using his understanding of how the brain works, he helps his patients to recognise what is happening when they feel the irresistible pull of cravings. So instead of trying to avoid snacking or cake and berating our lack of willpower, we can actually change our relationship with food.
While Brewer’s new book, The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop deals specifically with food, it is not specifically focused on weight loss. “What a lot of people struggle with is a general unease with food,” says Brewer.
Equally, when it comes to breaking bad habits, the same neuroscience applies to smoking and drinking to excess, through to doomscrolling and impulsive online shopping.
If you are one of those people who frequently feels angry and frustrated with yourself, then knowing how your brain works will free you from those feelings.
“Learn how your mind works; that’s the key piece here. You’ve got to be able to map out these loops and see how unrewarding those old habits are,” he says.
Why our brains are set up to get hooked
The most ancient neural systems in our brain are wired towards survival so it is calorie packed food that our so-called “old brain” recognises as our best chance of staying alive.
“Sugar and fat have lots of calories, so when we eat it our brain says, ‘Calories, fantastic!’” says Brewer.
He uses the example of a baby taking its first lick of ice cream. This sets off a big spritz of the hormone dopamine in the reward centres of the baby’s brain. “That sends a loud and clear message to the baby: remember what you ate,” says Brewer.
Dopamine is a drive molecule that says “go get this”: “I’d be forever grateful if you could help correct the internet myth that dopamine is the pleasure molecule,” says Brewer.
Habits free up our brain to learn new things, so we can automatically act that behaviour out without thinking. From knowing how to walk to brushing our teeth, our brain has learnt thousands of habits that make our lives run smoothly and conserve energy. Brewer favours the following definition: “A settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.”
However, the brain has to choose what to lay down as a habit and what not to do again. “As a result we learn a habit based on how rewarding it is,” explains Brewer.
Reward-based learning has three components: a trigger, a behaviour and a reward. “See food, eat food, feel good, repeat,” says Brewer. “This is how habits are set up so we react on autopilot.”
The decision maker
Sometime in the last million years, humans evolved a new layer on top of our primitive survival brain, called the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is located behind the eyes and the forehead. Brewer calls this our “planning brain”.
Less focused on the here and now, it is more concerned with predicting what will happen in the future.
An important part of the PFC is the orbitofrontal cortex, (OFC). Its role is to constantly compare everything we do to determine whether it helps or hinders our survival. “Think of the OFC as the decider,” says Brewer.
One of its chief responsibilities is to set up reward hierarchies.
Thus after a baby has tasted ice cream and broccoli for the first time, the OFC will make it pick ice cream every time. “That’s because it has more calories and will help us survive in famine. It doesn’t however take account of how the world has changed,” says Brewer.
The OFC also sits at a crossroad in the brain where sensory, emotional, and behavioural information gets integrated. The process by which it determines a composite reward value of a behaviour is called “chunking”. As such it also considers the value of people and places and things. “Think of your birthday when you were a child. You not only had cake, but you had fun with friends and there were presents. All of this information goes into a single composite reward value,” explains Brewer.
And each party we go to reinforces that. We only have to repeat a behaviour a few times to lock in its reward value and the habit is set. So as an adult you have an association you learn as a child that kicks in. “When we’re really on autopilot, we eat simply because it is there: see cake, eat cake,” he says.
You know that eating cake makes you feel good and it triggers that habitual and automatic response to eat it.
A dopamine world
The simple definition of addiction favoured by Brewer is a habit that continues despite adverse consequences. His work has taught him that the root of addiction isn’t in the substances themselves but somewhere deeper. “It could be continued shopping, tweeting, computer gaming, daydreaming, with adverse consequences. Addiction is everywhere.”
The modern world is securely designed to create experiences that trigger the release of dopamine in our brain. We’re targeted by adverts and what we want is available at the click of a button. In the food world, companies have tweaked their products so they have that bliss point mix of salt, sugar and fat that signals to our bodies what we have in our mouths is packed full of calories. “Convenience, food engineering and emotions add up to make it really easy to get locked into poor eating habits,” says Brewer.
Why we eat when we’re stressed
When we are stressed our natural reaction is actually to stop eating, so that we can run away from a sabre-toothed tiger. It’s why today you might not feel like eating before an exam or a big interview.
However, in a cruel twist, explains Brewer: “Over time in the absence of immediate threat and the presence of ready access to high-calorie foods, instead of avoiding pain by channelling our blood supply to our legs and lungs so we can outrun the tiger, we’ve learned to numb emotional pain with some pleasure or distraction.”
Our modern, creative brain has the idea that we can use reward-based learning for more than just food. “The brain says, ‘Next time you feel bad, why don’t you try eating something good, so you’ll feel better?’ We thank our brains for that idea, try it, and quickly learn that if we eat ice cream when we feel bad, we soon feel better,” explains Brewer.
It is the same learning process but instead of the trigger being a hunger signal coming from our stomach, an emotional signal urges us to eat.
“So anytime you choose to eat something to comfort your feelings, your survival brain and your planning brain are getting their wires crossed,” he says.
Our old brain is set up to help us survive using reward-based learning to help us find food, but our new brain leverages this learning process to trigger cravings, create habits and evoke emotions that spill over into compulsive behaviour like compulsive eating or any other addiction, from shopping to doomscrolling.
As a result, most of us struggle to tell the difference between hedonic, emotional eating, and homeostatic hunger, which is when your tummy rumbles.
“Our brain is trying to help us survive in a new world and not doing such a good job,” says Brewer.
Willpower – more myth than muscle
If our old brain acts on impulse, then our new brain is the rational, logical decision maker. “This is the seat of self-control and willpower. However it’s too inexperienced and weak to compete with the old brain,” says Brewer.
Under normal conditions it works. “But when we get stressed, our old brain takes over and overrides our newer brain, shutting it down until the stress is gone. Just when we need it to take control.”
Recent research is questioning some of the early studies on willpower, finding that it works only for a genetically endowed, lucky subset. Other studies that have tested for willpower as a real entity found that people who exerted more self-control were not actually more successful in accomplishing their goals. “They were depleted as a result. It might work in the short term but not in the long term,” says Brewer.
Yet if you’re trying to cut down on automatically eating cake the standard advice is to use your willpower. Just don’t eat it. “This might work sometimes but more often than not in the long run it fails,” says Brewer.
Most of our current habit change strategies rely on a new brain which goes offline when we need it most.
Diet culture asks us to substitute behaviours – swap your Snickers for a healthy snack – but this doesn’t break habit loops, says Brewer: “and makes it more likely you fall back into the old habit in the future”.
Another diet technique is priming your environment. By not having ice cream at home, you won’t have the temptation in the first place. This might work, but it doesn’t get to grips with long term behaviour change.
From an evolutionary perspective, diets also don’t work. “When we restrict our caloric intake, we’re fighting our survival nature so our body goes into starvation mode, decreasing our metabolism, to hold on to every calorie that it can,” says Brewer.
So how can we change our bad food habits?
One simple ingredient: awareness. “To change a behaviour you can’t just stop the behaviour, you have to focus on the behaviour itself. You have to address the felt experience of the rewards of the behaviour,” says Brewer.
If it was as easy as thinking our way out of a behaviour, he says, we would all just tell ourselves to stop smoking, comfort eating, or shouting at our kids when we’re stressed, “and it would work”. But it doesn’t. “The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value. That’s why it’s called reward-based learning after all,” says Brewer.
To change a habit our brains need new information “so that it can see that whatever the value it had learned in the past is outdated”.
By paying attention to the results in the present moment we can jolt our brain out of the habit of autopilot and see and feel how rewarding it is for us now. “This new information resets the reward value on that old habit and moves better behaviours into automatic mode,” explains Brewer.
He has scientific evidence that this approach works. Eat Right Now, the app-based mindfulness programme he developed, has a craving tool that makes patients measure exactly how rewarding certain eating behaviours are. Patients pay careful attention as they overeat a certain type of food so their brain can accurately update the reward value. “We have found it takes as few as 10 times of using the craving tool for people to update the reward value of their habitual behaviours and change their habits,” says Brewer. “In one study of our Eat Right Now programme we saw a 40 per cent reduction in craving-related eating.”
Cultivating awareness
For most people, mindfulness is seen as a way to slow down and de-stress. Brewer, though, is most interested in what mindfulness does to the brain and how it can help us break bad habits.
“Mindfulness targets both the new and old brain,” he says. “It can tap into reward-based learning to see the lack of rewards in harmful habits, and how bad they really feel, and the real rewards of helpful habits.”
The awareness that arises when paying attention on purpose and non-judgmentally helps us to recognise our habit loops while they’re happening. Once we are aware of those times when we are on autopilot we can get curious about what’s happening. Why am I doing this? What triggers that before? What reward am I getting from doing this? “This helps us change habits,” says Brewer.
Find your pleasure plateau
Some societies have long had positive food habits built into their culture. Take the example of the Okinawans who are lauded for the principle of hara hachi bu, the principle of eating until you are 80 per cent full. “When they eat to 80 per cent full they are paying close attention to the pleasure principle,” says Brewer. “They’re comfortable with not being 100 per cent full, because that’s what their habit is.”
To find your pleasure plateau while eating your favourite foods you have to pay attention with every bite. “Focus on pleasantness, wanting, and fullness. Use your mouth as your main guide here, and give your stomach 15 minutes to catch up so that it can let you know when you’ve hit enough,” says Brewer.
When you get started, you might go off the cliff a couple of times. “That’s fine. As long as you pay close attention to what that feels like, you’ll learn from the experience,” he says.
Use the craving tool
Cravings are designed to be unpleasant. “That dopamine-firing makes our lives miserable until we carry out the desired action,” says Brewer.
But the more we indulge as quickly as possible, the more we learn to do this.
However, says Brewer: “Satisfying a craving is different from feeling content afterward.”
Try the craving tool. Notice when you have a craving for a food.
If you decide to indulge the craving, go for it. “But pay attention to what it feels like as you do so. Check in with your body, emotions, and thoughts. Afterward, ask yourself one crucial question: ‘What am I getting from this?’”
Each time you do this it will help your brain determine the new reward value for each old (or new) eating behaviour that you use it with.
By also asking yourself: “How content do I feel?” You can start to build a disenchantment data bank; “a store of memories of negative prediction errors your OFC can draw on when making a decision about what to eat.”
Brewer recommends picking a food that is problematic and applying the craving tool 10 times and tracking the results.
How long does it take to build a new habit?
You don’t have to be chased by a tiger 20 times to learn that it’s dangerous. “Our brains have to adapt quickly to changing environments,” says Brewer, who has helped people break a habit of 40 years standing in one month. “It’s possible because that reward value becomes so clear,” he says.
While there is no proven scientific formula for how long it takes to form a new healthy habit, Brewer’s studies have shown that the more people pay attention the faster it happens.
The most important element though when attempting to form new healthy habits, says Brewer, is that we bring kindness, along with awareness. “Letting go of guilt and shame empowers people, opening the space for self-kindness and even a desire to address the root causes of emotional distress, rather than avoiding them through eating.”
Mapping food habit loops
If you’re unsure where to get started, mapping your food habit loops will help focus your attention on the present. A typical food habit loop can be distilled down to: why, what and how.
For example:
Trigger – see chips in a bowl
Behaviour – mindlessly eat chips
Result/Reward – satisfy that urge
Or
Trigger – uncomfortable feeling
Behaviour – eat something that temporarily diminishes the feeling
Result/reward – still have to deal with unpleasant feelings but now with a sugar headache.
Brewer advises against getting hung up on the why/trigger. While our history is important and shapes who we are, he says it only sets the wheels in motion of our habits, it isn’t what drives it.
“Ultimately you are caught in a habit loop that doesn’t work,” says Brewer.
What helps is learning to recognise when we’ve fallen into a habit loop: “Ask yourself, how rewarding is this?
“This helps people in a non-judgemental way to really explore what the results of overeating when you’re bored are,” says Brewer.
That curiosity in itself can help people ride out cravings “until they become fully disenchanted with the behaviour itself”.