Episode #7 - The Habit Loop

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Kevin: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Reframeable Podcast, a podcast that brings you people's stories and ideas about how we can work to reframe our relationship, not just with alcohol, but with stress, anxiety, relationships, enjoyment, and so much more. Because changing our relationship with alcohol is about so much more than changing the contents of our glass.

This podcast is brought to you by the Reframe app. Reframe is the number one iOS app to help you cut back or quit drinking alcohol. It uses neuroscience to reframe your relationship with alcohol and unlock the healthiest, happiest to you.

My name is Kevin Bellack. I'm a certified professional recovery coach and the head of coaching at the Reframe app.

In today's episode, I want to talk about the habit loop and become more aware of how these patterns might show up in our lives and reframe how we approach them. Anyone who knows me knows, I'm excited to talk about habits, so let's get started.

First, let's talk about what the habit loop looks like. In the book, [00:01:00] the Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg presents the Habit Loop as being made up of a cue, routine, and reward. He says, this process within our brains is a three-step loop. First there is the cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional.

Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop cue, routine reward cue, routine reward becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving eventually emerges and a habit is born, but habits aren't destiny, he goes on to say, and they can be ignored, changed, or replaced. The reason the discovery of the halo is so important he notes, is that it reveals a basic truth. When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working [00:02:00] so hard or diverts focus to other tasks so unless you deliberately fight a habit, unless you find new routines, the pattern will unfold automatically.

I think it's important to focus on here unless we deliberately stop and look at a pattern that has emerged, it will unfold automatically. So, as we mentioned in previous episodes, related to making a change, awareness is key.

Awareness is going to be the first step in order to make any change in our life. But first, let's expand a little bit more on this habit loop with one of my favorite books on the subject, if not Simply my favorite book, which is Atomic Habits by James Clear. In this book, clear adds a fourth part to the habit loop.

He takes the cue routine reward from Duhigg's book and expands it into cue, craving response reward. He breaks apart the routine into two steps and says the cue triggers our brain to initiate a behavior but cravings are the second step. They are [00:03:00] the motivational force behind every habit. What you crave is not the habit itself, but the change in state it delivers. And I'm paraphrasing here, but he says that you don't crave having a drink you crave the feeling of relief it provides, and every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state. The third step in his habit loop is the response. This is the actual habit you perform, which finally delivers a reward, which is the end goal of every habit.

He wraps it up by saying, the cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward, and the response is about obtaining the reward. Clear goes on to talk about his four laws to create good habits or to break bad habits. But for today, I just wanna stick with the habit loop itself and kind of break this down in order to bring awareness to how it even shows up in our life.

So let's take a look at each, each piece, starting with the cue.

Well, let me take a step back before we dive in [00:04:00] more. It's important to point out that where alcohol is concerned, it's not as simple as just changing a habit. Alcohol gives us an artificial rush of dopamine when first consumed, and over time, our bodies learn to trigger this release of dopamine when a craving hits. And while dopamine is linked to pleasure, it is also a motivational neurotransmitter, which is why it gets released in the craving phase once a habit has taken hold. So it's not as simple as just looking at this like making a habit change when an addictive drug like alcohol is involved. But for today's discussion, I wanted to just bring awareness to these different parts of the Habit Loop in order to help us make changes in our life related to alcohol and anything else that we're looking to change.

So the cue happens sometimes without us even doing anything. A cue is just something that can kick off a habit loop and kick off our want for a reward. This could be something like when I used to pull out of my parking garage downtown from [00:05:00] my office after a long day of work and I was feeling stressed.

That triggered me to think about wanting relaxation, which usually triggered me to think about having at least a drink when I got home. But for me in the moment as I pulled out into traffic, this just showed up as me saying to myself, Ugh, I need a drink. So me leaving the office immediately set off this motivation to get a drink and relieve stress.

This loop was built up over the years where I was stressed, I had a drink, and that drug relieved my stress temporarily. Where we can control our cues. It's important to do so, but also recognize that cues can happen without us doing anything at all. If I don't want to drink alcohol yet I, I have alcohol sitting out in my house, or it's there when I open the fridge.

Just the sight of that can be the cue that starts my desire to have a drink. In this case. Removing that cue and getting rid of the alcohol from my house could be the first step in stopping this particular habit loop from even starting. But then I might sit down and [00:06:00] turn on the TV and start watching a show, and I see someone pouring a drink, and that triggers me, triggers this habit loop in my brain, starting to crave something like is, uh, shown in the show.

And wanting that drink for the reward it signifies. We can work to control certain things in our environment, but inevitably cues can arise without us doing anything at all. So I want to give you a little homework assignment to start tracking habits and recognizing our cues will be the first part of that task.

So cues. These can be very subtle and we are going to have to be inquisitive and start to get curious about where our cues originate from. So my task for you over the next week is to create a note in your phone or on paper and just call it my habit log. Think about what you want to notice over the next week if it is, how does alcohol show up in my life?

We have to recognize when we get cravings to have a drink and we need to stop and ask ourselves, why did I [00:07:00] get that thought right Now? A lot of times we might not know, but if we start to recognize when the thought appears, we have a better chance of taking a look and seeing where it might have come from, and then we are able to potentially change our cues, determine what we can change and what we have to watch out for.

So that's the first piece of of the homework. More to come on that later. Um, so. A cue triggers a craving for a reward. I'm gonna be bouncing back and forth here a little bit, but the cue triggers a craving to get a reward. So let's go to the reward for a minute. A lot of times we believe we are craving a drink and therefore the drink is the reward.

But what I want to challenge you to think about is what reward is your body or mind actually looking for when we get a craving? If we are physically dependent on alcohol, the drink itself can be the reward. In this case, the reward is fulfilling our physical need for alcohol, but in most circumstances, alcohol is only [00:08:00] the response to get the reward that we're looking for.

So thinking about it this way, we need to ask ourselves, what reward am I seeking right now? A reward could be to feel less stressed. It could be to feel less bored. It could be to feel happy. It could be to just not feel sad. It could be to connect with others and so on. So if we look at it cue, craving response, reward: cue, craving response, reward.

So next we have to try and figure out. What it is we are seeking, what reward am I after? Early on in my own evolution with addressing alcohol in my life, I would have an emotion, ha have something happen to me or just show up at a certain place and my mind would tell me I want to drink. It took me getting curious about where these things started and, and what I was actually looking for to figure out that there are a lot of different emotions that led to these thoughts I had. I used to think that I drank [00:09:00] mainly because of stress from work. Uh, but when I started to be mindful of this and look for the patterns, I realized that I wanted to drink to help with any emotion, whether it was anger or sadness, or happiness or stress or anything like that.

So, realizing this, I was able to treat each circumstance as a unique opportunity to ask myself "what is it that I need right now?" In other words, what reward am I seeking? So by asking yourself, what reward is it that you are looking for you are able to start thinking about what response you can take to give yourself the same reward that doesn't involve having a drink. So if I pulled outta my parking garage and my mind immediately went to wanting a drink, I had to stop and think that the cue was leaving a stressful day at work, or perhaps it started much earlier at work. Uh, and I craved to unwind or relax. I had to acknowledge. That I had used alcohol as this [00:10:00] tool for so long that it just became ingrained that this was the only option.

For me alcohol was the hammer, and every emotion problem or stressor I had was a nail. But I had to stop and realize that yes, alcohol was the hammer. It was the coping mechanism that I used most, but every problem I had wasn't a nail. Some problems, needed a wrench, some problems needed, pliers, some problems just needed a screwdriver, and not the alcoholic kind. I needed to learn new responses and I needed to build new tools and recognize that the hammer wasn't solving my problems. It was just driving that nail deeper if I was bored and craving excitement. Alcohol wasn't rewarding me with excitement. It was making me not care that I was bored.

I needed to pick up a wrench and do something different. I needed to recognize that boredom doesn't cure boredom and that I was only sedating myself with alcohol. Using this example of boredom, the only way to cure it [00:11:00] is with something that we are actually interested in. In order to get a reward of relaxation, we have to do something that is relaxing.

We have to take breaks during our workday. We have to help ourselves de-stress throughout our days and come up with a plan for the nights as well. We have to recognize our triggers and cravings and change our responses in order to try and give ourselves the reward we are seeking. So now if we go to our habit logs and are taking note of our cues as they arise, it's going to be important to also ask, what am I craving right now?

And think through what your body and mind is looking for and try to solve that problem. We have to become problem solvers in this equation and come up with new and novel tools to use in our own lives in order to give ourselves that reward we're seeking. So along with taking note of our cues in our habit log, we should also write down what reward are we seeking?

Then we should write down at least five different ways [00:12:00] we can get that reward, even if it's not something we were able to do at that moment. We want to build up a toolbox of responses to things like boredom, stress, sadness, fun, et cetera, because if we are seeking to have fun and we crave a drink, because we want to go to a bar with someone and connect with them, but instead we sit at home and our bored, that's not giving yourself the reward that you're looking for.

So over time, we might feel deprived because we're trying to fix our problem with an incorrect tool. If you stay at home and do something engaging that is that you think is fun, that can work. But we need to make sure we are solving for the right reward, recognizing that it is going to be different. And we are going to have to put more effort into the solution because we're doing it differently than we may have in the past. But we need to try new things and try them again and search out new activities and grow on this journey. People ask, how do you have fun without alcohol? How do you unwind? How do you just get through? And I know I used to think the same things, but then [00:13:00] I realized that alcohol doesn't equal fun.

I realized alcohol's relaxation was fleeting and only led to even more anxiety the next day. because alcohol is just the big dumb tool that we use because at some point we stopped doing things we actually enjoyed and we settled. We settled for the path of least resistance. And admittedly, we settled for what we thought was a good solution at the time.

But along the way, these neural pathways kept getting laid and strengthened and solidified.

So as Duhigg said, When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in the decision making unless we deliberately fight back against that. So let's work to bring awareness to the habit loops in our lives and put down the hammers, whether that's alcohol or something else, and look for better tools to solve our problems.

Clear gives us a good feedback loop to practice here, and that's to try fail, learn, and try differently. If we keep repeating this, we can learn what responses work best or work better for us. [00:14:00] And remember that changing our habits, changing our, our cues, changing our cravings, changing our responses isn't easy work.

But if we can find better solutions, we can begin to feel better, we can begin to unravel those neural pathways and we can keep working on ourselves. So over the course of the next week, I challenge you to start your own habit log. And I'm giving you a guide here, but you can do it however it might work for you.

But when you notice a craving, ask yourself, where did it come from? What was my cue for this? And, and then ask yourself, what reward am I seeking? Or what problem am I trying to solve for here? Then come up with at least five different responses that don't involve alcohol in order to try and solve this particular loop.

And try one of them. Try five of 'em. Try all of 'em. And this exercise is important, whether you're looking to cut back on alcohol or if you're looking to quit, because remember, all we're doing here is trying to find better responses than having to reach for the hammer that is this drug called alcohol.

And then [00:15:00] try them, see how they feel, see how they work, they don't work well. Then learn from that and try a new tool next time. Or try this one again because not every situation is the same. And just keep building that toolbox. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Reframeable Podcast, brought to you by the Reframe app.

Reframe is the number one iOS app to help you cut back or quit drinking alcohol and will be available on Android very soon. It uses neuroscience to reframe your relationship with alcohol and unlock the healthiest, happiest you. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with those that you feel may benefit from it.

I wanna thank you again for listening and be sure to come back next week for another episode. Have a great day.