Transcript

The habits are a big part of who we are. What we do habitually makes up much of what we do entirely. In fact, it's estimated that up to 70% of our waking behavior is made up of habitual behavior. People are highly variable, and if you can't form one habit easily, it doesn't mean that you can't form other habits easily. It takes 21 days to form a habit. Some people say 18. Some people say 21 some people say 30 days. Some people say 60 days. So which one is it? Does it depend on the habit that one is trying to form? Or does it depend on the person that's trying to form the habit? There's a study published in 2010 first author, Lally, l, a, l, l y. This study found that for the same habit to be formed, it can take anywhere from 18 days to as many as 254 days for different individuals to form that habit.

So what I'd like to do is to take the scientific literature of how the nervous system learns and engages in neuroplasticity and apply that to habit formation, habit maintenance, and if so desired, how to break particular habits. I'd like to give you a particular tool that's gleaned from the research psychology literature with each repetition of a habit, small changes occur in the cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with procedural memory. So I just want to talk for a second about what procedural memory is. In the neuroscience of memory, we distinguish between what's called episodic memory and procedural memory.