Breaking Bad Habits: Hack your brain into making better decisions.

Not again! You ate too much pie. You bought yet another pair of shoes that you don’t need. You were rude to someone. You partied too hard.

The list of regrets goes on. We can recognize our bad habits, but we have great difficulty breaking them.

There is one simple thing you can do — a new habit you can develop — that has the potential to dissolve all of your bad habits. To learn how it works requires a better understanding of how the brain drives behavior.

The how and why of habit formation

New research has revealed numerous hidden forces that affect our behavior in surprising ways. These forces include biological and environmental factors that comingle to steer our actions on a subconscious level. In other words, many of the things we do, including the habits we’ve formed, are not the result of careful contemplation and deliberation on our part.

That may sound unsettling, but understanding the mechanisms underlying our behavior exposes potential ways to hack the brain into making more intelligent decisions. Otherwise, we fool ourselves into thinking we’re at the wheel when we’re actually just a backseat driver.

Our brain is a remarkable feat of evolutionary engineering, but it is not without its…