We form habits in order to perform tasks efficiently. When actions become a habit, such as brushing teeth in the morning, cooking rice in a rice cooker while still half-asleep, and pedaling a bike, we can complete even complex tasks without special effort. Not only actions that take several steps, but also even more complex actions can be carried out without major mistakes or waste of energy once they become habits.

However, not all habits are beneficial. Some may have a negative impact on our health, such as eating snacks at night and watching short videos on a cell phone in bed.

When we engage in a habitual action, our existing movement and associated thinking and feeling patterns are activated. This is because the thoughts, feelings, and actions we experienced or engaged in whenever we faced hardships in our childhood naturally become absorbed into our habits.

These ingrained habits become automatic, and when we face a certain situation, habitual thoughts and feelings are experienced and habitual actions are carried out without us even realizing it. These are habitual patterns ingrained in our brain’s default mode network (DMN), which automatically activate in certain situations.

“Why do I always act this way?”
“I always end up running away at important moments.”
“I become so worried every night, and it’s hard to escape it.”
“I can’t trust anyone anymore.”

Let’s imagine a college student client.

His father is a self-made businessman, and his mother is a housewife. His father is a blunt and hot-tempered man, physically and verbally violent to his mother and children. His mother has suffered from chronic depression and always seems to struggle.

The client, the second son, is introverted and gentle, while his elder brother is self-assertive and often clashes with his parents. Seeing the father getting angry at his family, the client came to think that anger is a quite bad emotion. Through the conflicts between his parents and his brother, he realized that expressing virulent emotions makes everyone unhappy.

He tried to ignore his uneasy feelings, and learned to give up from the moment when what he wanted seemed to create conflict. Despite these efforts, when his negative emotions remained unresolved and anger arose, he blamed himself for being a bad, inconsiderate person. Even when he was disappointed with his parents, he reproached himself, thinking, “Maybe I’m too petty.”

Instead of expressing what he wanted, the client hoped that others would be considerate of his needs, which never happened. Eventually, he came to believe that expecting nothing from others, including his parents, was the best way to protect himself, and this created the belief that he should not trust others. After entering college, he became even more lonely and had difficulty in managing social relationships. Whenever facing hardships, he drank or watched YouTube alone and easily fell into self-critical thoughts. His sleep patterns were disrupted and he also began to struggle with his studies.

In this case, while adapting to his family environment during childhood, the client developed attitudes and behaviors in relation to his thoughts and feelings over a long period of time. These thoughts, feelings, and behaviors became habitual patterns, which finally became ingrained in the client’s brain as defaults. Whenever the client was in a similar situation, the DMN became activated and similar patterns were repeated.

Three Psychological Strategies for Changing Habits

So how can we change these automated habits? The first step to changing the DMN is to awaken our capacity for new perceptions. In an automated state, such new sensations are blocked. Therefore, simply awakening a new sensation can have the effect of pressing the pause button on the automatic flow.

For example, when you are about to feel anxious, just find five new things around you, focus on the taste and smell of the food you are having and savor each element of it, or focus on the sounds of a guitar or drums in music. Activating your senses in this way can pause the automated DMN responses.

The second step is to engage in self-awareness. It is important to realize what is going on when the automated patterns begin. Self-awareness refers to realizing one’s own mental states, effectively thinking things such as, “I can tell I’m angry right now,” “I can tell I’m so upset I don’t know what to do,” and “I can tell I really want to watch short videos and eat a late-night snack right now.”

The third step is to activate the prefrontal cortex. Located at the front of the head, it is akin to the supervisory organ in our brain. It plays a key role in problem-solving and emotional control. The automated thinking process is followed by a series of negative thoughts, such as “You’re always like that,” “You’re never good at anything,” and “You’re useless.”

Activating the prefrontal cortex in these situations allows us to engage in factor-based balanced thinking. We can do this by thinking of specific answers to questions like, “What was I good at or what am I good at?”, “What do my friends think about me?”, “What would I say if my friends were in the same situation as me?” When we answer questions like these, our prefrontal cortex activates, pausing the automated DMN for a moment.

The final step to changing one’s DMN is to practice self-compassion, which refers to treating one’s current self warmly and embracing oneself with kindness and compassion. It involves asking yourself things like, “At the age of 100, what comforting words will I have for my current self ?”, “If a person I like or respect were in front of me right now, what kind of comfort would he or she give me?”, and “If I were to pray to God, what would he say to me in this situation?”, and then imagining answers filled with kind comfort or compassion, all of which is a great self-compassion exercise.

Practicing self-compassion not only pauses the existing DMN but also helps build a new one. Habits are efficient, but efficiency does not always guarantee happiness. Changing bad habits ultimately changes brain patterns, and the brain can be changed through repeated practices.

Consistent daily practice of the above strategies can gradually weaken automated negative habits and establish new default habits. New habits allow us to express our emotions freely and to take care of ourselves without blaming ourselves for a predicament we find ourselves in.

Professor Choi Kee-hong

Professor of the School of Psychology Director of the KU Mind Health Institute
Director of the MINDEEP Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Center, Vice President of the Korean Psychological Association
Vice President of the Korean Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Professor Choi Kee-hong graduated from the Department of Psychology at Korea University and received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Nebraska in the United States. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University Hospital and Yale University Hospital, he joined Korea University as a professor in 2012. He is currently serving as a professor at the School of Psychology, and is director of the KU Mind Health Institute, director of the MINDEEP Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Center, vice president of the Korean Psychological Association, and vice president of the Korean Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

He is conducting research on the development of cognitive behavioral therapy and the psychological assessment and the integration of traditional psychological services and AI/ICT technologies in order to resolve community mental health problems. He has received numerous awards, including the Minister of Health and Welfare Award, the Minister of Unification Award, the KU Stone Tower Research Award, and the KU Stone Tower Teaching Award.