Train the Brain to Form Good Habits Through Repetition

You can hack your brain to form good habits – like going to the gym and eating healthily – simply by repeating actions until they stick, according to new psychological research involving the University of Warwick..

Dr Elliot Ludvig from Warwick’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues at Princeton and Brown Universities, have created a model which shows that forming good (and bad) habits depends more on how often you perform an action than on how much satisfaction you get from it.

The new study is published in Psychological Review.

The researchers developed a computer simulation, in which digital rodents were given a choice of two levers, one of which was associated with the chance of getting a reward. The lever with the reward was the ‘correct’ one, and the lever without was the ‘wrong’ one.