Reset Your Habits

05

From social media to sugar, addiction can become hard-wired into our cognitive circuit board, hastening mental decline along the way. The same neuroplasticity that makes your brain so resilient also makes it vulnerable to the formation of harmful habits – such as robotically checking Instagram every time you unlock your phone, for example.

Neuronal connections are forged based on repetitive thoughts and behaviours. Over time, those fleeting indulgences compound your brain’s dependence on the dopamine hit they trigger. Dr Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, believes dopamine’s role is not to provide pleasure but to help us notice, remember and act upon things essential to human existence, like high- calorie foods or sex. In this way, new neurological pathways are formed.

Professor Michael Merzenich, neuroscientist at the Uni of California, has a slightly more hashtag-appropriate name for it: “negative learning”. While a predilection for buttery croissants is not to be derided, per se, the sugar addiction it represents packs a two-fold risk: interfering with brain patterns in the same way as other hooks, while also being linked to depression and memory disorders. Research by Dr Gene-jack Wang at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory concluded that even when relaxed, the sensory cortex of overweight people remained stimulated, in effect putting out subconscious feelers for food – the one stimulus they know is certain to get their neurons firing again.

So if you’ve been overdoing it on the Haribo/netflix/ Call of Duty, there is a smarter way of trying to kick the junk than going cold turkey. All you need to do is recruit the prefrontal cortex, or thinking brain, in a new and challenging way – and that means interval sprints. Complete five lots of 200m sprints, with 30 seconds of rest in between, twice a week. Not only will you burn off the morning muffin, it will also provide the cerebral wake-up you need to escape your vice’s grip.