Alexis Fernandez-Preiksa

So ride the wave of the extinction burst is what I'm saying.

Expect it, ride it, and then you'll come through the other end in a very short amount of time.

Like I'm talking a very short amount of time.

For some times it's only three exposures.

For some people it's ten exposures.

It depends on what it is that we're talking about.

But it will get better really, really quickly.

Now, another thing that we're going to talk about, and I'll go in depth a little bit further, is strategies that we're going to do.

And these are going to be replacing and not removing a behavior altogether, learning how we can replace things, because sometimes just the blatant removal of something is harder than if we swap it out.

Substitution behaviors is one of those things.

And then we're going to identify triggers and frictions and things like that.

Now let's talk about neuroplasticity first before we talk about that and this weakening of neural associations, like what's actually happening in the brain.

So habits, like I spoke about last episode, they're stored in the basal ganglia as these really strongly myelinated, really efficient neural circuits with this habit loop, this cue routine reward, cue routine reward, which I spoke about.

Now, breaking a habit requires this neuroplastic change called long-term depression.

And this is weakening the connection between the neurons that previously fired together to wire together to execute a habit, okay?

So,

While we have this long-term potentiation, which I said like sleep is really important and it occurs during LTP to really strengthen those neural circuits, we're also having this thing where the less attention you give to this circuit, like by breaking it, the extinction burst, all that kind of stuff, right, in that way of not associating, like removing associations and things like that,

the weaker and weaker and weaker that loop or that habit or that connection in the brain is going to get and you get this long-term depression.

So your brain starts to identify what it uses a lot of, what it doesn't.

And when it doesn't use something that much, that pathway gets weak because the brain is efficient.