Emonthebrain - How to Break ANY Bad Habit Using Neuroscience

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Em breaks down the neuroscience of the habit loop that keeps you stuck in bad habits and gives you the exact four step process she used to quit nicotine for good. I’m hosting a free MASTERCLASS on the Neuroscience of manifestation and reprogramming your subconscious mind!! Sign up here to save your spot: https://learn.emonthebrain.com/masterclass Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emonthebrain?igsh=aG1wNDY0OXZ1c3pi  I'm Going on Tour! Here's the link to RSVP for your city! https://laylo.com/emonthebrain/m/2jAoUd?utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3

The reason it's hard to break a bad habit is because it's not a decision anymore. It's a loop. But when you understand the loop, breaking bad habits becomes easy. And in this video, I'm going to explain to you the neuroscience behind the loop that keeps you stuck in your bad habits and teach you the exact process to interrupt this loop at every single stage. Now, I actually studied drug addiction when I was in my PhD. It was my research focus.

So bad habits, habit formation, and living in cycles. is sort of my specialty. I also used to be addicted to nicotine myself, and I used the exact process that I'm about to share with you to finally quit. The last step of this process will be the step that seals the deal for you and interrupts the loop forever. So definitely stay until that step. But first, let's talk about the loop that keeps you stuck in your bad habits. Every single habit that you have once started out as a goal-directed behavior. When you first started going on social media, You didn't go on there because it was a habit. It wasn't automatic.

You went on there for a purpose. You had some sort of goal. You wanted to interact with your friends or post something, share something, et cetera. But now, every time you open up your phone, all of a sudden, you're on social media and you don't even know how you got there. Your thumb clicked on it and you don't even know how you ended up on social media. You just ended up there. And that's because it's not a choice anymore. The behavior has become automated.

And so when the behavior that used to be a goal-directed behavior becomes automated, That is when it is stored in this habit loop. What does the loop look like? There are four stages of the habit loop. The first is a cue or stimulus. The second step of the loop is a craving or motivation. The third step is your response to that craving or motivation. And then the fourth step of the loop is reward.

So what does that look like in practice? Well, let's use the phone example. Okay. So with the habit loop, the first step is the cue or stimulus. So with your phone, it would be. your phone or maybe seeing the social media app. The second step of the habit loop is craving or motivation. So when your brain sees your phone, it motivates you to open up social media or scroll or binge watch something. And this happens because when something becomes a habit, dopamine actually

becomes tied to the stimulus itself and not even necessarily to the behavior. So at first, we got dopamine from going on social media. We got dopamine from sharing, from posting. But now you're getting dopamine from just looking at your phone. And that dopamine doesn't, it's not just reward. Dopamine is really important for anticipation of a reward for craving. Like that's really what dopamine is representing here is that craving that is driving you to pick up your phone and scroll on social media. And then step three of this loop again is your response. So the response has been automated. You get the trigger, which is the phone. You get the craving to go on social media. And then your response would be that you're going to pick up and scroll on your phone. And then the

last step is reward. You get a reward from scrolling. So you get that cheap dopamine hit from scrolling on social media, from the colors, from the social part of it. You get dopamine, which is rewarding. And that reward, that rewarding feeling actually drives this loop to be even further cemented in your brain because reward drives learning. When you are trying to teach your dog to sit, your dog doesn't learn to sit for free. You have to give your dog a treat and that drives learning. And I want to also use my example from my life of quitting nicotine because I know probably so many people can relate to that. And it's sort of just like a different angle of this loop. But I used everything truly that I'm about to share with you to interrupt this loop on myself. And so to describe how nicotine or vaping would be in this loop, the cue or the stimulus or the trigger, it might look like, many different things. So it might be seeing the vape, but it also might be at a party. It also might be drinking or smoking weed or taking adderol. For me in the past, those were all triggers. Those were all things that triggered me to want to vape because, you know, anytime I was stressed or anxious,

like that made me want to vape, right? So those were triggers. And then the craving hit, right? That's step two of the loop. The response is step three, which would be me hitting the vape. And then the reward would be the rewarding feeling that I got, which in the beginning of vaping, the reward was the buzz that I got from the nicotine. But toward the end, it didn't even really feel good anymore. It was more of the relief, which is actually negative reinforcement. It's removing the negative feeling, which is rewarding, right? So I'm anxious or stressed, and craving is actually just more stressful, and I'm hitting it to relieve the craving, which is rewarded. So a big reason why many people struggle to break bad habits is that they are actually trying to.

to attack the behavior without attacking the loop. And the loop is what we want to interrupt, not necessarily the behavior, although we will change the behavior. Let's dive straight into how to do this. So when we think of interrupting the loop, we can interrupt every single stage of this loop. It's really, really powerful. So let's start with step one, which is the cue, right? The stimulus or the trigger. The first step really is to identify what triggers you to do the bad habit in the first place. Because when you become aware of your triggers, now you can either avoid them or remove them from your environment or at least make them less visible. All right. So this is where you actually make the bad habit harder to perform. For me, when I was trying to quit vaping,

what I would do was I would actually like when I would be driving in the car because that was a trigger for me because my car was an environment that was associated with vaping. So when I would be driving in the car, I would put my vape like under the passenger seat because I knew that if I didn't have it at all, that stress would lead to craving, which was a trigger. So I would still bring it with me places, but I would hide it underneath the passenger seat of my car, right? So it wasn't readily or easily available to me. And if I was out in public, I would put it like in the bottom of my bag,

a bunch of whole different things. I would essentially make it harder to get to, and I would make it less visible to me. So for you, if it's social media, maybe that means deleting the app. Maybe it means sleeping with your phone outside of your room so you're not scrolling first thing in the morning. Maybe that means turning your notifications off or going on Do Not Disturb or when you're working, putting your phone in a completely different room.

If you are trying to eat healthier or avoid eating sweets, maybe that means don't buy them in the first place or keep them locked up or put it on a super high shelf out of reach. And the reason why this is so important is because it creates a post. Remember the habit loop. You have a stimulus or a trigger or a cue and that automatically leads to craving or motivation, which leads to your response. When you are in a habit loop, all of this is happening automatically. We don't get to think. It's not a decision. It is an automatic loop that the brain is playing and it is so deeply ingrained that we don't get a choice in it. And that's why it's so hard. But if you can put this thing out of reach, if you can make it harder to do. What happens is you interrupt this and you create a pause. So if I'm driving in the car

and I get triggered, which triggers that craving, my automatic response would be to vape, but because it's underneath the chair next to me, I can't automatically respond, which creates a pause. And in that pause, I can choose differently. And that is how you can begin to take your power back and be mindful over these automatic behaviors and habit loops that run our lives. So just building enough space, really widening the gap between getting triggered and your automatic response, the wider the gap, the more time you have to respond as the version of yourself that you want to be versus responding in the same old ways that you've always responded before. So again, that pause is what allows you to choose differently. And that is where the rewiring

begin. So that's the first step is to change the queue or remove it all together if that floats your boat. I know some people want to just cut it cold turkey, remove it from their environment, do that. If you want to do that, go for it. But I will actually explain to you in a second why that might not be the best choice and why there might be a better one. So the next part of the loop that we can readily rewire and change is the response. Because if we're being honest, we might not always be able to eliminate the triggers, right? Like for me, if driving in the car was a trigger, I can't just eliminate that trigger. Like, I have to drive in the car. If stress is a trigger, yeah, we can do our best to eliminate stress and try to regulate ourselves, but it's not always avoidable. We can do our

best to avoid being tired because when you're tired, your prefrontal cortex is less active and you have less ability to regulate your impulses, right? Like, we can do our best to avoid our triggers, but we might not always be able to avoid our triggers. And this is where this next step comes in, which is where you can change the automatic response. So this is where you have to decide beforehand what you want your new habit to be. The loop already exists in your brain.

The trigger is already triggering your brain. So while we can't necessarily erase neural pathways in a brain like they do in men in black, we can replace the bad habit with a new behavior. So in the first step, you need to get clear on what your triggers were. In this step, it is, okay, what am I going to do when I am triggered? What am I going to do instead? Now, for me, with vaping, something that I decided to do was I was going to take a deep breath.

Every time I get triggered, I'm going to take a deep breath. Or, you know, because vaping can be like a mouth fixation thing, I would take a drink of water, like drink through my straw. or I would literally pretend to like breathe in air. But something that I noticed also though was a lot of the time when I was craving. What I really did need was a deep breath. Like taking a deep breath feels really good. Like go ahead and take one out.

Like take that deep breath. Feel the oxygen expanding your lungs. It feels incredible. Now you might also choose to text a friend, right? Use social comfort, social reinforcement. Whatever it is, get clear on what your triggers are and decide on a new habit that you are going to replace the bad habit with. In the morning, if you scroll every morning, maybe you want to journal instead, or maybe something that I actually used to like to do is I had an

affirmation app that I would scroll instead. So I would open up my phone and, you know, that was already a trigger for me. So rather than just completely removing the phone, I would open up my affirmations app and I would just scroll affirmations. And that was a great way to start my day. Maybe if you are trying to eat healthier and cut out the sweets, you want to replace it with like an electrolyte drink or something that still gives you that little sweet treat feeling, that treating yourself feeling but doesn't actually contain all the sugar. And what you're doing here is you're essentially training your brain to associate the trigger or the cue with a new behavior. And over time, your brain will actually start to tie that trigger with the new behavior.

So right now, you're automatically getting triggered and you're doing the bad habit. But over time, if you see the phone, you might automatically just pick up and scroll affirmations instead. Or you might just take that deep breath instead. That's kind of what happened to me over time. Like over time, my brain learned, okay, in response to being triggered, we take a deep breath. And that was really helpful for me. So we've talked about changing the cue and we've talked about changing your response to it. Now let's talk about the next step in the loop, which is the reward. Your brain keeps repeating the same bad habit because something about it feels rewarding. Even if the reward is just, thank God, the craving stopped, that's negative reinforcement.

The removal of a bad feeling is rewarding. So stop letting your brain romanticize this bad habit. Your brain is still believing this is good for you for some reason. So stop letting your brain romanticize this bad habit and let it experience the full breath of the outcome that it implicates. How do you do this? Let's be so honest, right? because I would put the vape under the passenger seat.

I would take the deep breath. And sometimes I'd still like the vape, right? Like, I was addicted to nicotine, okay? Like, this wasn't just a bad habit. I was addicted to it. And so sometimes I would still give in to the craving and I would hit it. You know what I would do then? I would sit in the disgust of what it felt like.

Rather than allowing my brain to learn that, oh, yeah, this is rewarding because we don't crave anymore. Thank God. We can relax. We can sit back. like this is no longer stressing us out. The craving is gone. Rather than letting that happen, no, no. I would sit and just feel how disgusting I felt. And it's not about punishing yourself. It's about training your brain to associate the habit with what it really feels like,

with the negative outcome that it really leads to. So if you're scrolling for an hour or more, and you don't want to do that anymore, sit with yourself after you finish that. And rather Rather than just moving on, no, sit and notice how scattered you feel. When you scroll first thing in the morning, notice how the rest of the day you are less clear. You're less productive. You are more scattered. You are craving checking social media even more because you primed your brain with it first thing in the morning. When you give in and you eat a whole bunch of junk food when you're trying to eat healthy,

notice how that feels afterward and sit with it. Focus on the negative feeling. Now, this is powerful because your brain. learns from what you repeatedly pair together. So if your habit is repeatedly paired with relief or reward, then okay, hell yeah, your brain's going to be like, let's keep doing this. Let's keep motivating us to do it. But when you repeatedly pair with, that feels terrible. I don't like how this feels. I'm not being the version of me that I really want to be. Now your brain is learning a new outcome. This was super helpful in my journey because over time, I realized that when I would experience a

craving, my immediate response started to change. Like, when I would crave it, my thought that would pop into my head would be, no, you don't want that. That makes you feel gross. Over time, that is literally the response that my brain started to have, which was really helpful for when I finally fully quit and threw it away. Like, I would be walking through my closet and experience a craving randomly. And my immediate thought was, oh, no, like, you don't want that. That's gross. That's powerful. And that allows you to actually say strong when you do get to do to crave. And that might be more powerful for my people that are trying to quit nicotine or whatever it is, but it can be helpful for any bad habit.

Now, I want to be real with you for a second because I knew all of this. Like, I studied drug addiction. I was in the lab studying relapse to drug addiction. And I quit nicotine for six months and then I still relapsed. And there is one more step that I want to give to you because this was the step that actually sealed the deal for me and made it. real and made it permanent. And I have found that this is what has made it permanent for so many of the students and people that I coach. So many of the people that I coach have actually been able to

overcome addiction themselves through this process, including the step that I'm about to give you. Because this step really was what made it permanent for me. And it is to change who you think you are. Change the story that you've been telling about yourself. Your brain holds the most. You're model of who you are based on your past and your memories, your experiences. And it uses that model to predict your future, to predict your behavior and your thoughts and your choices. They've actually found that the neural correlates of a decision, the neural activity that represents a choice, can be seen in the brain before we are even consciously aware that we made a choice, meaning that this model a lot of the time is choosing for us. And I'm sure you've experienced this

with your bad habits. You're like, I wish I wasn't choosing this, but I am. You have to the model. You have to update the story of who you are. Because as long as you continue to tell the same story, you will continue to live the same story. I had a student once who was really struggling and living in this cycle. He came to me and he was like, I'm doing really well and I'll stop. And then I keep falling back to this old pattern and I just keep falling back to this old pattern. He was beating himself up about it. And you know what I said to him? Well, I said first, give yourself grace. And second, I said, stop telling that story. You're right here right now reinforcing to me that you always do this. You always fall back into

these old patterns. Well, yeah, as long as you tell that story, that's going to be the story that you're living. I was on the phone with a friend once, and he told me that he was two weeks sober from the nicotine pouches. I said, hell yeah, congratulations. I'm so excited for you. And you know what he said to me? He said, yeah, it's all right, but I'm always going to be a nicotine user. Like, that's just always going to be who I am. Like, I'm a pouch guy. That's what he said. I said, stop calling yourself a pouch guy. Because as long as that's your identity, as long as that's who you are, your brain is going to make sure that you act in alignment with that. And then you're going to wonder why you keep falling off. It's because you haven't shifted your identity. It doesn't matter

if it sounds delusional. My student that I coach, he was like, okay, cool, yeah. And one, two weeks later, he came back to me and he came on the call and he said, I have not gone back to that old bat habit since we talked. He said, I went up to my friend and I told him, yeah, that's just not who I am anymore. He said my friend laughed at me, but I didn't care because I was serious about it, and he hadn't fallen off. He had not fallen off, and now he's just living his best life, not repeating those old cycles. This is how you solidify it. And that's not to say that the previous steps that I shared with you in this video are not extremely important and helpful. They are, and they absolutely come in handy when you are experiencing craving, when you're experiencing

stress, all of these steps matter. But shifting your identity to match the version of you that you want to be, to writing the new story about the life that you want to live, that will help you to seal the deal. If you want to dive deep into the neuroscience of manifestation and understand the neuroscience behind the different components of your subconscious mind so that you can actually learn what is driving your behavior's thoughts and choices and learn real neuroscience fact tools to reprogram these different parts of the subconscious, then check the link in the description to save your seat for my next live re-masterclass where I train you to rewire your brain,

reprogram your subconscious, level up, and live your best life. I am also going on tour very soon, so make sure to click the link to RSDP for your city because we're actually going to be using your responses to that to decide which cities to come to on tour. I am sending you so much love. I believe in you. I'm rooting for you. You've got this.

Go have an absolutely amazing day, and I will see you soon. Bye.