Submission: Prioritize breaking bad habits with the help of campus resources

“I’ll sleep more next week.” “I’ll focus on dating after I graduate.” “I’ll exercise more next quarter.” As students, we say or hear these things all the time. We might put our values and quality of life on hold, sacrificing our wellness today with the idea that if we work hard enough then we will get to enjoy life later.

It’s the beginning of spring quarter. If you’re like me, you might have the idea that it’s a fresh start again and so this quarter you really will do better at: fill in the blank. But as the quarter progresses, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the moment when you’ve been working so hard on classes or your research or your paper or your computer code or your analyses. I find myself doing it more often than I would like. By getting caught up in the moment we can actually miss out on being in the moment.

Here’s the thing: Life is today. Life isn’t tomorrow, or next week, or after we finally get our degrees. Our lives are being built by our current experiences and habits. The habits we build today are all the more likely to become the habits of our future. So it’s extremely important that we really do start engaging in better habits now.

As a clinical psychology student, sometimes science speaks more persuasively to me than words of wisdom. So I’m going to talk science briefly.

Early formation of a habit begins with some randomness. You try out behaviors in particular contexts, and if the behavior results in benefits – attention, reduced discomfort, praise – then an increase in dopamine tells your brain “Hey, I like this, let’s keep it.” So then connections between neural synapses are strengthened to associate behaviors with situations. The next time you encounter the situation, your brain has that connection ready to go, making you more likely to repeat the behavior, and thus further strengthening the connections.

The pro: These stimulus-response associations are like “brain hacks” that maximize efficiency so that we can react more quickly, which is evolutionarily beneficial. If you already learned that running from a tiger resulted in not dying, then it’s helpful if your brain can prompt this stimulus response instead of considering all the options when the next hungry tiger approaches.

The con: What is beneficial in the short term or earlier in life may ultimately become detrimental. While avoiding confrontation in response to interpersonal conflict may be beneficial in the short term, frustration can build up in the long term and necessary assertive skills won’t get built. While perfectionism can help us attend to details, over time we risk burning out and losing motivation.

However, changing habits is hard. It isn’t simply a matter of knowing why we want to change or saying to ourselves, “Just do it.” There are a couple reasons. First, once one habit has established itself neurologically, then any new habit must compete with the old habit’s neural connections. Second, our habits lose plasticity across development, meaning that older brains have less flexibility to receive new information and alter neural connections. While habit change is still possible in later life, there is a shift in our mid-20s after which our brains – specifically the prefrontal cortex – have lower plasticity and require more effort to augment neural connections.

Bottom line: Habits are harder to change the longer you do them and the older you get. So when we tell ourselves that we’ll address those bad habits later, the very irony is that they’ll be harder to change in the future.

With all that said, sharing my opinion and these scientific explanations doesn’t make habit change any easier. College and graduate school are hard. We’re busy, we forget, we have conflicting priorities, we’re expected to complete assigned tasks while also working independently.

So what can be done? Fortunately, UCLA and campuses everywhere are offering more and more programs to help students take habit change off the back burner. We are surrounded by skill workshops, accessible health services, recreation classes and facilities, student group wellness events, de-stress activities at the library and more. Starting this week, for example, there will be two eight-week long programs – The Happiness Challenge and ReBoot Camp – that will focus on evidence-based skills for new habits: relationship improvement, physical exercise, time management, living in the moment, improving sleep and so on.

I could go on about the merits of campus resources, but I recognize that’ll only go so far. It comes down to this: Are you willing to prioritize your habits now instead of later?

If you are, then take advantage of what this campus has to offer us. If you want to learn more about The Happiness Challenge or ReBoot Camp, you can visit BruinHabits.org. Changing habits is hard enough alone, but collectively we can decide to start living our best lives now.

Rith-Najarian is a doctoral student in clinical psychology.