How to Break Any Bad Habit w/ Neuroscience 🧠
The Secret to Breaking Bad Habits That No One Talks About (7min Read)
TL;DR Summary:
Bad habits are loops of negative thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Methods like notifications and tracking only work short-term.
The Positive Cargo Method rewires your brain by inserting a small positive action after the bad habit.
Avoid guilt and shame—they reinforce bad habits.
Consistently using this method will help you break the loop and form new, positive habits.
Breaking Bad Habits
The number of times I get asked, "How do I break a bad habit?" is absurd.
That’s why today, I’d like to share one of my favorite tools to do just that!
It’s called the Positive Cargo Method, developed from the work of Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist.
This method is simple, backed by neuroscience, and will rewire how your brain handles habits.
Before we get there though…
What Even Is a Bad Habit?
At its core, a bad habit is just a loop.
Think of your brain as a highly efficient machine.
All day long, it runs on automatic, using loops to save energy—loops of thoughts, feelings, and actions.
These loops are efficient because they keep you from having to think about every little thing you do.
Let me ask you: Have you ever been driving and suddenly realized you don't remember the last few minutes of the trip?
That's your brain running a loop in the background—super efficient but unconscious.
Bad habits work the same way. They’re closed-loop systems that reinforce themselves.
Here’s what a Bad Habit Loop might look like:
Feeling stressed ➡️ "I need to relax." ➡️ Drinking alcohol
Thinking "I’m not smart enough" ➡️ Feeling guilt/shame ➡️ Procrastinating on a project
Failing at something ➡️ Feeling embarrassed ➡️ "I’m a failure." ➡️ Quitting
These loops trap us because they create a cycle of bad feelings leading to bad habits, which lead to more bad feelings.
Breaking Bad Habits: What Doesn't Work
Before we get into the Positive Cargo Method, let’s touch on what people usually try to break bad habits—and why these methods often fail over time.
Notifications
We’ve all tried it, right?
You set reminders, change your phone’s wallpaper to a motivational quote, or plaster sticky notes around the house.
These cues work for a little while, but after about a week, your brain starts to ignore them.
Notifications only work in the short-term because your brain habituates to them—it gets used to the reminder, and the novelty wears off.
Tracking
This is a popular method among habit-hackers.
You track your bad habit with tally marks or in an app.
The theory is that by becoming more aware of how often you’re doing the habit, you’ll eventually cut back.
It’s a decent method—awareness is step one, after all.
But over time, the brain adapts, and the motivation to track fades, along with its effectiveness.
Electric Shocks (Yes, I’m serious)
Ever heard of Pavlok?
It's a bracelet that delivers an electric shock when you perform a bad habit.
This method uses aversion therapy—it trains your brain to associate the bad habit with something unpleasant, like pain.
Shocking yourself into submission works because it taps into Pavlovian conditioning, but let’s be real—not everyone is willing to go that far.
Plus, tinkering with your brain’s wiring can be risky if you don’t fully understand what you’re doing.
The Positive Cargo Method: Creating a Bad-Good Loop
So how do we break free? By creating a Bad-Good Loop.
Instead of spiraling down into bad feelings and bad habits, you can “trick” your brain by inserting a positive behavior right after the bad one.
This interrupts the loop and rewires your brain to expect something good instead of spiraling further into negativity.
Here’s how it works:
Catch the bad habit. Let’s say you catch yourself doom-scrolling on social media.
Insert Positive Cargo. As soon as you realize what you're doing, replace the habit with something positive but super easy, like taking a deep breath, doing a pushup, or drinking a glass of water.
Repeat. Every time the bad habit shows up, follow it with your positive action.
Avoid Guilt and Shame (They’re Not Your Friends)
Here’s the trick—don’t beat yourself up when you mess up.
Guilt and shame are powerful emotions that fuel the bad-bad loop.
If you keep saying things like, “Ugh, I did it again… I’m such a failure,” you're reinforcing the same pathways you're trying to break.
Instead, approach it with curiosity and kindness.
When I catch myself in a bad habit, I literally say “whoops!” out loud, laugh, and immediately follow it with the Positive Cargo.
This playful mindset keeps me from falling into the guilt trap, and it helps me stay consistent.
Over Time: The "Double Habit" Effect
As you continue using this method, something magical happens—your brain creates what I call a Double Habit.
Now, instead of bad habit ➡️ bad feeling, you’ll start to experience something like this:
Bad habit ➡️ Positive Cargo (good action) ➡️ Good feeling.
Over time, the positive behavior starts to override the bad habit.
It rewires the neural pathways in your brain.
This means your brain begins to anticipate the positive action after the bad habit, weakening the bad-bad loop until it eventually dismantles itself.
The Positive Cargo Process:
Here’s a simple, three-step process to follow:
Access: Pause and notice right after the bad habit happens.
Adjust: Insert a positive behavior, even something small.
Act: Execute the positive behavior immediately—don’t wait or overthink it.
You’re essentially "rewriting" your brain’s script, and with practice, the positive cargo will become automatic, replacing the bad habit.
A Quick Story to Illustrate
By now you’re probably wondering if this even actually works…
So, let me tell you about Sarah, whose name I’ve changed for privacy.
She’s what I’d call an anxious achiever. She’s a super busy entrepreneur, and every night after work, she finds herself in front of the fridge, reaching for snacks.
It didn’t even matter if she’d already had dinner—stress from her day just pulled her there. She knew it wasn’t helping, but it had become her go-to way to unwind.
Sarah wanted to stop, but the more she tried to rely on willpower, the more frustrating it became.
Each time she gave in, she felt worse about herself, which just fueled the cycle even more.
Sound familiar?
So, we decided to try the Positive Cargo Method.
Instead of aiming to quit the snacking cold-turkey, which she’d tried before and hated, we focused on adding something positive into the mix.
I told her, "Next time you catch yourself heading to the fridge, pause for just a second, grab a glass of water instead, and take a few sips."
At first, it felt a bit silly, and yeah, she still found herself snacking at times.
But slowly, something shifted. That quick pause to drink water started to break the loop.
It gave her brain a moment to reset, and she realized she wasn’t always hungry—she was just stressed.
Over the next few weeks, Sarah found herself reaching for water more often and grabbing snacks less.
The key wasn’t to rely on sheer willpower—it was about giving her brain a new habit to latch onto, one small step at a time.
And with less pressure to be "perfect," she started noticing real change.
It wasn’t a miracle overnight, but by rewiring the loop little by little, Sarah gradually let go of the late-night snacking habit without feeling like she was constantly battling herself.
Avoid the Trap of “I’ll Start Tomorrow”
Remember, knowledge without action is useless.
If you’ve made it this far, I believe you’re serious about breaking your bad habit.
The best time to start isn’t tomorrow—it’s right now.
Pick a Positive Cargo, even if it’s something simple like standing up or drinking water, and use it the next time you catch yourself in that bad loop.
Make it fun, avoid guilt, and keep going, even if you slip. Your brain is on your side—it just needs the right tools.
Tag me on social media with the Positive Cargo you’ve chosen! Let’s break these habits together!
And as always, until next time… Live Heroically 🧠
Supporting Research
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.
Huberman, A. D. (2021). How habits form and how to break them. Huberman Lab Podcast. https://hubermanlab.com.
Smith, J. E., Meyers, R. J., & Miller, W. R. (2001). The community reinforcement approach to the treatment of substance use disorders. American Journal on Addictions, 10(s1), 51-59.
Stawarz, K., Cox, A. L., & Blandford, A. (2015). Beyond self-tracking and reminders: Designing smartphone apps that support habit formation. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2653-2662.
Tang, Y. Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213-225.
Wood, W., & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289-314.