How to Become the Person You Want to Be

is a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research is multidisciplinary, spanning cognitive science, neuroscience and psychopathology, with a central focus on understanding the functioning of the brain’s habit system. He uses experimental and neuroscientific methods to advance our understanding of how and when habits are formed, how they can be broken, and how habit mechanisms contribute to compulsive behaviours. is a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His research is multidisciplinary, spanning cognitive science, neuroscience and psychopathology, with a central focus on understanding the functioning of the brain’s habit system. He uses experimental and neuroscientific methods to advance our understanding of how and when habits are formed, how they can be broken, and how habit mechanisms contribute to compulsive behaviours. The alarm goes off. In that blurred moment of semi-consciousness, you are caught between two versions of yourself – the you who set the alarm to rise early for exercise, meditation or journaling, and the tired, groggy version now reaching for the snooze button. Somehow, last night’s best intentions do not seem to be enough. This gap – between intention and action – is a universal feature of human psychology, and it extends far beyond the morning alarm. It is there when you plan to cook a healthy meal but order takeaway instead, or when you sit down to read a book yet find yourself scrolling on your phone. An entire self-help industry has grown up around our desire to close the intention-action gap. We surely know more about exercise, nutrition, sleep and mental health than any previous generation. And yet, so much of the time, knowing what we want to do and reliably doing it remain two very different things. In this Guide, I’m going to approach the gap from a different direction, drawing on cognitive neuroscience to show you how to form new desirable habits and break the ones you don’t want. The power of habit A Strava survey of 25,000 runners found that, for most of them, the alarm is the worst moment of the day. Their favourite part of a run is when it’s done (the satisfaction of finishing even beats the post-run snack). These are not people who necessarily love the process. And yet 57 per cent of the Strava runners said they never hit snooze. So how did they close the intention-action gap? They still find the alarm unpleasant but somewhere along the way they stopped relying on motivation alone. Instead, they have made getting up into a habit. Everything else follows from there. And the same pattern holds in other contexts: for anyone who reads every night before bed, writes consistently or maintains any routine that once required enormous effort to start. The reason they keep doing their thing is that they made a habit of it. A habit is a learned behavioural response that is triggered automatically by a specific cue, without requiring conscious deliberation or intention. It is not simply something you do often. It is something your brain has learned to initiate without being asked. According to a major review published in 2024, habits are the single strongest predictor of our behaviour and more influential than our beliefs, emotions or general attitudes. The two brain systems that manage behaviour The goal-directed system, anchored in the prefrontal cortex – the region of the brain located directly behind your forehead – is the seat of deliberate planning and conscious decision-making. One of its many roles is to inhibit habitual tendencies that conflict with our current goals. But this region is energy-intensive and relatively slow. When tiredness, stress or the fog of an early morning reduces its capacity to engage, our deliberate thinking takes a back seat. The habit system operates out of an older, more energy-efficient set of structures called the basal ganglia, buried deep beneath the cortex near the centre of the brain. It relies on links between specific cues and well-practised responses, and it does not care about your long-term goals. It gains the upper hand when deliberate thinking is depleted. Once a behaviour is encoded here, it becomes remarkably persistent (see the Learn More section below for more on how this happens). From the brain’s perspective, habits are neutral machinery. The 57 per cent of runners who resist the snooze button are not fighting their habit system. They have trained it to work for them. And the same machinery that can be trained to build a new routine can also be reprogrammed to dismantle an old one. Once you understand how this wiring operates, you can engineer better habits, break counterproductive ones, and create behaviour change far more reliably than with willpower alone. This Guide draws on cognitive neuroscience to offer a practical framework for doing exactly that. This advice isn’t about clinical behaviours such as serious addictions, but it will help you close the everyday gap between who you intend to be and what you actually do. Key points The power of habit. So often there is a gap between our intentions and what we actually do. The way to close this gap is to understand the brain wiring that underlies the habit system. Then you can use that machinery to engineer better habits and break counterproductive ones. Recognise the fresh-start trap. When you first introduce a new behaviour into your life, you’ll be fuelled by a burst of resolve. Butthis will take you only so far once fatigue kicks in. Break down your routine into nodes. To achieve lasting behaviour change, you need to transition to your habit system. But you can’t make an entire complex behaviour into a habit, so you need to break it down into habitual nodes. Engineer the entry point. The most important node is the initial entry point – the cue that triggers the first action you need to take. Try writing down a single sentence using the format ‘When [insert a specific cue], I will immediately [insert your desired behaviour].’That first cue can be a time, a place or even an internal state. Prioritise consistency over frequency. Once you have an entry-point cue, shift your focus from how often you perform your desired behaviour after the cue to the consistency of the other surrounding conditions. Three repetitions in identical conditions will build a stronger neural link than five spread across varying contexts. Abandon the magic timeline. Various myths abound regarding how many repetitions it takes to build a habit.There is no simple rule.Instead, the speed of the brain’s adaptation is dictated by the complexity of the task itself. Understand the limits of avoidance and willpower. When it comes to breaking bad habits, avoiding cues and resisting urges will take you only so far.You can’t avoid triggering cues forever – and once the habit is triggered, attempting to overpower established architecture with pure resolve is a losing battle. Build the competing association. To truly succeed in breaking an unwanted habit, identify the need that this habit serves and the cue that triggers it. Then you can design a genuine alternative that satisfies that exact same function. What to do Recognise the fresh-start trap Whatever the new behaviour that you want to make part of your life, whether it’s to start running every morning, cooking a healthy meal every evening or reading every night, you will find you’re usually propelled by a burst of resolve, which is what behavioural scientists call the ‘fresh start effect’. In these early days, motivation is high, and your deliberate thinking system is driving the whole operation. The critical mistake most people make is assuming that, through sheer repetition, this effort will naturally dissipate, and the routine will eventually run on autopilot. But if you simply try to power through day after day, your habit system is never given the conditions it needs to take over. The behaviour stays entirely effortful, requiring a fresh surge of willpower every single time. This is precisely why so many well-intentioned new year’s resolutions collapse by February. You are relying on an energy-intensive system that is biologically destined to fatigue. Break down your routine into nodes To make a behaviour last, you have to transfer the cognitive load away from the goal-directed system. But to do this effectively, you must abandon the idea that an entire behavioural routine becomes a habit. Running a 5K, cooking a healthy meal or reading a chapter never become a habit in their entirety. These are complex routines (that is, complex sequences of different thoughts and actions) that will always require your deliberate mind to stay engaged. To make a routine stick, you need to engineer it so that specific components within it gradually develop habitual architecture. The aim is for certain physical sequences, transitions and internal responses to solidify into automatic habitual ‘nodes’. As these nodes form, the behaviour becomes progressively easier. The experienced runner is not on autopilot for the whole run, but they are for parts of it. And not all these automatic nodes are physical actions; some are so-called habits of thought. Runners automatically expect to feel better afterwards. They frame initial discomfort as temporary. They interpret tiredness as something to move through rather than a signal to stop. These are not conscious choices, but they are well-worn neural pathways doing their job. In the same way, the person who cooks a healthy dinner every evening is not on autopilot for the whole cooking process, but their post-work transition into the kitchen and the expectation that they will feel satisfied afterwards have all become automatic nodes that carry them through the moments when ordering takeaway would be easier. When a routine feels endlessly exhausting to maintain, it is usually because these nodes have not yet been reinforced. Engineer the entry point When you’re aiming to establish a new behaviour into your lifestyle, the most critical node to build first is the entry point, which is the gateway through which everything else flows. If you can make starting automatic, your goal-directed energy is preserved for the routine itself. The habit system does not respond to abstract goals (such as to run more often or to eat more healthily) but rather to environmental patterns. These are not limited to physical locations. An environmental pattern can be a specific time of day, a preceding action you have just completed, the presence of a particular object, or even an internal state like the feeling of having just woken up. Broad intentions like ‘I will exercise more’ or ‘I want to read more’ fail because they provide no specific anchor for the basal ganglia to map onto. The cue must be concrete enough that your brain recognises it without deliberation, such as a physical transition or fixed event that already occurs reliably. To build this node, try writing down a single sentence using the format: ‘When [insert a specific cue], I will immediately [insert your desired behaviour].’ This is known as an implementation intention, and it effectively does the goal-directed work in advance. When the cue arrives, you are no longer deciding to act but executing a pre-computed response. To see how this works in practice, consider two examples. Someone who wants to read every night before bed might write: ‘When I get into bed, I will immediately pick up the book on my nightstand.’ The cue is a physical transition they already perform reliably, and the response is concrete and immediate. Someone who wants to start cooking healthy weeknight meals might write: ‘When I close my laptop at the end of the workday, I will immediately walk to the kitchen and place a chopping board on the counter.’ Notice that neither of these entry points describes the entire routine. You are not committing to reading a full chapter or cooking an elaborate recipe. You are committing only to the first physical action, the threshold you need to cross. Once initiated, the rest of the routine can begin to unfold. However, if your days are highly unpredictable – perhaps you do shift work, travel frequently or live in a chaotic household – environmental consistency may be impossible. In these cases, avoid linking your cue to a specific time or place. Instead, rely on a flexible cue, which you are biologically or practically compelled to perform every day regardless of location. This could be the moment your feet first touch the floor in the morning, the act of filling and boiling the kettle wherever you happen to be staying, or the feeling of toothpaste in your mouth after brushing your teeth at night. What makes these cues effective is not their context but their inevitability. Your brain will encounter them every single day, and that reliability is enough to build an association with whatever you do next. Once the entry point is established, you can begin building additional nodes into the routine. How rigid these need to be depends on the nature of the activity itself. A runner who takes the same route every morning is creating a tightly linked chain where each node triggers the next, and the entire sequence can become deeply automatic. A cook who makes a different recipe each night cannot standardise the routine in the same way, but the structural transitions – such as the familiar sequence of pulling out ingredients, settling into the rhythm of prep, the expectation of satisfaction at the end – can still solidify into automatic nodes even when the specific content varies. Pay attention to the transitions within your routine and, where possible, keep them consistent. Prioritise consistency over frequency Once you have an entry-point cue, shift your focus from how often you perform your desired behaviour after the cue to the consistency of the other surrounding conditions. You might assume that doing something as frequently as possible builds a habit. But if the context constantly varies – different time, different room, different preceding event – you introduce neural noise into the learning environment. Three repetitions in identical conditions will build a stronger neural link than five spread across varying contexts. For the first month at least, treat variation as your primary obstacle. The aspiring reader who gets into bed at the same time, reaches for the book on the same nightstand, and follows the same winding-down sequence every evening will develop automaticity far faster than one who reads in the living room on Monday, in bed on Tuesday, and on the sofa on Wednesday. The person building a cooking habit should aim to use the same kitchen setup, at the same point in their evening, following the same entry sequence, even if the meals themselves vary. To understand why context matters so much, it helps to look at how scientists measure real-life habits. A 2023 machine-learning study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analysed tens of millions of gym visits and hospital handwashing activities. The researchers showed that a defining hallmark of a habit is simply predictability. People who successfully automated their routines did so because their behaviour became deeply anchored to specific environmental cues, such as the time of day (eg, visiting the gym during lunch break every Friday) or a preceding event (eg, washing hands after every patient interaction). If your own behaviour feels erratic, it just means your brain has not yet tethered the action to a reliable cue. It is not a failure of willpower but rather a signal to rigorously standardise your entry conditions until the automaticity takes hold. Abandon the magic timeline Even if you engineer the perfect entry point and standardise your conditions, you will likely still encounter a period where the routine feels like an uphill climb. This is where most people falter, not due to a lack of discipline but a misplaced expectation of speed. The idea that habits form in 21 days is a widely repeated myth, and its persistence leads many to interpret the normal, slow pace of neural change as a personal failure. The 2023 machine learning study confirmed that there is no universal ‘magic number’ of days until automatisation. Instead, the speed of the brain’s adaptation is dictated by the complexity of the task itself. Handwashing for hospital workers is a simple, singular node with almost no transitions, and the study found it could solidify in a matter of weeks. Going to the gym, however, is a different matter entirely. It is not one habit but a constellation of many, such as packing a bag, navigating traffic, initiating the workout and managing recovery. Because each of these individual nodes must be reinforced on its own terms, the researchers found that complex gym routines typically take months to become automatic. In practice, this means you must resist the urge to benchmark your progress against someone else’s experience or an imagined average. Some habits will click into place with surprising speed, while others will require months of consistent scaffolding before the habit system fully takes the reins. Neither experience means you are doing something wrong. They simply reflect the different neural overhead required by different tasks. So how do you know whether the process is working? Progress in habit-formation is rarely dramatic. It tends to show up not as a sudden shift from effort to autopilot, but as a gradual reduction in the friction you feel at each stage. You might notice that the internal argument about whether to start has shortened. You might find yourself partway through the routine before you have consciously registered beginning it. You might realise that a missed day feels genuinely strange, rather than a relief. These are all signs that nodes are forming, even if the routine still requires some deliberate engagement. If, after several months of genuinely consistent practice, the routine still feels as effortful as it did on day one, that is a signal worth attending to. It usually means one of two things. Either the entry conditions are not stable enough, in which case revisiting and simplifying your cue is the right move, or the routine itself is too complex and needs to be stripped back to a smaller, more manageable version. Reading five pages is a better foundation than committing to a full chapter you cannot sustain. A simple one-pan meal that you actually cook is worth more than an ambitious recipe that defeats you before you start. You can always expand the scope of a routine once the foundational nodes are in place. The challenge is not whether the routine will eventually carry itself – it will, if the conditions are right – but whether you can stay in the race long enough for your brain to finish the wiring. Understand the limits of avoidance and willpower Up to this point, I’ve focused on how you can embed desirable new behaviours into your life. But what about getting rid of unhelpful ones? Breaking an established habit presents a distinct neurobiological challenge. You are not building on a blank slate. You are actively competing against an engrained neural pathway. When it comes to breaking these patterns, cognitive neuroscience points to three primary mechanisms: avoiding the cue that triggers the bad habit, actively suppressing the urge to act that’s triggered by that cue, and building a new habit to compete with the one you want to give up. The first two approaches are intuitive and immediately available, which is why most people default to them. But understanding their inherent limitations reveals why the third – building a competing association – is the only strategy with genuine staying power. The first approach – avoidance of the triggering cue – is the simplest way to stop a habit. If your brain never encounters the cue, the habit system is never triggered. This is why keeping junk food out of the house or leaving your phone in another room is so immediately effective. However, pure avoidance is fragile. You cannot control the real world perfectly. Eventually, your environment will shift, and the cue will find you. When you cannot avoid the cue, your brain must rely on goal-directed inhibition. This means encountering the trigger, feeling the automatic urge to act, and actively suppressing the response. This is what we commonly call willpower. The problem is that inhibition requires active, continuous cognitive energy to slam on the neurological brakes. The moment stress, cognitive load or a bad night of sleep weakens your prefrontal engagement, your inhibition will collapse, and the old habit will reassert itself. Attempting to overpower established architecture with pure resolve is a losing battle. Build the competing association Because avoidance is impossible to maintain forever, and inhibition is biologically destined to fatigue, you must overwrite the old habit by building a competing association. But to do this effectively, you must first make the invisible visible. You still need to begin by identifying the specific cue-response link that is driving the behaviour. Most habitual actions feel as though they come from nowhere, which is precisely what makes them so difficult to address. The whole sequence fires automatically, and you often notice only after the behaviour is already underway. Your first task, then, is to surface the cue that is triggering the response. One effective way to do this is to use friction as a diagnostic tripwire. Introduce one mechanical barrier that widens the response window of your habit. Log out of a distracting app so you are forced to type your password manually, or store the TV remote in another room. When your habit system inevitably tries to execute its routine, you will hit this barrier. That sudden moment of physical interruption, like staring at a login screen you did not consciously choose to open, buys your prefrontal cortex the milliseconds it needs to step in. It immediately highlights the exact cue that triggered the behaviour. More importantly, this forced pause can reveal the function the habit is trying to serve, which cannot be ignored. Habits do not exist in a vacuum. They often develop to solve a problem. When you hit that point of friction, observe the change in internal state you were seeking (even if unconsciously). Were you looking for a transition away from a difficult piece of work? Were you seeking a momentary sense of control, relief or stimulation? If you ignore this underlying function, your new habit will fail because the original need will remain unmet. Once you understand what state you’re actually pursuing, you can design a genuine alternative that satisfies that exact same function. For instance, if you instinctively reach for your phone to get a mental break from deep work, try taking a short walk or doing a quick stretching sequence instead. By consciously executing this new, functional response, you begin creating a neural pathway that eventually takes over from the old habit. Finally, when a lapse occurs, it is essential to treat it as design data rather than a failure of character. A lapse simply means the habit system ran faster than your goal-directed inhibition could engage. Ask yourself what specific variables weakened your deliberate engagement at that exact moment. Had you slept poorly? Was your cognitive load exceptionally high? Was the cue more accessible than usual? Make one concrete environmental change before the next opportunity arises. You are not trying to willpower your way to success, you are redesigning the architecture of your behaviour. The approach I’ve outlined in this Guide is not about motivation, discipline or becoming a fundamentally different person. It is about understanding the machinery your brain already uses to drive behaviour, and then deliberately aligning it with the outcomes you actually want. Cognitive neuroscience shows us that lasting change is not a contest of character but an engineering problem, and engineering problems have solutions. If you anchor your cue, stabilise your context, respect the timeline and treat setbacks as data, you are not hoping for change. You are building it. Learn more The neurochemistry of habits Throughout this Guide, I’ve described how consistency helps to build habits. This happens becausewhenever a cue reliably leads to a behavioural response that is followed by a reward, the connection between them is strengthened. This wiring is shaped by dopamine, which is not merely a ‘pleasure’ chemical, but a powerful learning signal. When an action leads to a reward that is better than expected, or even to unexpected relief from an urge, dopamine reinforces the neural connection between that specific cue and that specific response, making the same sequence more likely to fire next time. Over many repetitions, the dopamine signal begins to shift. It starts firing not when the reward arrives, but when the cue appears, effectively turning the cue into a pull toward action. And as the behaviour repeats, control gradually migrates to brain circuits that can run it with little conscious input. This is what gives established habits their automatic quality, whether that cue triggers you to lace up your trainers or reach for the snooze button. The paradox of mastery If you follow the What To Do steps of this Guide, specific nodes of your wished-for routines will eventually become habitual. Your entry point will feel automatic. The cognitive friction of starting will fade. This is the triumph of the habit system. It conserves your brain’s energy and makes consistency possible even on your worst days. But this neurological efficiency comes with a hidden cost, and it reveals what might be called the fundamental paradox of behaviour change. Habits are essential for consistency, but they are the enemy of improvement. Once a behaviour is fully handed over to the basal ganglia, you execute it without thinking. Because you are no longer thinking, you stop noticing your mistakes. You perform the action the same way every time, and your performance plateaus. The experienced runner who clocks the same 5K route on autopilot every morning will never run it faster. Their brain has engineered a perfectly efficient, closed loop. If your only aim is maintenance, this plateau is exactly where you want to be. But if your goal is mastery, consistency alone is not enough. You have to deliberately break the automaticity you worked so hard to build. This is not a fringe idea. It is precisely what the world’s greatest athletes have done at the peak of their careers. Tiger Woods repeatedly overhauled his golf swing, even while ranked number one in the world. After winning the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes, he rebuilt his swing from scratch and in 1998 he struggled, winning only once, before surging into the greatest stretch of golf in history. Rafael Nadal deliberately evolved his serve over two decades, changing his technique to transform it from a way to start the point into a genuine weapon. In both cases, these athletes chose to disrupt what was already working, endured the temporary cost, and emerged better for it. They understood that the habits that had carried them to the top would eventually become a ceiling that prevented further improvement. In cognitive science, this process is known as deliberate practice, and it is inherently anti-habitual. It requires you to take a smooth, automatic sequence and intentionally deconstruct it, re-engaging your prefrontal cortex to focus on errors, inefficiencies and new challenges. You are consciously taking the wheel back from the autopilot. To see this in action, consider someone who has spent years typing with a self-taught method, casually typing 40 words per minute without much thought. But to reach professional speeds, they decide to learn formal touch-typing. They must intentionally deconstruct their old habit, forcing their hands to stay anchored to the home row and strictly forbidding themselves from looking down at the keyboard. When they first do this, the behaviour will feel effortful, clunky and immensely frustrating. Their typing speed will temporarily plummet to 10 words per minute, and they will make constant errors. This sudden drop in performance is not a regression but it is the biological signature of their deliberate system coming back online rather than relying on an established pathway. Mastery, then, is not about putting your entire life on autopilot. It is a continuous, deliberate dance between your two cognitive systems. You use goal-directed effort to build a habitual foundation. That foundation gives you the stability to survive your toughest days. But when you are ready to grow, you step back into the friction using the deliberate mind to push the boundaries of what your habits can do. The two systems are not in opposition. Used wisely, they thrive off each other. Links and books For the science this Guide is built on, read this recent (open access) feature review by me and my colleagues on the cognitive neuroscience of making and breaking everyday habits, written for the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The study behind the ‘no magic number’ idea used machine learning to track real gym visits and hospital handwashing, finding that some habits take months and others only weeks. To learn where the ‘21 days’ myth actually came from – not habit research but a 1960 book on plastic surgery – read the clear explanation provided by the researcher Benjamin Gardner in this blog post. Russell Poldrack’s bookHard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick (2021) is an accessible tour of habits, from a Stanford cognitive neuroscientist. For the science of expertise behind the ‘paradox of mastery’, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s bookPeak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016) is the original account of deliberate practice.