Before we dig into building healthy habits let’s first look at the mechanism of what a habit is. 

“A habit is a redundant set of repeatable actions. In human behaviour, it is when the body knows how to do something better than your mind.” Dr. Andrew Huberman

A great example of this would be your drive to work. When you think back to it, you most likely cannot remember every detail, colours of cars you passed, garbage on corners, people walking et cetera. This is because you have repeated this process so many times that your body knows how to get you there without having to recruit your full attention to every detail of the task.

Perfect so we know what a habit is, the next step is how to build them. Insert DPO, Duration Path Outcome. This process happens automatically whenever we look at something novel. How long is this going to take, how do I get there and what will I get? When we have a group of students and we want to get them to take on the habit of exercise if they have never done it before their brains will automatically begin this process of thought. So this is a critical step in building healthy habits.  Here we have to ensure that the DPO is attainable! so the students’ brains can release the final piece of the puzzle, Dopamine!!

Dopamine is most likely the most misunderstood neurotransmitter of the bunch. What dopamine’s primary role is within the human body is drive. Without dopamine, we essentially will not be able to get out of bed. It is the driver that gets us moving forwards, and we can train it to be released in patterns, to create habits. 

So putting it all together. The foundation of building a process to build healthy habits is in assessing. The assessment or more accurately stated “Self reflection” enables us to bring clarity to the DPO process. Once we have this piece we insert a goal that we can daily, or weekly, reflect on to see progress so we have a steady release of dopamine.