Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits!

Hey, welcome to Think Thursday from the Alcohol Minimalist Podcast. Think Thursday is all about your beautiful, brilliant human brain. We're talking neuroscience. We're talking behavior change. We are talking about your mindset. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Well, hello and welcome. Or welcome back to Think Thursday from the alcohol minimalist. Think Thursdays, where we talk about that beautiful, brilliant human brain of yours and really focus on behavior change in its entirety. Right. So why things are harder or easier and what can we do to help change the things that we want to change and really look towards creating sustainable change? So today we are going to talk about, uh, something that's happening all the time, whether you're aware of it or not. And that is visual triggers and how they influence what you do, what you want, and even how much effort your brain puts into resisting or acting on a behavior. And I actually talked about a couple of weeks ago on the big episode, how your environment shapes your drinking habits. And in that episode, I talked about how it's not just your what you see, it's other things too. But today we're going to hone in on visual triggers because they are incredibly important. And if you've ever found yourself reaching for something without even thinking like snacks on a counter or wine on a counter, your phone when you see a notification turning on the TV without even thinking about it, there's a good chance a visual cue was driving the action. So why do visual visual cues have such a strong pull on our behavior? Well, it all comes down to efficiency. As we know, the brain is incredibly efficient and it's constantly scanning the environment for shortcuts, signals it can use to predict what's next and how to respond without needing to make a decision. Every time visual input is processed incredibly fast, like we are talking within 13 milliseconds. That's according to research from MIT. And here's the thing it accounts for up to 80% of sensory input that your brain uses to make decisions. So 80% of the sensory input visual and 13 milliseconds for your brain to process it. So put those two things together, and you can understand why a visual cues become very important to behavior. When a specific visual cue is paired repeatedly with a certain behavior, then the brain learns to associate the two, and eventually just seeing the cue is enough to activate that neural pathway, and it can help drive the urge. Right? That's why even before you become conscious and you may start thinking, which of course fuels the feeling of desire your brain unconsciously is thinking because it's processing your visual cues, even if you weren't thinking about it a second earlier. Right? And that's what's known as cue reactivity. And it's a foundational principle in both habit science and behavioral psychology. Now let's make this real world concrete for us. All right. Here are a few ways that visual triggers shape your behavior without you realizing it. First, you see your phone light up right the screen and the brain says, check it. Uh, you see open snack bags or a bottle of wine sitting on the counter and your brain says, grab a handful. Pour a glass. You see a browser tab open on your computer with your favorite shopping site, and your brain says we should go buy something. Click and scroll. Maybe you have a yoga mat left out in your living room and your brain says we should go stretch. Maybe your book is beside your bedside, right on your nightstand, and you automatically think, oh, I need to do some reading here before I go to sleep. Now notice these cues aren't good or bad, right? They're just association. Your brain is saying, last time I saw this, we did that. And unless you interrupt or replace the loop, that default response is going to win and you're going to just repeat the behavior. That's what the brain is primed to do. Here's the other key piece. Visual cues don't just remind you of a behavior. They actually initiate that urge or the feeling of desire, because it really does launch an unconscious thought that you may not even be aware of. Right? And that creates the feeling of desire, always a thought that fuels the feeling of desire. But the thought is a repetitive thought, and again, happens so quickly because of a visual cue that your brain picks up on in 13 milliseconds. And studies in neuroscience show that when you see a cue associated with a reward, your brain begins to release dopamine just in anticipation of that reward, not in response to the reward itself. And so this means that desire starts before the actual action of drinking. Eating. You know, anything that you do that is a reward type behavior. You don't want the cookie after you taste it, you start wanting it the moment you see it. And this is why visual design matters. This is why cluttered counters matter. This is why even what saved on your desktop or your phone screen can influence your behavior. So what can you do? Well, visual triggers as we've established, are incredibly powerful, but they're also very manageable. You just have to work with your brain instead of trying to fight it. So here are two quick strategies that that might help. So first of all, we just want to remove triggers that you don't want out of sight out of mind. Isn't just a saying. It is a cognitive tool. When you clear visual visible cues linked to habits you are trying to change, you reduce the dopamine spark that leads to a craving, and even just moving something out of your line of sight or into a drawer can make a difference. So move the you know, move the stuff off the counter, put it away, put it in a closet. Put it in a pantry, put your, you know, put your, uh, if you have a, an open liquor, you know, a bar, a area in your house, you're going to want to think about what that does to reinforce your drinking habits. And if you want to reinforce a new behavior. All right. This is the other part. We want to add visual cues for the behaviors you want. So put your journal journal right on your pillow and you will see it before you go to bed. If you're trying to like start journaling and doing the daily gratitude practice, set out your walking shoes and your coat the night before. If you want to try to establish a early morning walk as part of your routine. Place a water bottle by your coffee maker and take it with you to work and say, I'm going to continue to drink more water. Use sticky notes with thought prompts or values that you want to remember. I tell this to my clients all the time. Sticky notes are great. Put one on your phone. Put a put a, you know, put a visual being write down something on a sticky note and take a picture of it and make it your screensaver. Your brain takes the path of least resistance, especially when it can see where that path begins. So make things easier for yourself and set up some new visual cues. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. All right. Behavior isn't random. It is responsive. And more often than not, it's being cued by something. You can see whether you realize that or not or what, even realize what you're seeing. So take a quick audit of your visual environment today. Ask yourself, what do I see often? What does this make me want to do? What do I want to reinforce and what do I want to fade? When you start changing what your brain sees, you'll start changing what it expects. And that's how you begin to create sustainable change. It takes, you know, the visual. Visual cues. It isn't, uh, is a tactic, right? It's part of the process. And I am all about making things easier as you work toward sustainable change. Gotta start. You know, we do both tactical work and thought work. We change the narratives we have around alcohol. We change the narratives we have around any behavior we're trying to change. And we can also take some tactical steps. And improving our visual environment is one of them. That is what I have for you this think Thursday. If you found this episode helpful, then share it with someone who loves, you know, brain science too. And if you want to start applying this work to your real life habits, a great place to start is my Drink Less Success 30 day Self-starter program. It is grounded in neuroscience and it offers you daily exercises to help rewire your drinking habit. The link will be in the show notes or you can visit Molly. Until next time, choose peace my friends and I will see you on Monday.