'Mindlessness is the new mindfulness': Lessons from brain science on how to change behaviors

Many a digital health intervention has been stymied by the same problem, one that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to quit smoking or lose weight by changing their diet: the extreme difficulty of behavior change.

On the final morning of the Connected Health Conference in Boston today, two experts presented their science-based solutions to the problem of behavior change. These solutions orbit around two seemingly contradictory poles: mindfulness and mindlessness.

A fairly popular idea these days in self help and pop psychology, mindfulness is about defeating bad habits in our subconscious by exposing them to the scrutiny of the conscious mind.

“There’s a part of our brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, and this part of the brain stores and compares reward value,” Dr. Judson Brewer, director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, said.

This part of the brain stores information like “chocolate is a better reward than broccoli,” he explained. But when we fall into bad habits, he said, “we’re not paying attention. We’re not giving our orbitofrontal cortex updated and accurate information. So we asked this question: Is awareness enough to change behavior? So we developed these app-based mindfulness programs so we could teach people to pay attention to their habit behaviors.”