Curiosity: The Superpower That Breaks Any Habit Loop

Why Curiosity Matters More Than Willpower

You know the feeling. You’re lying in bed at midnight, scrolling through your phone, and some part of you is fully aware that this is making you feel worse. You know you should stop. You tell yourself to stop. And then you keep scrolling.

Or maybe it’s the worry that won’t quit — the mental loop that starts every time you see an ambiguous email or feel a weird sensation in your chest. You know worrying doesn’t help. You’ve been told a hundred times to “just relax.” You can’t.

Or maybe it’s the late-night trip to the kitchen. You’re not hungry. You know that. But the anxiety in your chest is doing what it always does, and your brain is making its familiar suggestion: eat something. You already know how this ends — food, then guilt, then shame, then more anxiety, then more food.

These look like different problems. Different habits. Different struggles. But after twenty-plus years of studying the brain — running clinical trials on smoking, anxiety, and emotional eating — I can tell you they share one thing: they are all habit loops. And they all respond to the same intervention.

Not willpower. Not gritting your teeth. Not screen-time limits or breathing exercises or one more diet plan.

Curiosity.

That probably sounds too simple. Maybe even a little absurd. But the neuroscience behind curiosity is anything but simple, and the clinical results are significant. In my lab’s research, curiosity-based approaches have produced a 67% reduction in anxiety, 5x the quit rates for smoking compared to gold-standard treatment, and a 40% reduction in craving-related eating. No willpower required.

Curiosity is the single most powerful tool I’ve found for breaking habit loops — any habit loop. And in this article, I’m going to show you exactly why it works, how it works in the brain, and how to start using it today.

Not All Curiosity Is Created Equal

Before we go deeper, we need to clear something up. When most people hear “curiosity,” they think of one thing — the desire to learn something new. But curiosity actually comes in two distinct flavors, and the difference between them matters enormously.

In 2005, psychologist Jordan Litman identified two categories: I-curiosity and D-curiosity.

D-Curiosity: The Restless Itch

D stands for deprivation. This is the closed-down, contracted, need-to-know state. It’s what you feel when someone sends you a text and you can’t check your phone. It’s the itch that won’t stop until you scratch it. It’s what happens when you see a celebrity’s face and cannot remember their name — that squeezing, racking feeling in your brain as you try to force the answer out.

D-curiosity is driven by a gap in information. You don’t have something, you need it, and you won’t feel right until you get it. When you do get it — when you finally check that text, or remember the name, or Google the answer — you feel relief. Not joy. Relief. The itch has been scratched. Done.

Here’s the critical thing to understand: D-curiosity is about the destination. You’re trying to get somewhere — to that piece of information. Once you arrive, the curiosity vanishes. And the reward is just the absence of discomfort. That’s it.

I-Curiosity: The Joy of Exploration

I stands for interest. This is the open, expansive, wide-eyed-wonder kind of curiosity. It’s what children have in abundance — the fascination with a butterfly, the delight in discovering how something works, the endless “why?” that drives parents to the edge of their sanity.

I-curiosity isn’t about filling a gap. It’s about the journey itself. When you get fascinated by a topic and fall into a four-hour exploration, that warm, energized feeling isn’t relief. It’s genuine reward. The exploration is the point. At its most intense, I-curiosity becomes fascination — and fascination is one of the most pleasurable states a human brain can experience.

Here’s what makes this distinction so important for habit change: I-curiosity doesn’t need an external payoff. The experience of being curious — the open, interested quality of mind — is inherently rewarding. It feels good to be curious. You don’t need an answer, a result, or a destination. The curiosity itself is the reward.

We’ll come back to why that matters. First, let me tell you about a problem.

How D-Curiosity Got Weaponized

Every notification on your phone is a D-curiosity exploit.

Think about it. Your phone buzzes. Immediately, your brain registers an information gap: someone sent something, and you don’t know what it is. D-curiosity fires. That restless, contracted, need-to-know itch appears. And it will not relent until you check.

Social media platforms are engineered around this principle. Every red notification badge, every “someone liked your post” alert, every algorithmically timed email is designed to create a gap you feel compelled to close. You scroll not because the content is rewarding — most of the time, it isn’t — but because your brain is chasing the next piece of information that might scratch the itch. It’s doomscrolling powered by D-curiosity.

Cornel West called these “weapons of mass distraction.” He’s right. The modern information environment doesn’t satisfy your curiosity. It exploits it. It creates an endless series of tiny information gaps — what happened next, who said what, what does this notification mean — and each one triggers the same restless need-to-know cycle. You’re not exploring. You’re scratching an itch that’s been engineered to never fully go away.

This matters for habit change because D-curiosity, left unchecked, drives the very everyday addictions that people struggle with most: compulsive phone checking, doomscrolling, news addiction, social media spirals. The itch-scratch cycle is the habit loop. Trigger (information gap), behavior (check/scroll/search), temporary relief. Repeat.

But here is where it gets interesting. You can flip D-curiosity into I-curiosity. And when you do, you break the loop.

The Flip: From “Oh No!” to “Ohhh?”

This is the move that changes everything. It’s the core of what I teach, and it’s deceptively simple.

When D-curiosity fires — that contracted, anxious, need-to-know sensation — instead of chasing the answer, you get curious about the sensation itself.

Here is what that sounds like internally:

D-curiosity: “Oh no, I don’t know what that text says. I need to check right now.”

I-curiosity: “Ohhh — interesting. What does this urge to check actually feel like in my body?”

D-curiosity: “Oh no, what if something bad happened? I need to worry about this.”

I-curiosity: “Ohhh — what does this anxiety actually feel like right now? Where is it? What’s its texture?”

That shift — from “Oh no!” to “Ohhh?” — is the pivot point. It moves you from a closed state (contracted, tense, grasping for information) to an open state (expansive, interested, exploring). And here’s what two decades of neuroscience research has shown me: these two states cannot coexist.

The Neuroscience: Why Curiosity and Anxiety Can’t Coexist

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s brain science.

Open and Closed: The Body Knows

My lab ran a five-year research project in which we asked people to categorize their emotional states along various dimensions. One pattern emerged with remarkable consistency: people reliably sort emotions into open or closed categories.

Anxiety, fear, shame, frustration — closed. Contracted. Tight. Small.

Curiosity, interest, awe, compassion — open. Expanded. Spacious. Warm.

And here is the key finding: you cannot be contracted and expanded at the same time. Your body cannot physically inhabit both states simultaneously. When genuine curiosity comes online — real, embodied, interested curiosity — the contraction of anxiety releases. Not because you pushed it away. Because there is no room for it. The expansion displaces the contraction.

This is why curiosity works where willpower fails. Willpower tries to suppress the anxiety while remaining in the same contracted state. It’s like pressing down on a spring — the moment you let go, it snaps back. Curiosity doesn’t press down on anything. It opens a different channel entirely.

The Posterior Cingulate Cortex: Your Brain’s Quiet Center

In my neuroimaging research, we’ve studied what happens in the brain during moments of curiosity versus moments of anxiety and craving. One brain region stands out: the posterior cingulate cortex, or PCC.

The PCC is a hub of the default mode network — the brain system associated with self-referential thinking, mind wandering, and getting “caught up” in mental loops. When you’re worrying, ruminating, or craving, the PCC is active. It’s the neural signature of being stuck in your own head.

But when people are genuinely curious about their experience — when they shift from fighting a craving to being interested in what it feels like — the PCC gets remarkably quiet. The mental noise drops. The self-referential chatter fades. You’re no longer caught up in the story of your anxiety. You’re present with the raw experience of it.

This isn’t relaxation. It’s something more precise. It’s the brain shifting from a mode of reactive self-involvement to a mode of open, present-moment awareness. And that shift changes everything downstream — because a quiet PCC means the anxiety habit loop isn’t running.

Curiosity Primes the Brain to Learn

A landmark study by Matthias Gruber and colleagues at UC Davis showed something remarkable about what happens in the brain at moments of peak curiosity. Using brain imaging, they found that when curiosity fires, dopamine pathways activate with increased intensity. But that’s not all — there’s also an increased connection between reward centers and the hippocampus, the brain region associated with memory formation.

What this means is that at moments of genuine curiosity, your brain is primed to learn. Not just to learn the thing you’re curious about, but anything. Gruber’s team tested this by presenting random information at peak-curiosity moments and checking retention months later. People remembered the random information better when it was paired with curiosity than when it wasn’t. Curiosity doesn’t just feel good — it literally opens the door for your brain to update its learning.

This is directly relevant to habit change. When you bring curiosity to a craving or an anxiety response, your brain is in an optimal state to update the reward value of that behavior. You’re not white-knuckling it. You’re creating the neurological conditions for genuine learning — the kind of learning that changes behavior from the inside out.

Information Has Literal Reward Value

Researcher Tommy Blanchard and colleagues studied the orbitofrontal cortex — the brain region that assigns reward value to experiences. They found that this region doesn’t just assign value to physical rewards like food and water. It assigns value to information itself.

In primate studies, Blanchard’s team found that primates would give up a drink of water when they were thirsty in exchange for information. Think about that: curiosity has literal reward value. Information isn’t just useful — it’s rewarding in the same neurological currency as food and water.

This finding helps explain why curiosity works as a replacement for bad habits. When you bring genuine curiosity to a craving, you’re not substituting a lesser reward. You’re tapping into a reward system that evolution has spent millions of years building. Your brain recognizes curiosity as valuable because it is valuable — neurobiologically, measurably, intrinsically.

Curiosity as the Bigger Better Offer

In my clinical work and in my books Unwinding Anxiety and The Craving Mind, I teach a framework called the Three Gears for breaking any habit loop. The third gear — the final piece — is what I call the Bigger Better Offer, or BBO. Your brain won’t drop an old habit into a vacuum. It needs something to replace it with. And that replacement has to be genuinely more rewarding than the old behavior, or your brain won’t make the switch.

This is where most habit-change advice falls apart. People try to replace doomscrolling with pushups, or stress eating with drinking water, or worry with positive affirmations. And it doesn’t stick — because the substitute doesn’t activate the reward system more powerfully than the original behavior. Your brain isn’t fooled.

Curiosity is the ultimate BBO because it’s intrinsically rewarding. It doesn’t depend on getting something external. It doesn’t run out. It doesn’t habituate the way external rewards do — you don’t build tolerance to being curious and need “more curiosity” to get the same effect. It’s a quality of mind that, once accessed, is self-sustaining.

And it works across every domain. That’s what makes it a cross-pillar superpower. Whether the habit loop is anxiety-driven worry, doomscrolling, procrastination, smoking, or anxiety-driven eating, the mechanism is the same: bring genuine, open curiosity to the experience, and your brain prefers it because it’s a better deal.

How Curiosity Works Across All Three Domains

Anxiety

Anxiety is closed. It contracts your body, narrows your focus, and pulls you into catastrophic thinking. The anxiety habit loop runs like this: uncertainty triggers worry, worry provides a fleeting sense of control, and that sense of control reinforces the worry habit.

When you bring curiosity to anxiety, you shift the entire dynamic. Instead of “Oh no, what if something terrible happens?” you ask “Ohhh, what does this anxiety actually feel like right now?” You notice where it lives in your body. You notice its texture, its temperature, whether it moves or stays still.

This isn’t distraction. It’s direct engagement — but from an open, expanded state rather than a closed, contracted one. And because curiosity and anxiety are neurobiologically incompatible, the anxiety doesn’t just get pushed aside. It loses its grip because the brain state that sustains it is no longer active.

In a randomized controlled trial, this approach led to a 67% reduction in anxiety for people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The number needed to treat was 1.6 — meaning that for roughly every two people who used this approach, one saw significant improvement. For context, SSRIs have a number needed to treat of 5.2.

Bad Habits and Everyday Addictions

Every bad habit follows a loop: trigger, behavior, reward. The behavior persists because your brain believes the reward is worth it. Second Gear — becoming disenchanted with the actual reward — starts the process of updating that belief. But the update won’t stick unless you offer something better.

Curiosity is that something better. When a craving arises — the urge to check your phone, to procrastinate, to scroll — instead of acting on it or fighting it, you get curious about the craving itself. What does this urge actually feel like? Where is it in my body? Is it hot or cold? Does it have edges? What happens if I just watch it for thirty seconds?

In my smoking cessation research, smokers who brought this kind of curiosity to their cravings quit at 5 times the rate of those using the gold-standard American Lung Association program. They didn’t fight the craving. They got interested in it. And the craving lost its power because the brain got accurate information about what smoking actually delivered versus what it promised.

The same principle applies to every everyday addiction: doomscrolling, compulsive phone checking, procrastination. The craving feels urgent because D-curiosity is driving it — that contracted, need-to-know itch. When you flip to I-curiosity — genuine interest in the craving itself — the urgency dissolves. You’ve given your brain a better offer.

Emotional Eating

The anxiety-eating-shame cycle is one of the most entrenched habit loops I encounter in my clinical work. Anxiety triggers eating, eating triggers shame, shame feeds back into more anxiety, and the cycle repeats.

Curiosity breaks this cycle at every link. When anxiety arises and the urge to eat follows, curiosity about the anxiety itself — what does this anxiety feel like in my body right now? — interrupts the automatic leap to food. When shame arises after eating, curiosity about the shame — where do I feel this? what’s its quality? — prevents the shame from calcifying into an identity narrative.

In clinical research, this approach produced a 40% reduction in craving-related eating. Not through restriction. Not through meal plans. Through curiosity about the emotional experience driving the behavior.

One of the members of my Going Beyond Anxiety program described it this way: she was standing at the refrigerator, about to start eating, when she paused and got curious about what was actually happening in her body. She noticed the anxiety in her chest. She noticed the urge. And for the first time, she realized the food wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted the anxiety to stop. That awareness — powered by curiosity — broke the loop in a way that no diet ever had.

How to Practice: Getting Started with Curiosity

Curiosity isn’t something you can force. You can’t grit your teeth and be curious — that’s just more contraction. But you can create the conditions for it to emerge. Here’s how to begin.

Step 1: Notice the Contraction

Before you can flip from “Oh no!” to “Ohhh?”, you need to notice the “Oh no!” happening. This is awareness of the habit loop in action — what I call First Gear.

When you feel the urge to scroll, eat, worry, or avoid, pause for one second and notice what’s happening in your body. Tight chest? Clenched jaw? Restless energy in your hands? That contraction is the signal. It’s your brain in a closed state, running a habit loop.

You don’t need to do anything about it yet. Just notice it. Mapping the loop is the first step.

Step 2: Ask the Question

Once you notice the contraction, try this: instead of acting on the urge, ask yourself with genuine interest — not judgment, not analysis, but interest — “What does this actually feel like right now?”

Not “why am I feeling this?” (that’s your prefrontal cortex trying to solve a problem, and it’s probably offline anyway). Not “how do I make this stop?” (that’s still contraction). Just: what does this feel like?

Where is it in my body? Does it have a shape? A color? A temperature? Is it moving or still? Does it change as I watch it?

This is the shift from D-curiosity to I-curiosity. You’re no longer trying to get an answer or scratch an itch. You’re exploring. And that exploration, if you let it, will open you up.

Step 3: Feel the Shift

If the curiosity is genuine — and you’ll know because your body will soften — you’ll notice something change. The contraction loosens. The urgency fades. Not always dramatically. Sometimes just a few percent. But that few percent is your brain learning something new: curiosity feels better than the habit.

This is the update. This is reward-based learning working in your favor. Your brain just experienced that open, curious awareness is more rewarding than the contracted, automatic habit. And it will remember.

Step 4: Repeat. Often.

Curiosity isn’t a one-time intervention. It’s a practice. Every time you bring it to a habit loop, you’re strengthening the neural pathway that says “try curiosity next time.” Over weeks and months, the old habit weakens and the new pattern — curious awareness — becomes more automatic.

The RAIN exercise (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Note) is one structured way to practice this. The “Investigate” step is where curiosity lives. I also teach specific curiosity practices in my Going Beyond Anxiety program, where we work with curiosity in real-time during live sessions.

The Clinical Evidence

I’m a scientist. I don’t ask anyone to take this on faith. Here’s what the data shows across all three domains:

Anxiety: A randomized controlled trial of our approach showed a 67% reduction in GAD anxiety scores, with a number needed to treat of 1.6 — more than three times as effective as SSRIs (NNT of 5.2).

Smoking: Our mindfulness-based smoking cessation program, which centers curiosity as the BBO for cravings, produced quit rates 5x higher than the American Lung Association’s Freedom From Smoking program in a randomized controlled trial.

Emotional Eating: A 40% reduction in craving-related eating using the same curiosity-based framework — not through food restriction, but through bringing curious awareness to the emotional triggers driving the eating.

These aren’t different programs with different mechanisms. They’re the same mechanism — curiosity as a more rewarding alternative to habitual reactivity — applied to different behaviors. That’s the whole point. Curiosity isn’t a technique specific to one problem. It’s a fundamental capacity of the human mind that your brain is already wired for. We’re just reactivating it.

You Already Have This Superpower

Here’s the part that matters most: curiosity isn’t something I’m going to give you. It’s something you already have. Every child is born with it. You had it before the world taught you to prioritize answers over questions, efficiency over exploration, and certainty over wonder.

The modern world — with its infinite notifications, its algorithm-driven content, its culture of instant information — has trained you toward D-curiosity at the expense of I-curiosity. It’s trained you to scratch itches rather than explore. To seek relief rather than understanding. To chase destinations rather than journeys.

But I-curiosity hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s sitting right where you left it, waiting for you to turn toward your own experience with genuine interest instead of judgment.

The next time anxiety tightens your chest, or a craving pulls at your attention, or shame starts its familiar narrative — try this. Just for ten seconds. Get curious. Not about why you’re feeling it or how to make it stop. About what it actually feels like, right now, in your body.

You might be surprised by what happens. Your body might soften. The urgency might fade. You might discover that the thing you’ve been fighting all along becomes far less intimidating when you simply look at it with open eyes.

That’s curiosity. It’s the biggest, best offer your brain has. And it’s been yours all along.

If you’re ready to put curiosity into practice — with structured guidance, live coaching, and a community doing this work alongside you — Going Beyond Anxiety is where we do exactly that. Because reading about curiosity is useful. But experiencing it changes everything.

Onward.