Hacking Your Brain's "Reward System" to Change Habits

Why do we keep doing things we know are bad for us? As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, I’ve spent over 20 years studying this question. The answer isn’t that you lack discipline or motivation. It’s that your brain has a reward system that was built for a world very different from the one you live in today — and that system is running the show whether you realize it or not.

Understanding how your brain’s reward system creates and maintains habits is the single most important step toward changing them. Once you see the machinery, you can stop fighting yourself and start working with your brain instead of against it.

Overview

This 7-minute animated explainer from my lab breaks down the neuroscience of habit formation in accessible terms. The animation walks through how the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system creates and maintains habits — from smoking and overeating to worry and panic — and introduces the research-backed method for rewiring these patterns.

The core mechanism is reward-based learning: your brain connects triggers to behaviors based on the reward they produce. A stressful day (trigger) leads to eating ice cream (behavior), which feels good (reward). Your brain stores this sequence and replays it automatically. The problem is that this system, which evolved for survival, doesn’t evaluate long-term consequences. It simply repeats whatever felt rewarding in the moment, creating the habit loop that drives everything from anxiety to addiction.

The animation highlights findings from Dr. Jud’s clinical research at Brown University — including 5x quit rates for smoking and a 40% reduction in craving-related eating — and explains how curiosity serves as the key to upgrading your brain’s outdated habit programming. This is the same core science behind Dr. Jud’s New York Times bestseller Unwinding Anxiety and The Hunger Habit.

Key Takeaways

• Your reward system doesn’t care about long-term outcomes: It reinforces whatever feels good in the moment, which is why unhealthy habits persist even when you know they’re harmful.
• Willpower can’t override the reward system: Self-control depends on the prefrontal cortex, which shuts down under stress — exactly when bad habits are most likely to fire.
• Curiosity is the upgrade your brain needs: When you bring genuine curiosity to a habit, your brain gets updated reward information and naturally downgrades the behavior — no willpower required.

How Reward-Based Learning Creates Habits

Your brain learned to form habits through a process called reward-based learning. It’s one of the most evolutionarily conserved learning systems we have — it’s the same process that helps a mouse learn where the food is in a maze. In humans, it works like this:

1. Trigger: Something happens — you feel stressed, you smell cookies, you see a notification on your phone.
2. Behavior: You do something in response — you worry, you eat the cookie, you check the notification.
3. Reward: Your brain evaluates the result. Did it feel good? Even a little? If so, your brain lays down a memory: next time you encounter this trigger, do this behavior.

Over time, this loop becomes automatic. You don’t decide to reach for your phone when you’re bored — your brain just does it. You don’t choose to worry when you feel uncertain — the worry fires on its own. The habit loop is running in the background, below conscious awareness.

This is where things get interesting. The same reward-based learning system that creates bad habits can also unlearn them. When you bring mindful awareness to a habit — really paying attention to what the behavior delivers — your brain gets updated information. If you genuinely notice that eating the cookie when you’re stressed doesn’t actually make the stress go away, your brain starts to downgrade the reward value of that behavior. I’ve seen this in my clinic and in randomized controlled trials: curiosity is a more powerful tool for habit change than white-knuckling your way through willpower.

The Dopamine Connection

Dopamine plays a central role in this process, though not quite the way most people think. Dopamine isn’t simply a “pleasure chemical.” It’s more accurately a learning signal. Your brain releases dopamine when something is better than expected — this is called a reward prediction error. That dopamine surge is what tells your brain, “Pay attention. Remember this. Do it again.”

This is why habits can feel so automatic and addictive. Your brain has been laying down dopamine-reinforced memories every time the habit fires. The good news is that the same system works in reverse. When you pay close attention and a behavior is worse than expected — when you really notice that the third social media scroll isn’t making you feel better — dopamine drops, and the reward value gets updated downward. This is the neuroscience behind why awareness and curiosity work so well for habit change.

Putting This Into Practice

If you want to start working with your brain’s reward system today, here’s the simplest thing you can do: the next time a habit fires, pause and get curious about it. Don’t try to stop it. Just notice. What triggered it? What did the behavior actually deliver? How does your body feel right now?

That’s it. That single moment of awareness — what I call “first gear” — is where change begins. You’re giving your brain the updated information it needs to start recalibrating. For a guided approach to this process, watch my TED talk on breaking bad habits or explore mindfulness exercises that build the awareness muscle.

Related Resources

• What Is the Habit Loop? — The trigger-behavior-reward cycle driving your habits
• Habit Loops and Everyday Addictions — How the reward system creates everyday compulsions
• Curiosity: Our Superpower — Why curiosity is the brain’s natural habit-breaking tool
• A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit — Dr. Jud’s TED talk on habit change
• How Anxiety Becomes a Habit — When the reward system drives worry
• Habit Change Strategies Reviewed — Evidence-based methods for rewiring habits