The Six Magic Words: What Am I Getting From This?

The “six magic words” are a single question I teach for unwinding habits like worry, overeating and phone checking: What am I getting from this?

“Six magic words” is a nickname for the question, not a name I came up with. And the question itself is pretty simple, not necessarily magic. As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, I can tell you why it works: it uses the way your brain learns. Once you see that, you can use it on almost any habit loop.

What Are the Six Magic Words?

The six words are: What am I getting from this?

You ask them about a habit while you’re doing it, or right after, and you answer by checking in with your body, not your thinking mind.

In Unwinding Anxiety the question appears as “What do I get from this behavior?” In The Hunger Habit it’s the layperson’s version of tuning in to a behavior’s reward value: “What am I getting from this?”

The question is the heart of what I call second gear. In the Three Gears of habit change, first gear is mapping your habit loop: trigger, behavior, result. Second gear is paying attention to the results of your actions. Third gear is finding a bigger, better offer. The six words are how you shift into second.

Why Does Asking a Question Work?

Habits run on reward-based learning. A behavior leads to a result, and that result drives future behavior. If the behavior is rewarding, you do it again. If it isn’t, you stop doing it.

The part of the brain that keeps score is the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC. It bundles what you’ve learned about a behavior into a single reward value, so you don’t have to relearn it every time. I think of this as “set and forget.” Your brain may still be running on the reward value it set for a whole bag of chips when you were thirteen.

Behavior doesn’t change if the reward value of that behavior stays the same. And the reward value can only change when you bring awareness to bear and see what the behavior gives you right now. When you do, the OFC reshuffles its reward hierarchy and moves the less rewarding behavior lower on the “if triggered, must-do” list.

I call this disenchantment. It’s a bit like a kid yanking on Santa Claus’ beard and realizing it’s fake. Once you know, you can’t go back. If you pay careful and close attention and see that a behavior is not rewarding right now, you start to get less excited about doing it again.

None of this runs on willpower. Instead of forcing yourself to stop, you’re giving your brain fresh information so it can do what it already does well. My colleagues and I have described this as self-regulation without force: bringing awareness to your experience and behavior can change how your brain values learned but unhealthy behaviors (Ludwig, Brown & Brewer, 2020).

How Do You Ask It With Your Body, Not Your Head?

This is the step people most often skip, so I’ll be blunt. Asking the question is not an intellectual exercise. If you treat it as one, you end up in a familiar loop: you tell yourself not to eat the snack, five minutes later your willpower breaks down, you eat it anyway, and you feel bad.

Thinking is helpful for planning, but the thinking part of your brain is the weakest player when it comes to changing behavior. The heavy lifting happens in the OFC and other reward-based learning parts of the brain, and awareness is their coach.

So when you ask, “What am I getting from this?”, put your thinking mind on hold for a few moments. Drop your awareness into observation mode and notice:

• What body sensations are here?
• What emotions are here?
• What thoughts are showing up?

Your brain may jump in with a judgment like “you shouldn’t have” or “this is bad.” Your body knows best, so listen to what it has to say. In The Hunger Habit I pair the six words with a second question: “How content do I feel?” Ask it now, and ask again in 5 and 15 minutes. Feeling satisfied by scratching an itch is different from feeling content afterward.

How to Use the Six Magic Words in Three Steps

1. Map the loop. Name the trigger, the behavior and the result. Here’s a familiar one from Unwinding Anxiety. You come home after a long, stressful day, head into the kitchen, and start mindlessly eating a bag of chips while you watch TV. Trigger: time of day, stress. Behavior: mindlessly eat a snack. Result: Hmmm, how did those chips taste? You weren’t really paying attention.

2. Ask the six words. The next time the loop runs, ask, “What am I getting from this?” and feel the answer. Half a bag in, you might notice that you feel stuffed and slightly ill, and that the relaxation you were after isn’t there.

3. Find the bigger, better offer. For a new behavior to stick, its reward value likely has to be greater than the reward value of the behavior it replaces. Curiosity fits the bill. It’s always available, it feels more open and expansive than the restless “do something” of an urge, and it doesn’t feed the habit loop. You can even bring curiosity into the question itself and ask it with genuine interest.

Then repeat. I think of this as “short moments, many times.” When the habit comes up, you have to deal with it anyway, so take a few seconds to map it and ask. Each time is another rep in your mental gym. For the full framework, see the Three Gears of habit change.

What Do the Six Magic Words Look Like in Real Life?

Worry

Because our brains link worrying with problem solving, they keep pulling the worry slot machine lever, hoping for a solution jackpot. When people in my clinic and programs map their worry loop and ask what they’re getting from it, they report back that worry doesn’t get them anything but more anxiety. Then they ask why they haven’t stopped worrying yet. I ask how long they’ve had the worry habit. Most of them reply, “All of my life.” Then I ask how long they’ve been in the program. “Two weeks” and “three weeks” are the usual answers. Hearing themselves say that is usually enough to help them gain perspective.

Overeating

The craving tool from The Hunger Habit works like this. Notice when you have a craving for a food. If you decide to eat it, go for it, but really pay attention to what it feels like as you do. Afterward, ask yourself one crucial question: “What am I getting from this?” Eating with awareness doesn’t magically make you stop liking chocolate. You might like it even more when you notice how great it tastes. What you can do is notice exactly when the scale starts tipping from delicious to neutral to unpleasant, and see if that helps you stop there, or at least slow down.

Phone Checking and Scrolling

Pulling out a smartphone and checking a news feed or answering a few emails might give some brief anxiety relief. It also builds a new habit: when you’re stressed or anxious, you distract yourself. When the distraction doesn’t work, that can lead to more worrying. Next time your hand reaches for the phone, ask the six words and notice what the relief actually feels like.

Procrastination

A perfectionist patient of mine found that his impossible standards kept sending him to “procrastination land”: social media, the news, the refrigerator. He described himself as “like a gambler going deeper into debt, thinking the only thing I can do is gamble more, because stopping wouldn’t solve the debt.” When he started collecting second-gear data, he noticed that avoidance delivered nothing, while imperfect action delivered forward motion. Thirty seconds of sitting with the discomfort, plus a rough outline, was almost always better than another hour of avoidance.

Smoking

I don’t have to tell my patients that smoking is bad for them. They already know. Instead, I teach people to pay attention when they smoke. One woman who was doing this noticing compared it to stinky cheese and said it “tastes like chemicals, YUCK.” She wasn’t thinking, “smoking is bad for me.” She brought curiosity and awareness to the experience of smoking, as she was smoking. That kind of awareness is critical for resetting the reward value in your brain.

Which Version of the Question Should You Use?

People half-remember the six words, and that’s fine. Any of these will do the job:

• What am I actually getting from this?
• What do I get from this? (the version in Unwinding Anxiety)
• What did I get from this last time? This is what I call retrospective second gear. You can learn from a habit after the fact, as long as the felt experience still has some juice when you recall it.
• How content do I feel? (the companion question from The Hunger Habit)

The exact wording matters less than where you look for the answer. Look in your body.

How Long Does It Take to Work?

As a science geek, I wanted to know how long it takes someone to become disenchanted with a food. In a study from my lab, people tracked their craving tool use in our Eat Right Now program. It took only 10 to 15 uses of the craving tool for the reward value to drop below zero. In a separate real-world sample of over 1,000 app users, reward values dropped across craving tool uses as well (Taylor et al., 2021).

There’s a caveat. Simply mapping out habit loops and seeing their lack of value doesn’t magically unwind years of entrenchment. For deeply entrenched habits, your brain needs to see the lack of reward over and over before the new pattern takes hold. Each time you ask the six words, you add a data point.

What Does the Research Say?

Two more papers from my lab add to the studies above:

• Smoking. In a randomized trial of 88 adults, mindfulness training was compared with the American Lung Association’s Freedom From Smoking program. At the 17-week follow-up, 31% of the mindfulness group had not smoked in the past week (confirmed by a breath test), compared with 6% of the comparison group (Brewer et al., 2011).
• Worry. It is thought to be learned and reinforced the same way other habits are, which makes it a target for mindfulness training aimed at that mechanism (Brewer & Roy, 2021).

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Dr. Jud’s six magic words?

They’re a single question: “What am I getting from this?” It’s the heart of second gear in my Three Gears of habit change. You ask it during or right after a habit, then notice in your body what the behavior actually gave you. “Six magic words” is a nickname. The question is pretty simple, not necessarily magic. It works because it gives your brain’s reward system up-to-date information.

Who can use the six magic words?

Anyone with a habit loop they’d like to change. I use this question in my clinic and in our Unwinding Anxiety and Eat Right Now programs, with habits like worry, stress eating, smoking and procrastination.

How many times do I have to ask before it works?

Fewer than you might think, though it isn’t instant. In one of my lab’s eating studies, it took only 10 to 15 uses of the craving tool for the reward value of a food to drop below zero. Deeply entrenched habits can take longer, because your brain needs to see the lack of reward over and over before it trusts the new data.

Can asking the question make my anxiety worse?

Paying close attention to an old habit can be uncomfortable, and mapping an anxiety habit loop can make you anxious for a moment. If that happens, take a step back, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that this is your brain trying to be helpful and getting a little off track. If your anxiety feels overwhelming, work with a clinician alongside this practice.

Is this the same as willpower?

No. Willpower means telling yourself to stop and pushing against the urge, which often breaks down a few minutes later. The six magic words have nothing to do with willpower. They help your brain see, from direct experience, that a behavior isn’t as rewarding as it remembered, so you naturally get less excited about doing it again.

Try It Once Today

The next time you catch yourself in an old loop, try the six words once. Map the loop, ask “What am I getting from this?”, drop into your body, and see what you find. You don’t need to change anything yet. You’re collecting data.

If worry is the habit you’d most like to work on, start with how the anxiety habit loop works, or read my guide to anxiety for the bigger picture.