Hard-wired bad habits prove hard to break

WASHINGTON - Uh-oh, the new year's just begun and already you're finding it hard to keep those resolutions to junk the junk food, get off the couch or kick smoking. There's a biological reason a lot of our bad habits are so hard to break - they get wired into our brains.

That's not an excuse to give up. Understanding how unhealthy behaviors become ingrained has scientists learning some tricks that may help good habits replace the bad.

"Why are bad habits stronger? You're fighting against the power of an immediate reward," says Dr. Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an authority on the brain's pleasure pathway.

It's the fudge vs. broccoli choice: Chocolate's yum factor tends to beat out the knowledge that veggies bring an eventual reward of lost pounds.

"We all as creatures are hard-wired that way, to give greater value to an immediate reward as opposed to something that's delayed," Volkow says.

Just how that bit of happiness turns into a habit involves a pleasure-sensing chemical named dopamine. It conditions the brain to want that reward again and again - reinforcing the connection each time.

People tend to overestimate their ability to resist temptations around them, thus undermining attempts to shed bad habits, says experimental psychologist Loran Nordgren, an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

"People have this self-control hubris, this belief they can handle more than they can," says Nordgren, who studies the tug-of-war between willpower and temptation.

Even scientists who recognize it can fall prey. "I don't like popcorn. But every time I go to the cinema, I have to eat it," Volkow says. "It's fascinating."