“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor Frankl

Who knew mindful curiosity could have a profound impact on bad habits? It has the ability to shift our focus from automatic reactions to conscious awareness. By becoming curious about our cravings and the sensations they bring while having them, we disrupt the habitual cycle of trigger-behavior-reward. This curiosity-based awareness allows us to observe our urges without acting on them, reducing their power over us. Research shows that mindfulness can change brain activity, making it easier to break bad habits. Curiosity transforms our relationship with cravings, turning them into opportunities for learning rather than triggers for automatic behavior. This approach fosters self-control and promotes healthier, more intentional choices.

Observe urges mindfully, break free from bad habits.

TED Talks are influential presentations given by experts across various fields, aiming to share “ideas worth spreading.” These talks cover a wide range of topics, including technology, entertainment, design, science, and personal growth. Each talk is typically under 18 minutes, making them concise and impactful. TED Talks are available online for free, allowing global access to innovative ideas and inspiring stories. They are filmed at TED conferences and independent TEDx events, featuring speakers like Simon Sinek, Brené Brown, and Bill Gates. TED Talks have become a valuable resource for learning, motivation, and sparking meaningful conversations.

In Judson Brewer’s TED Talk “A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit,” he explores how mindfulness can help us overcome habits like smoking, overeating, or compulsive phone use. Brewer explains that habits are formed through a reward-based learning process involving triggers, behaviors, and rewards. By becoming curious about our cravings and paying attention to what they actually feel like, we can disrupt this cycle.

Brewer shares research showing that mindfulness training can change brain activity and help people quit smoking. He suggests using curiosity to become aware of our urges instead of acting on them, which can lead to breaking bad habits naturally.

Main Point	Description
Habit Formation	Habits are formed through a reward-based learning process involving triggers, behaviors, and rewards.
Mindfulness and Curiosity	Becoming curious about cravings and paying attention to their sensations can disrupt the habit cycle.
Brain Activity	Mindfulness training can change brain activity, aiding in breaking bad habits.
Awareness Over Action	Observing urges without acting on them reduces their power.
Research Insights	Studies show mindfulness helps people quit smoking and overcome other habits.

Judson Brewer’s TED Talk “A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit” can benefit anyone struggling with habits like smoking, overeating, or excessive phone use. Individuals seeking to improve their mental health, and well-being will find value in learning how mindfulness and curiosity can disrupt the habit cycle. Healthcare professionals and therapists can gain insights into effective strategies for helping clients overcome addictions. Educators and parents can use these principles to guide others in developing healthier behaviors. By understanding the power of mindfulness, viewers can gain practical tools to break free from automatic behaviors and make more intentional choices.

Breaking a bad habit using Judson Brewer’s method

Brewer’s core insight is that habits are driven by a trigger-behavior-reward loop, and that curiosity is more powerful than willpower for breaking them. Instead of fighting urges, you learn to observe them with interest until the craving loses its grip. Here is how to apply it concretely.

Core loop to understand first

Every habit runs on this cycle:

Trigger → Behavior → Reward (or perceived reward)

Your brain learned the behavior because it once felt good or relieving. The goal is not to white-knuckle through cravings but to update your brain’s data on whether the behavior actually delivers.

Step-by-step method

1. Identify your specific habit loop

Pick one habit. Write down:

• What triggers it (stress, boredom, a time of day, a feeling, a place)
• What the behavior is exactly
• What reward your brain expects from it

Be precise. “I eat junk food” is too vague. “I reach for chips when I sit down to work at 3 pm because I feel anxious” is workable.

2. The next time the urge hits, pause before acting

Do not try to stop the urge. Do not judge it. Just create a small gap between the trigger and the behavior. Even two seconds counts.

3. Get curious about what the urge actually feels like in your body

Ask yourself these questions in real time:

• Where do I feel this in my body right now?
• Is it tight? Warm? Restless? Hollow?
• Is it getting stronger or just staying the same?
• What does it actually feel like, moment to moment?

You are treating your own craving like a fascinating science experiment, not an enemy.

4. Notice what the behavior actually delivers

When you do engage in the habit, pay very close attention to the actual sensory experience, not the anticipated one. Brewer calls this “tasting the results.”

Ask yourself:

• Does this actually feel as good as I expected?
• What does it feel like in my body right now, while doing it?
• Is this satisfying, or just numbing?

Your brain updates its reward value based on real experience. Disappointment is data.

5. Replace the reward with curiosity itself

Over time, the act of getting curious becomes the new behavior in the loop. Curiosity feels open and expansive. Craving feels tight and contracted. You train yourself to notice the difference.

When an urge arrives, instead of acting on it, say internally:

“Interesting. There it is again. What does this actually feel like right now?”

6. Use the RAIN technique as a structured support tool

This pairs well with Brewer’s method:

• Recognize the urge is happening
• Allow it to be there without fighting it
• Investigate the physical sensations with curiosity
• Note what you observe, then let it pass

7. Track your results in writing

After each instance, note briefly:

• What triggered it
• What you did
• What it actually felt like (not what you expected)
• Whether curiosity helped create a pause

Over days and weeks, patterns become visible and the brain’s reward prediction starts to update.

Key mindset shift

• Willpower says: “Do not do the thing.” Brewer’s method says: “Get so curious about the thing that your brain naturally loses interest in it.”
• You are not fighting your brain. You are giving it better, more accurate information so it can update the habit on its own terms.

Concept novels and poetry

These works don’t just describe the habit loop or craving intellectually. They enact the process of pausing, observing with curiosity, and watching the grip of compulsion loosen from the inside.

Novels

• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. The narrator moves through a dreamlike world where compulsive patterns repeat and distort. The reader is placed inside the experience of being driven by something you cannot name, watching it without resolution. Unsettling and revelatory.
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. A dying man writes letters to his young son, observing his own life with radical curiosity and no self-defense. The entire novel is an act of noticing without grasping. Quietly profound.
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Esther watches her own unraveling with a clinical, almost detached curiosity that mirrors Brewer’s “observe the craving” stance exactly. The gaze itself becomes the turning point.
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun. A man observes his own deterioration with strange fascination rather than panic. The curiosity about his own suffering is both disturbing and oddly freeing. A raw, early example of the method in literary form.
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Stevens slowly, painfully notices what his lifelong habit of emotional suppression actually cost him. The entire novel is one long act of belated, honest observation. Devastating and beautiful.
• Stoner by John Williams. A quiet novel about a man who watches his own life with clear eyes, neither dramatizing nor escaping it. The observation itself becomes a form of dignity.
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Deeply difficult but relevant. A character’s compulsive self-harm is rendered with such interior precision that the reader experiences the trigger-behavior-reward loop from inside it, and the long, nonlinear process of its loosening.

Poetry

• Upstream by Mary Oliver. Oliver’s entire practice is structured curiosity about the present moment. She turns attention itself into the antidote. “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” That is Brewer’s method in three lines.
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. Not poetry strictly but poetic prose. Rilke repeatedly instructs the young poet to sit with discomfort, observe it without fleeing, and trust that curiosity will do what force cannot. Directly parallel.
• The Wellspring and Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds. Olds observes her own compulsions, grief, and bodily experience with forensic, non-judgmental attention. Her gaze is exactly the curious, non-reactive stance Brewer describes.
• The Wild Iris by Louise Glück. Poems spoken from the perspective of flowers, a gardener, and God in rotation. The collection enacts the process of noticing what drives longing and watching it transform. Strange and stunning.
• View With a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska. A Polish Nobel laureate whose poems treat ordinary compulsions and assumptions with gentle, almost playful curiosity. She defamiliarizes habit beautifully. Highly recommended and lesser known in the US.
• Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Vuong observes inherited trauma and personal compulsion with tenderness and precision rather than judgment. The poems embody the pause before the behavior.

Note on why these work

The common thread across all of them is the quality of attention the narrator or speaker brings to their own interior experience. None of them resolve craving through willpower or moral instruction. They resolve it, when they do, through sustained, honest, curious looking. That is exactly what Brewer is asking us to practice.

Keepsakes

What Brewer’s method and every one of these books and poems quietly teaches is that the way out is not through force but through attention. They share a single, radical premise: that looking clearly and curiously at our own experience, without flinching and without judgment, is itself transformative. We do not need to conquer a habit. We need to see it honestly enough that it loses its authority over us.

Carry these ideas with you:

• Curiosity is not passive. It is one of the most courageous acts available to us.
• The pause between trigger and behavior is where our freedom lives.
• Discomfort observed with interest becomes something entirely different than discomfort resisted with fear.
• Our brain is not our enemy. It is simply working with the information it has. Give it better information.
• Willpower is a finite resource. Curiosity is not. One exhausts us, the other opens us.
• A novel or poem that makes us feel seen in our struggle is doing the same work as the practice itself. It is training our capacity to witness ourselves without turning away.
• The method does not ask us to be perfect. It asks us to be honest, one moment at a time.

Whether we are sitting with an urge, reading a difficult novel, or simply pausing before an old familiar pattern, we are doing the same thing. We are choosing to look. That choice, made again and again, is how habits change, how understanding deepens, and how a life slowly, genuinely shifts.

Updated since September 24, 2024.

©2024 S. Mottet bloomhearty.com writing, creation, and design.