- Remove the current class from the content27_link item as Webflows native current state will automatically be applied.
- To add interactions which automatically expand and collapse sections in the table of contents select the content27_h-trigger element, add an element trigger and select Mouse click (tap)
- For the 1st click select the custom animation Content 27 table of contents [Expand] and for the 2nd click select the custom animation Content 27 table of contents [Collapse].
- In the Trigger Settings, deselect all checkboxes other than Desktop and above. This disables the interaction on tablet and below to prevent bugs when scrolling.
Whether you’re someone who loves diving into self-improvement or just feels ready to tweak your daily habits for a sharper mind and a more productive life, paying attention to your cognitive habits is critical. These habits play a crucial role in managing stress, fine-tuning our focus, and powering overall day-to-day performance. However, building and maintaining these habits effectively can be a challenge.
This is where brain data comes in – offering us a groundbreaking way to understand and optimize how we think, work, and live. By leveraging devices like the MW75 Neuro we can better take control of our mental processes, building habits rooted in science rather than guesswork.
Why Are Habits So Hard to Change?
At the heart of habit formation lies the interplay between our brain’s reward systems, cognitive control mechanisms, and environmental cues. According to the article Leveraging Cognitive Neuroscience for Making and Breaking Real-World Habits, habits are structured around a cycle of cue, routine, and reward:
- Cue: A trigger that initiates the behavior.
- Routine: The behavior itself.
- Reward: Positive reinforcement that strengthens the habit over time.
For example, checking your phone (routine) during a work break (cue) for a dopamine hit from a notification (reward) forms a powerful cycle. Over time, this loop becomes automatic, making it challenging to break. Conversely, forming good habits requires sustained cognitive control and effort in the early stages, as the brain works to override old patterns and establish new routines.
Stress and cognitive fatigue further complicate this process. Under high mental load, the brain defaults to automatic behaviors, which often align with bad habits. Breaking these cycles requires not just effort, but tools that can help us disrupt the loop and build healthier patterns.
This is where technology comes in. The MW75 Neuro puts your brain data at your fingertips to help reinforce building new habits. At the end of the day it will be your discipline in using the technology that matters, but it can be an effective tool reducing the burden to reach your goals.
4 Keys to Forming New Habits: The Role of Brain Data
Insights into the brain’s real-time state have previously only been available in the lab or clinical setting. But leveraging easy-to-use EEG systems today, like the MW75 Neuro, leverage neuroscience principles to transform how we build and break habits in our everyday lives. Here’s how:
Motivating Daily Effort: One of the key principles of building habits is consistency. The Neurable app encourages users to engage in focused work every day by setting manageable goals. For example, earning 100 "Focus Points" daily helps users establish a routine without overwhelming them. The goal here isn’t to stop at 100 points, most people will actually crush this goal. The goal is to have people create the habit of showing up each day. This approach mirrors the habit loop by creating small, achievable wins that reinforce the behavior over time.
Tracking Trends and Insights: Cognitive neuroscience emphasizes the importance of understanding how habits interact with our environment and mental state. The Neurable app tracks how distractions, cognitive fatigue, and other factors impact focus. By analyzing this data, users gain personalized insights, such as:
- The best times of day for deep work
- Tasks that naturally align with their focus patterns
- Environmental factors that enhance or hinder productivity
This tracking creates a feedback loop that helps users identify and reinforce behaviors that lead to sustained focus and better mental health.
Real-Time Interventions: One of the most innovative features of the MW75 Neuro is its ability to provide real-time interventions. By monitoring brain activity, the device detects when focus starts to wane and suggests timely breaks to prevent cognitive fatigue. This approach addresses a key flaw in traditional systems: relying on subjective cues, like feeling tired or distracted, to decide when to stop. By the time these signs appear, performance has often been compromised for hours.
Real-time interventions not only keep users productive but also help disrupt the cycle of bad habits by introducing new routines at critical moments. For instance, instead of unconsciously scrolling through social media, users might take a guided mindfulness break or switch to a more engaging task.
Unlike traditional systems like the Pomodoro technique, which rely on rigid timers, Neurable adapts to your unique cognitive state, ensuring your work habits align with how your brain naturally operates. To read more about this check out this article on how Pomodoro can lead to inefficiency.
Building Resilient Habits with Personalization: The Neurable app goes beyond real-time feedback by offering long-term insights that help users optimize their routines. By analyzing trends in brain data, it identifies patterns that are unique to each individual:
- Best Times for Focus: When your brain is most alert for deep work or tackling the work you have the hardest time focusing on.
- Ideal Tasks for Low Motivation: Activities that are easier to complete when energy is low.
- Ideal Tasks for High Motivation: Which activities are harder to complete and therefore may require you to use your best focus times on.
- Impact of Lifestyle Factors: How sleep, stress, and environment affect your performance. Right now this is done by looking at your focus efficiency in the app and the graphs post session but soon we will have an AI that can pull these insights for you.
This personalized approach aligns with research showing that habits are most likely to stick when they are tailored to the individual. By understanding and leveraging your brain’s natural rhythms, you can create habits that endure under stress and cognitive load.
Read more about how we designed our app to help you build better mental health hygiene.
TL;DR
Under high load, the brain struggles to maintain focus and defaults to ingrained routines. The MW75 Neuro combats this by providing data-driven support to manage cognitive load effectively. By helping users stay in control of their mental state, it accelerates the process of building good habits and breaking bad ones.
The beauty of habit formation lies in its potential to transform our lives—one small, intentional shift at a time. Tools like the MW75 Neuro and the Neurable app give us a window into how our minds actually work, turning abstract neuroscience into practical, everyday wins. It’s not about perfection; it’s about progress—showing up consistently, understanding what drives us, and making smarter choices that stick.
So, if you’re ready to take the guesswork out of self-improvement and build habits that truly serve you, why not explore how your brain can guide the journey? Start small—play with the idea of tracking your focus, tweaking your routines, or even just noticing what sparks your best work. Your brain’s got the answers; all you need to do is listen.
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
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