Why does your brain prefer cake to broccoli, even when you know which one you should be eating? In a seven-minute video posted to his DrJud channel in February 2020, Jud Brewer, MD PhD, argues that the answer has less to do with flavor or personal weakness than with how the brain files away rewards. Habits, in his telling, are not moral failings or stubborn character traits. They are learned predictions, built from past experience, that run automatically unless something updates them. Brewer's central claim is that willpower is the wrong tool for changing them, and that the more reliable lever is awareness: paying close attention to what a behavior actually feels like while you are doing it, which he says can reset the reward value the brain has been using all along.
Brewer opens with the question most of us have asked at a dinner table or in front of a vending machine. "Cake tastes better, but it's not as simple as you might think," he says at the start of the video (0:06). The answer, he suggests, points toward something larger than snack choices. It tells us why we act the way we do and why breaking a bad habit is so hard.
The story begins with a practical problem. The brain cannot treat every action as a fresh decision. Brewer makes the point with a thought experiment: imagine waking up every morning and having to relearn how to walk, dress, tie your shoes, make coffee, and cook breakfast. "You'd be exhausted before you even finished breakfast," he says (0:32). Habits solve this by letting you learn something once and then perform it without thinking. Their purpose, in other words, is efficiency. They free up attention for new learning.
But the brain is selective about what it turns into a habit. Not every action you take becomes automatic. So what decides which behaviors get locked in?
Brewer's answer is that habits are learned according to how rewarding a behavior is. He calls this reward-based learning and breaks it into three parts: a trigger, a behavior, and a reward. His example is simple enough to remember. "Let's say you see your shoelace is untied, that's the trigger. Tie your shoes, that's the behavior. And then don't trip when you walk, that's the reward" (1:13 and following).
The key principle is that the stronger the reward, the stronger the habit loop becomes. Brewer describes the brain as organizing behaviors into a hierarchy based on their reward value, with the behavior carrying the biggest payoff being the one we tend to act out. He ties this to evolution. The brain, he explains, is wired to secure calories, because calories meant survival. Sugar and fat are dense in calories, so when we eat cake, a part of the brain treats it as a survival win. Over time, that is why we come to prefer cake over broccoli. Our brains "remember which foods are more rewarding," which, as Brewer notes with a wry aside, is also why many parents keep dessert off the dinner table.
Calories are only part of the story. Brewer says the brain also learns the reward value of people, places, and things. He invites viewers to think back on childhood birthday parties. The brain, he says, combines everything into one composite reward: the taste of the cake, the presents, the ice cream, the friends. "All of this information goes into a single composite reward value," and each party reinforces it (2:21).
This is where the idea becomes useful for adults. When you see a piece of cake now, you don't reconstruct what it tastes like or replay the memories of those parties. The learned association fires on its own. "You just know that eating cake makes you feel good," Brewer says, "and it triggers that automatic and habitual response to eat it." His shorthand for the process is "set-and-forget": the brain sets the reward value and forgets the details. That efficiency is what makes habits powerful, and it is also what makes them so stubborn.
If the brain is running a prediction, then the standard advice, to use willpower and simply think your way out of the behavior, is aimed at the wrong target. Brewer acknowledges that this approach can work sometimes. Reminding yourself of the calories or the health consequences may help in a given moment. But, he says, "more often than not in the long run it fails." His explanation: "to change a behavior you can't just focus on the behavior itself. You have to address the felt experience of the rewards of the behavior" (3:40).
The logic here is worth sitting with. A habit is not stored as a set of instructions that a rational argument can overwrite. It is stored as a felt sense that a particular action pays off. Reasoning about the downside does not touch that felt sense. You can know perfectly well that cigarettes or cake are bad for you and still reach for them, because the reward prediction has not changed. Brewer's conclusion is blunt: "The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value. That's why it's called reward based learning after all."
Brewer's answer is one simple ingredient: awareness. A habit persists because the brain is working from old information. Its reward estimate was set years ago, perhaps in a different context, and nothing has corrected it. To change that, the brain needs new data. "By paying attention to the results of the behavior in the present moment," Brewer says, "we can jolt our brain out of habit autopilot and see and feel exactly how rewarding or unrewarding it is for us right now" (4:15).
The distinction is subtle but crucial. Telling yourself that smoking is bad is one thing. Noticing, in real time, what smoking actually smells and tastes like is another. The first asks you to think. The second gives your brain fresh evidence. Brewer argues that this fresh evidence "resets the reward value on that old habit," and allows better behaviors to move into automatic mode.
Brewer illustrates the approach with his Craving to Quit program, which he says does not tell people to force themselves to stop smoking, or remind them that smoking is harmful, since they already know both things. Most people, he notes, started smoking as teenagers, when cigarettes were tied to being young, cool, and rebellious against parents. Those associations are strong. So the exercise asks participants to pay attention when they smoke, and to notice how rewarding it is in that moment.
Brewer shares a comment from a participant that captures the shift: "smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, yuck" (5:27). He points out what is absent from that remark. The person was not thinking about health warnings. They were describing their direct experience of smoking as it happened. That, for Brewer, is the mechanism. Awareness lets the brain register the actual present-tense payoff, and that registration can begin to reset the reward value that had been driving the habit.
Brewer also addresses the obvious skeptical question: can awareness really overcome habits that are deeply ingrained? He says his team tested it. In the Eat Right Now program, which uses app-based mindfulness training to teach people to pay attention while eating, the team built in a craving tool. The tool asks participants to notice closely as they overeat or eat a particular type of food, so the brain can update the reward value of that behavior. Brewer reports that "it takes as few as 10 times of using the craving tool" for people to update those values and change their habits (6:38). In one study of the program, he says, researchers saw a 40 percent reduction in craving-related eating.
Those figures come from Brewer's own presentation in the video, and the full study details are not part of this article. Still, the logic he lays out is consistent: if the habit is a reward prediction, then changing the prediction should change the behavior, and he presents the results as evidence that this is possible without relying on sheer self-control.
"People are no longer habitually reacting to their triggers. They don't have to force themselves to stop. They can move beyond willpower." (Jud Brewer, DrJud video, 2020, approx. 6:50)
Brewer's closing move is to reframe the struggle itself. People trying to change habits are usually fighting their own brain strength. But the processes that built the old habit are the same ones that can dismantle it. "They're leveraging their brain strength, the very same processes that set up their old habitual behaviors, to break free from them," he says (7:03). It is a hopeful reframe, and it shifts the question from "why am I so weak?" to "what does this habit currently feel like it is paying me?"
The practical takeaway from Brewer's video is compact. Stop treating habits as a test of willpower. Understand that a habit is a learned prediction built from trigger, behavior, and reward, and that its strength comes from the reward value attached to it. To change it, bring attention to the behavior while you are doing it, notice the actual result without judgment, and let the new information register. Brewer's own summary is the best one: "Quit relying on willpower and go to the source, reward value, and don't forget a little awareness goes a long way."
There is a reason this message resonates. It takes the most common self-criticism people carry about their habits and replaces it with a mechanism that can be observed and tested. Whether or not every reader finds the specific study numbers persuasive, the core idea is one that is easy to try on a small scale: next time the familiar urge arrives, look closely at what the behavior actually delivers in that moment.
If you want to go further, start with Brewer's own video, which is short and built around concrete examples like the shoelace and the birthday party. His website, drjud.com, lists his work on habit change. The programs he names in the video description, Unwinding Anxiety, Eat Right Now, and Craving to Quit, are his own, and he presents them as examples of the awareness-based approach he describes. Whichever route you choose, the practice he returns to is the same: notice the reward while it is happening, and let that new information do the work that willpower alone has rarely managed.
