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Your basal ganglia automates any repeated pattern of cue, routine, and reward without judging it as good or bad. To change a habit, find the cue and reward driving it, then swap the routine. The brain doesn't care if the pattern serves you.
Your basal ganglia automates any repeated pattern of cue, routine, and reward without judging it as good or bad. To change a habit, find the cue and reward driving it, then swap the routine. The brain doesn't care if the pattern serves you.
Here's the thing about habits is in our brain, there's no such thing as a bad habit or a good habit, right? The basal ganglia is this part of our brain that creates habits, and it actually evolved just to do that. If we couldn't form habits, we would not evolve. Our brain just says, look, if there's a pattern of a cue, a routine, and a reward, I'm gonna make that easier and easier to do. It doesn't say this is a good habit or this is a bad habit. It's up to us to decide which habits are good and which are bad, which ones we wanna encourage and discourage. And just because other people think they're good or bad, that does not mean that they have to be good or bad for you. The key is to have agency, to have control over your life. And the way we do that is by not just focusing on the behavior, but by looking for these cues and these rewards, looking for these leverage points that we can use to change and become the person we want to be.
