Monday, March 18, 2013

the power of habit

I spent the majority of break reading The Power of Habit.... here are some of the notes I took while reading:


  • "All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits" -William James
  • More than 40% of actions people performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits
  • "chunking" = the root of how habits form - it's a process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine
  • habits are stored in the ganglia basal (an oval of cells in the brain that wasn't understood for years - central to recalling patterns and acting on them) even while the rest of the brain goes to sleep
  • habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort
  • three main parts of habits = cue ---> routine ---> reward
  • habits can be ignored, changed or replaced but they never really disappear because they're encoded into the structures of our brain
  • the brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits
  • without habit loops (cue ---> routine ---> reward) the brain would shut down
  • habits as much as memory and reason are at the root of how we behave
  • craving is what powers the habit loop and causes cues/rewards to work
  • habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings (occur gradually so that we're often blind to their influence)
  • to overpower a habit you have to recognize which craving is driving the behavior
  • to change a habit follow the 'Golden Rule of Habit Change' = keep the old cue and deliver the old reward but insert a new routine
I also tracked/documented 5 of my habits for a week...

...and then took away the lines/dates/times just for fun to see what it looked like more abstracted...



1 comment:

  1. Nicholas Feltron
    feltron.tumblr.com
    http://feltron.com
    also look at his personal annual reports on his personal website. amazing. John McVey has a couple of them in print here in the sem room.

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