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...