The Habit Loop can always reapear!

In my intention to contribute to this community I want to recommend the book "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business" by Charles Duhigg. I still havet finised reading it (I will report here any new interesting information that I think will be useful for the fapstronouts).

Based on scientific data, Duhigg explains how the habit loop works - cue-routine-reward. And it works for humans, but for animals also.

photo of the habit loop: http://charlesduhigg.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/the-habit-loop.jpg

“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,” Ann Graybiel, a scientist at MIT who oversaw many of the basal ganglia experiments, told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golly, the old habit will reemerge right away. Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.”

This explains why it’s so hard to create exercise habits, for instance, or change what we eat. Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors—if we take control of the habit loop—we can force those bad tendencies into the background, just as Lisa Allen did after her Cairo trip. And once someone creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring the doughnuts becomes as automatic as any other habit.

This means that old habit never disappears. So, we should always be aware of that dangers.