Irresistible temptation of bad habits

Perhaps habits are one of the greatest injustices in the world. Some people mistakenly take them as lack of willpower. Why is it so easy to remember dirty words in a foreign language, and so difficult to learn the language? Why is the forbidden apple most tempting? And why habits are in fact a one way street?

Habits form a neurological cravings, which can actually never be erased from the brain. On the one hand it's reassuring, because as children we can learn many useful behaviors, but on the other hand its quite daunting if you plan on making some changes in later life.

In most cases, habits save our lives. As we walk, we do not have to think about taking steps and finding balance. Everything happens automatically, thanks to the programmed habits. Besides, if he were deliberately to process all that operational information our brain wouldn’t withstand such a load.

But there is a significant imbalance between good and bad habits. The former is difficult to instill, and the latter lingers in a heartbeat. The answer lies in the prize. Bad habits have very attractive prizes.

Trigger - Routine - Award

Each habit comes down to three steps - trigger, routine, reward. Let's take a less obvious example - emails. Work involves the need to concentrate. To achieve the optimum level of concentration 20 minutes is needed. But practically every one of us has indulged in the habit of distraction, resulting in turn from the need to have a brake. The sound of incoming e-mail or SMS is the ideal trigger. Oh, how hard it is to resist the temptation and not read the incoming message immediately. In this case, the trigger is the sound of a text message, reading it is the routine and the need for distraction the reward.

When the habit is deeply rooted, the trigger is equal to the prize, and the feeling of pleasure. Neurological studies have shown that in the initial stage of entering a habit, your brain comes to life twice, with the trigger and then with the reward. When the habit becomes stronger, your brain feels the excitement only once, at the beginning, and already identified the trigger with the reward. At this stage, any changes are very difficult.

Our brain is like a hard disk, even if you erase the content, a good IT expert is able to recover all data. It so happens that when it comes to our habits, each one of us is such a talented computer scientist. Therefore, an alcoholic, even after 20 years of staying clean, has an urge for a glass, he is always one step away from a relapse into the habit.

According to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, there is hope. The only way to change a bad habit is to rewrite it with a good one. This does not mean that the bad one will disappear. And it involves a lot of self-discipline. Another good news is that just after one and half month you can get into the good habit. How? Trifle - you have to find out what the prize is and try to change the habit with a different routine, but providing the same award. Yeah, pretty simple ...