Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation
kyoto-u.ac.jp
kyoto-u.ac.jp
It's important not to ruminate on bad thoughts (when your proposal is a good replacement behavior), but it's also important not to bottle up natural human emotions as if they are unjustified or unreal.
A thought exercise: if it wasn't your behavior that caused your own despair, but your spouse's behaviors that caused you irritation / grief. Do you think it's better to paint a smile on yourself and ignore the underlying problem, or spend a few minutes feeling your emotions, describe the cause to your partner, then politely suggest a substitute behavior? The former builds resentment and bottles up strong emotions for an inevitable outburst down the road. The other diffuses the emotion, potentially alleviates the offending behavior, and doesn't betray what you authentically emote.
The unnecessary emotion is the problem and that emotion is 100% caused by inexperience. The surest way to stay confused is to overindulge in the emotions blinding you. Worse would be wallowing in it with your partner.
Communicating the emotions first and then rambling your unfiltered thoughts will just cause more confusion. This is exactly how most couples fuck everything up. You should instead take the time to process the emotions on your own and then find the burning question underneath it all.
The more you do this, the less time you'll need to waste on the emotions and the more effective you'll be when you choose to speak or act.
forming a habit involves taking an action and having a result. A consequence. Talking about it does not work for a lot of people. They need to be pavlov’d.
Once those difficult emotions are cool, everyone can explain what you did and why, yes. I just don’t think that always waiting for things to “cool off“ is actually helpful, it robs people of the consequences of their actions. People need immediate consequences to reinforce behaviors.
In my experience I've generally fucked things up precisely because my reaction was worse and inappropriate compared to what the partner did.
I think I am "lucky" in that my wife is amazing and I don't have to be on-guard again truly malicious and inappropriate behavior from her, so I have the "luxury" of focusing on controlling my own emotions and responses.
But then - WTF! How are people in relationships with people that you have to be so on-guard against?
In the US, we also have ideologies that say that one partner is supposed to be subservient to the other based on gender roles, and that makes things even more insane.
It mainly seems like their parents failed to pass on any cultural wisdom. Go along to get along is fine, very different than your "partner" severely transgressing upon you.
The grandparent said Rocket doesn't slip into despair, not tries not to slip.
That's unrealistic and tracks with toxic positivity. If everyone had the muscle to process their initial and secondary emotions in a calm manner, then airport bookshelves would be empty.
You even ask how people can get swept in such situations when the pathologies for trauma bonds and "s/he beats me because they love me" are pretty clear.
I made a distinction between people who have the self-esteem muscle (healthy) and those who subscribe to unsustainable, toxic positivity (unhealthy).
I'd say the ease which you can pick up habits or drop them is extremely variable across the specific habit and person. (as a different example, someone with less social awareness will find it harder to pick up the habit of being a hospitable host than someone it comes naturally to, but once learned its probably fairly easy to maintain)
One of my favorite quotes is, "first the man makes the habit, then the habit makes the man" , and it works both ways, good and bad. I really think this is something that should be taught much more explicitly in school to everyone, rather than leaving it only in places like sports and the military.
Going for a 5k jog every morning is also a habit that affects your brain chemistry, through different mechanisms, and can also be addictive. It's obviously much healthier, but its still a habit, that is reinforced via brain chemistry rewards etc (addictive in some people). It's not as widely seen or known but there is a small cohort of people who exercise becomes a problematic habit and ends up being detrimental to their health.
I suggest you check the definition of the words. I specifically wasn't talking about addiction because that is just one axis of what can make up a habit. Drinking water is a habit that is not addictive but pretty hard to quit. If you take a wider view there are tons of habits that are either harmful or positive, but have no addictive component, and have no chemical component, and are either hard or easy to pickup / drop.
perhaps this is one of those definitions that are in flux and we are moving from taking drugs as a habit, to first having a drug habit, and soon, no longer a habit but an addiction.
I would have to say that in light of the other definitions of habit it does seem reasonable to separate them.
if you want to play pedant paddle, explain the relationship between the words habitual and habit, write an essay, and submit to webster, to oxford and any of your favorite dictionary and try and get them to change the the top definition of habit to be a synonym for addiction.
In the meantime I'll get on with my life because I know what I said was perfectly clear and accurate.
That definition is too broad to be useful is absolutely not a definition used in the given context (psychology).
Same goes for the examples, you can generalize statements to to get common denominators (affects the brain), but it's not useful to do so, it's misleading.
if you want a more specific and narrow definition for certain classes of XYZ, you can do that, I wasn't trying to do that here.
You can follow the definition that you like, but the typical habit is something you just do without thinking. Taking drugs is mostly something you do to get the kick and in later stages because you don't want the withdrawal symptoms. Some addictions are quite habitual too (smoking is not just for the nicotin but also having the habit of taking a break for 10 minutes out on the balcony), but arguably there is more to an addiction than the habit component which is only a minor contributor if at all.
This is "bad, bored, tired" or anything else. "That" is the drug administration, experience, etc.
Much of addiction therapy is understanding that cycle and finding a different course of action between "my body feels this" and "doing other things instead of that drug"
That soounds a tiny bit circular. Doesn't "habitually" mean to do something out of habit?
I'd suggest "habit" is something we often do, but don't really need to do, If it's something we have to do, like eating we don't call it a habit.
Calling heroin a “habit” is putting it in a class which includes doodling, tapping your foot, talking a particular route to work, or putting your jacket on the same way every time.
In other words, it is technically a member of a class but very different than the median member of that class. This is why naive use of centroid clustering to reduce dimensionality and distance quantization leads to bad results.
I think Johnny Thunders would agree.
Complaining is a reinforcing negative loop.
Saying to yourself that you can do it, even when you think the opposite very quickly shapes your mind.
Needs to be as mandatory a suffix here as year, video, etc
Lots of things we know about human physiology comes from animal studies.
Mice are not just some random animal species. They are a model organism for humans, meaning that they are sufficiently close in many ways such that insights are transferable.
2. Mice are obviously a useful first test subject or they wouldn't be used; they are also different enough from humans for studies to have no guarantee of results transitioning either smoothly or at all to us.
So yes, let's be more responsible with our link titles if the original articles "forget" to include the limitations.
Of course there is no guarantee. There never is in biology. Even if your study involves humans, there is bo guarantee that things apply to you or another cohort or are even reproducible. It's one data point and knowledge is built by gathering many of those which eventually paints a clearer picture.
If believing it helps you establish better routines then there’s no harm in that. Just be careful about where you repeat this stuff because everyone who has studied even a little neuroscience groans when Huberman comes up.
Almost everything he says about dopamine is flawed, as one example. It’s hard to explain how bad his statements about “dopamine detox” and low dopamine levels really are if you’ve only understood the concept of dopamine through his lens.
He’s a story teller with a lot of confidence and charisma. He will tell you any story that makes him sound smart and makes the listener feel impressed.
> My personal hunch is most people don't watch the long-form stuff and only hear this second-hand in a short-form context where a lot of the details are stripped out.
Nope! I tried to listen. It’s really bad. He uses the long form to ramble and project a sense that his knowledge is infinitely deep.
There are a lot of Huberman debunkings on the internet if you want to go look. You might also be interested to learn about his past lies to different researchers and his exaggerations about his lab affiliation (he doesn’t even live near the “Huberman lab”). He’s also not a great person by all accounts. He’s kind of the prototypical whole-package grifter podcaster.
I lately noticed that religion (at least, Judaism in my case) really embraces the opposite of what we just described. Daily action is really the thing. You don't pray once in your life, you pray every day. You follow the commandments every day. Back in the temple times, we gave sacrifices every day. Whether you take that literally or directionally - it's a powerful reminder against the thing we are struggling with that you described.
So one circuit essentially has 2 modes: 1 I do ActionA because I want to get GoalA 2 I do ActionA because it is my routine
What would be interesting to see is IF by activating this mechanism, mice start getting habits almost instantly for behaviors performed when this circuit was in the state#2. Correct me please.