5 ms·
Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation
- davidmyr 2mo agoWhat also still puzzles me about habits is the fact that once I have a routine (like going to the gym at 6am) it is super easy. But once I lost it I struggle a lot to get it back.
- blooalien 2mo agoI feel like it's much the same for bad habits broken, too. If you allow yourself to fall back into a bad habit (smoking, drinking, gambling, etc for example) it feels really challenging to break it yet again. Best excuse I suppose to keep those good habits and bad ones right where you wanna keep 'em.
- davidmyr 2mo agoThis reminds me also of the Andrew Huberman <-> Jordan Peterson discussion where doing sth you do not like actually physically lets a specific region in your brain grow and if you do not do it, it shrinks (sorry for the simplification - not a neuro scientist haha)
- Aurornis 2mo agoHuberman grossly misrepresents the science on these issues. Not a good source. Yes I am aware of his credentials. He is notoriously bad at extrapolating from studies and confidently mapping it to life advice. 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.
- abhaynayar 2mo agoI haven't really listened to him much, didn't really like his style, just one or two of his sleep science episodes but I thought it was well-balanced and at each topic he added caveats etc. and always made sure to tell people to not just blindly trust the science but see what works for you. Can you point to any examples of him grossly misrepresenting the science on these issues. 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.
- Aurornis 2mo agoHe is the type of faux-balanced where he confidently says something and then tries to balance it with some caveats. 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.
- davidmyr 2mo agoInteresting did not know about this, just liked his videos :D Here is also an article that talks about him cherry-picking publications: https://neuroscienceandpsy.substack.com/p/breaking-up-with-bad-science-podcast-0df https://neuroscienceandpsy.substack.com/p/breaking-up-with-b...
- card_zero 2mo agoThat is opposite, not the same.
- shermantanktop 2mo agoWhen I start a habit it feels like a one-way trip to a new life. If I break it, even once, I realize it’s not, it’s just a thing that I can do or not do. Now starting that habit again feels much less consequential.
- xyzelement 2mo agoI really relate to this and see it as a problem because it feels this way but the feeling is misleading 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.
- sandspar 2mo agoI find this as well, that breaking a habit kills some of its magic. However I sometimes prefer it this way. It might be good to hold habits with intellect rather than superstition. At least it's more honest.
- dartharva 2mo agoThe paper might explain why it is so. Routine-setting in your brain runs separately than the execution of the activity itself, meaning you need to train the two separately, at least from what I understand.
- sandspar 2mo agoThe psychologist William James described habits as like winding a string of yarn into a ball. If you drop the ball then you have to spend time rewinding it. Also, a ball that has been being wound for a long time will be easier to rewind than a newer and smaller ball.
- doginasuit 2mo agoThe determined mouse with the barbells and the headband is my new spirit animal.
- getstowly 2mo agoI was watching a Charlie Rocket interview today and I got a lot of inspiration from him. He made it a habit of staying positive, turning a loss into a win and always finding the upside. Instead of getting sucked into the despair, he takes a loss as a learning lesson. Good habits can be hard to find but once you get into the habit of something, it becomes super easy. Everything is hard to do -- if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Once you learn to do something, and keep doing it, you understand it better and it can make your life so much easier, or happier, or better, in so many ways. There are also bad habits but those are just as easy to break as good ones.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- thephyber 2mo agoThere's a fine line between what you described and toxic positivity. 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.
- sublinear 2mo agoI think you're only only disagreeing in the premise of your reply, and not the substance of it. 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.
- mellosouls 2mo ago(in mice) Needs to be as mandatory a suffix here as year, video, etc
- teiferer 2mo agoShould it be? "New black hole observed" needs a mandatory "(with a radiotelescope)"? "Agentic AI is great" needs a mandatory "(according to my opinion)"? 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.
- winwang 2mo ago... I don't think the original commenter said anything about mice being a non-model organism. But mice are far from humans, and I, at least, find the distinction rather important.
- mellosouls 2mo ago1. Your examples are very different; we know in both cases the qualifier. I clicked on the link fully expecting to read an article about people. 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.
- teiferer 2mo agoYour field of expertise is clearly not biomedical research. An article about results in mice is as close to article about humans as they get, except direct human studies. For ethical reasons lots of things can only directly be studied in model organisms. 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.
- john_minsk 2mo agoInteresting. 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.
- pizzao 2mo agoAs a beginner academic, is it fine to publish cute figures like this in academic journals (Im in computer science) ?
- dryanau 2mo agoIt's fine, though it isn't the norm, presumably because authors fear their work might be taken less seriously; but if the content of the paper is good, it's fine to add a little character, or flourish. Some amusing titles fall into a similar category.
- rustfreeforme 2mo ago[dead]