Habit Loop Quotes

He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop. ~ Charles Duhigg

Habits aren't destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced. But the reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit - unless you find new routines - the pattern will unfold automatically. ~ Charles Duhigg

Moreover, the reward, as Hopkins envisioned it, was even more enticing. Who, after all, doesn't want to be more beautiful? Who doesn't want a prettier smile? Particularly when all it takes is a quick brush with Pepsodent? HOPKINS'S CONCEPTION OF THE PEPSODENT HABIT LOOP After the campaign launched, a quiet week passed. Then two. In the third week, demand exploded. There were so many orders for Pepsodent that the company couldn't keep up. In three years, the product went international, and Hopkins was crafting ads in Spanish, German, and Chinese. Within a decade, Pepsodent was one of the top-selling goods in the world, and remained America's best-selling toothpaste for more than thirty years.2.10,2.11 ~ Charles Duhigg

Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. ~ Charles Duhigg

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP ~ Charles Duhigg

The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. ~ Charles Duhigg

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, ~ Charles Duhigg

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. ~ Charles Duhigg

Two things make smoking a virtuous habit. In the first place, the smoker, by paying billions of pounds in tobacco duty, pretty well pays for the entire hospital service. In the second place, by dying on average five years younger that the non-smoker, the smoker reduces the burden of old age on society as a whole. ~ Auberon Waugh

His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages. ~ Charles Dickens

In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth, and not by their mediocrity, nor by their being commended. For several men praise several customs, and, contrarily, what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them. ~ Thomas Hobbes

We must pray without ceasing, in every occurrence and employment of our lives - that prayer which is rather a habit of lifting up the heart to God as in a constant communication with Him. ~ Elizabeth Ann Seton

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to great old Mrs. Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let me find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling held the whole. ~ Virginia Woolf

Why don't you ever say anything unless you're answering a question?"
"Just a habit, I guess. I'm always forgetting to say important things."
"Can I give you some advice?"
"Go ahead."
"If you don't fix that, it'll end up costing you."
"You're probably right. Still, it's like a junky car. If I fix one thing, it'll be easier to notice something else that's broken. ~ Haruki Murakami

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don't have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity. ~ Henepola Gunaratana

I do not believe that since man was in the habit of living on this planet anyone has ever lived possessed of the impudence of Jay Gould. ~ Jay Gould

I really enjoy what I do, and who I'm with and where I am. Having said that, I'm not really a person of habit, because what I do in my job is travel around the world and play concerts to people, and occasionally do very weird things. ~ Robert Smith

Transcending divisiveness is one of the dreams of centrists, as if disagreement were a bad habit rather than fundamental to politics. ~ Doug Henwood

There were times Hadrian wondered if Royce was actually a cat that some mischievous witch had turned into a man and then lost track of. The similarities were too numerous to be coincidental. An irritatingly-superior aloof nature, fastidiousness, a habit of roaming at night, and his general propensity for solitude were all evidence. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest. This is no new discovery. The Gospel says: "Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The thought we give to these things is taken away from matters of more importance. And what is worse, the habit of mind engendered by thinking of these things is a bad one; it leads to competition, envy, domination, cruelty, and almost all the moral evils that infest the world. In particular, it leads to the predatory use of force. Material possessions can be taken by force and enjoyed by the robber. Spiritual possessions cannot be taken in this way. ~ Bertrand Russell

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. Aristotle ~ Christine Zolendz

Oh, what a lovely owl!" Cried the Wart.
But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through - as you are in the habit of doing when told to shut your eyes at hide-and-seek - and said in a doubtful voice
"There is no owl."
Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.
"It is only a boy," said Merlyn.
"There is no boy," said the owl hopefully, without turning round. ~ T.H. White

If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men. ~ Karl Popper

With constant repetition and reinforcement, new habits are easily formed. ~ Marshall Sylver

Success is not a probability visiting us once in a while..Success is a HABIT which can be acquired, cultivated, polished, practised and achieved on a daily basis ! ~ Abha Maryada Banerjee

Cats and their owners are on a private, exclusive loop of affection. Thus cats have become symbolic of a community eschewed and a hyper-engagement with oneself. They represent the profound danger of growing so independent in New York that it's not merely that you don't need anyone - it's that you don't know how to need anyone. ~ Sloane Crosley

Habit, to which all of us are more or less slaves. ~ Jean De La Fontaine

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the gr ~ George Mangels

I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose. ~ W.B.Yeats

People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home. ~ Jonathan Raban

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king. ~ Jose Saramago

Affirming others isn't 'flattering' them - it's when you genuinely and consistently acknowledge their efforts and accomplishments, both large and small. Make affirmation a habit and watch what happens! ~ Lee Ellis

New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely. ~ Jerry Saltz

The waves have the habit of going forward and then flowing back. ~ Dacia Maraini

Allowing a friend to careen toward self destruction is not friendship. That is a habit the United States needs to break as it pursues a richer and more deeply supportive relationship with Israel. ~ Stephen Kinzer

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. ~ Robert Smithson

Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

While they're in WWE, we absolutely have a health and wellness policy. I'll probably always say 'we,' even though I've resigned as the CEO. It's kind of hard to break a 30-year habit. ~ Linda McMahon

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime. ~ Ian McEwan

For some people the past is so vicious that it creates a loop of bad memories that runs constantly inside their hearts. A loop so bad that sometimes it reaches out to those capable of seeing it to let us know to take extra care of the ones who were hurt. It tells us to let them know that just because the world is eat up with mean, it doesn't mean we all are. That even though the past hurt them, it doesn't have to destroy their future. Give as many smiles away as you can. They're free and make the world a much prettier place. You may not have the best clothes or the latest in shoes, but everyone has a unique designer smile that is worth millions, especially for those who need its warmth. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

We are all creatures of habit, and when we make any change in our daily or weekly routine, we feel it. But soon your workout will become not only a reliable part of your day but a "must" on your to-do list. ~ Bob Harper

Make doing your best a habit, and you will never know not doing your best. If you build roads build them Roman-make them last two thousand years. Dig ditches as if you were taking them to the state fair to win another blue ribbon for best ditches. It's never a question of what you do but how well you do it. Do the best work you can, even if your boss never sees it- what matters it that you see it. Because ultimately you're your own boss. Find work you love to do. Because, the greatest devil of them all is to work just for money. I know more miserable souls who, chasing the almighty dollar through some strange loophole logic, believe that the more money you have the happier you'll be ... generally the richer they become the more wretched they become. ~ Carew Papritz

Lack of Control Loophole: Weirdly, we often have an illusion of control over things we can't control - "If I spend a lot of time worrying, the plane is less likely to crash," "If I play my lucky numbers, I'll win the lottery eventually" - but deny control over things we can control ("If my cell phone buzzes, I have to check it"). We argue that circumstances force us to break a habit, but often, we have more control than we admit. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Putting my face in food is not a habit I have unless I'm really drunk. ~ Charlotte Dawson

To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads; such is the behavior of the multitude. ~ Mencius

Perhaps you have been ensnared by a sinful habit that you will not abandon, and your guilt is so overwhelming you are ashamed to approach Christ. Whatever the reason for your broken intimacy with God, there is good news. Jesus waits to embrace you now in the arms of unconditional, divine love. ~ Charles Stanley

When we recognize that we have a habit of replaying old events and reacting to new events as if they were the old ones, we can begin to notice when that habit energy comes up. We can then gently remind ourselves that we have another choice. We can look at the moment as it is, a fresh moment, and leave the past for a time when we can look at it compassionately. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind - for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults - that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was never only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods. What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination - they copulated and they ate; but the the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service - and not only in the medieval bestiaries, by any means.

Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among the first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a ~ Brian W. Aldiss

As you read deeper into the novel, you must modify your representations of the folk psychological representations that each character has. But since the metarepresentational load here increases dramatically with the complexity of the portrayal of the characters and their relationships to one another, it is no surprise that even partial expertise typically involves knowing how to find one's way about in the novel. It involves knowing how to locate and identify the folk psychological representations that respective characters have, and the signs of these in the novel itself. Here the representations that are the object of your own representations are located somewhere other than in your own head. In short, this understanding involves constructing a representational loop that extends beyond the head and into the minds of the fictional characters - and perhaps the narrator or even the author - with which you are engaged. ~ Robert Andrew Wilson

The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. ~ Walter Benjamin