About 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit. Every habit has these three components. There's a cue, which is a trigger for the automatic behavior. And then the routine, right? Picking up the beer and drinking it, or going for a run. And when we do that, it delivers a reward to us. And over time, our brain begins to associate this cue, this routine, and this reward into a little package that happens almost automatically inside our brain. And at the core of it is this craving. There's a woman named Dr. Ann Grabial at MIT who's done research on habits.
And what she's found is that if you create a habit in, say, a rat's brain for running a maze, and then you remove it from the maze for literally years, and then bring it back and drop it in the maze again, that habit reemerges instantaneously. When you just say, I'm going to stop drinking, because that neural pathway still exists, you still have that craving. The key is don't try and extinguish the habit. Rather, try and change it. Find a new behavior that corresponds to the old cue and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're overriding that neural pathway inside your brain. in, say, a rat's brain for running a maze,
and then you remove it from the maze for literally years, and then bring it back and drop it in the maze again, that habit reemerges instantaneously. When you just say, I'm gonna stop drinking. Because that neural pathway still exists, you still have that craving. The key is don't try and extinguish the habit. Rather, try and change it. Find a new behavior that corresponds to the old cue and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're kind of overriding that neural pathway inside your brain.