Читать книгу Summary: Mini Habits. Smaller Habits, Bigger Results. Stephen Guise - Smart Reading, Ольга Ганкова - Страница 3

The two main facets of forming a new habit are repetition and reward. New neural connections are formed only through multiple repetitions, but if you do not offer the brain an adequate reward for the additional load, it will resist. Our brain is arranged in such a way that in order to save energy, it chooses familiar paths and with a guaranteed reward. At the start, the effectiveness of a new behavior pattern has not yet been proven, not to mention that everything new is associated with increased risk. Therefore, the corresponding neural connections either do not exist at all, or they are still very thin. So until you establish a strong neural connection, you will have to manually override your habitual behavior with the help of "carrots".

Two functions are responsible for forming habits in the brain: a stupid repeater and a smart manager.

Most of your brain (which is run by the basal ganglia) is not very bright in the sense that it doesn’t consider lung cancer while you smoke or the perks of great abs before you exercise. What’s worse, this is the strong part of your brain that usually gets its way long term. It recognizes and repeats the same patterns until told to do otherwise. Thus, the brain saves energy and deals with those tasks that do not require special control.

The other part (the prefrontal cortex) is really smart. It’s the "manager" that understands long-term benefits and consequences and, thankfully, it has the ability to override the basal ganglia. It also handles short-term thinking and decision-making. It is the prefrontal cortex that decides to resist the chocolate bar and learn French.