In this article published in the Great Course Daily, we can read an extract from the lecture series: "Outsmart Yourself: Brain-Based Strategies to a Better You", taught by Professor Peter M. Vishton, Ph.D., where he explains the hugely importance of habits and how we could use some tools of cognitive neuroscience to help us break the bad ones. Something to be considered when confronting a behavioral change, and maybe some explanation why we do what we do.

All our habits are originally underpinned in what we call the Positive and Negative reinforcement. What is more commonly known as Trigger - Behavior - Reward, a simple formula that states by: Action + Reaction = Outcome. That's how we learn and establish habits. But the problem is that we forget that those early reactions are always based on a context dependent memory.

Suddenly, we start assuming that what makes me feel good in one situation, might also work in a completely different one. So we tend to extrapolate the behaviors to get the same reward, but the trigger might be different from the original functional one.

If initially we developed a functional habit, out of context, we might cross the line from learning to survive to kill ourselves with those habits.

It's pretty clear that trying to control those "impulses" doesn't work, it even made them worse. We are trying to use cognition to control our behaviour. But the Pre-frontal cortex, the part of

There is mind blowing Ted Talk by Johann Hari, “Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong”, that if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, specially if you are willing to understand the deep root of addictions. In this article, "You Can Never Change Your Life Through Willpower. Here’s What Actually Works, The opposite of addiction is connection", Benjamin p. Hardy, also highlights the relationship between addiction and disconnection. But not only that, he goes one step further by stating that willpower doesn’t actually work. Because will power it’s focussed on the self, and addiction is all about context. So is all behavior.