Habits are learned slowly but once they are in place they are by their very nature difficult to break. One defining feature of habits is that they are resistant to extinction. Habits are very inflexible; they're very unresponsive when a situation changes. The distinction between behavior driven by a goal and behavior driven by a habit is that goal driven behavior requires thinking.
However, if you do the goal driven activity often enough, then it becomes an automated habit triggered by circumstances beyond your control.
Dopamine influences both types of behavior, revving up the motivational circuits of the brain and strengthening the power of habit. The circuitry operates in roughly parallel loops, with one loop acting as the processing center for motivational information and another focusing on the motor activity associated with habits.
The implications for someone trying to control food intake are obvious. As habits are learned, the brain comes to code whole sequences of behavior as performance units that can be triggered by specific contexts. Cues in the environment become the triggers of predictable and automatic actions.
When it comes to food, we are, in essence, following an eating script that has been written into the circuits of our brains. The more rewarding the food, the stronger the learning experience that creates the automatic behavior (i.e. high sugar/fat foods). That's the danger of habit.
But habit formation has the potential for good as well. If we can learn to turn all of this around, we can eventually create new habits, ones that motivate us to pursue other, healthier sources of reward.
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