Day 22. Discover Your Habit Circuit We’ve plumbed our depths! Emotions, relationships, work, and now, what about our habits? A Habit Circuit is an observable behavior that is triggered by a fight-or-flight drive, causing us to repeat the response. Then we say, “Why do I keep doing that? I tell myself I won’t do it again, but then I do. What’s wrong with me?” There is nothing wrong with us. Let’s get back to basics. We all have a Stress Triangle, in which the amygdala, the reward center, and the hypothalamus all collude to activate and strengthen our Love Circuit – causing the stress of merging and distancing, our Mood Circuit – with false highs, unnecessary lows, or numbness, and our Work Circuit – causing problems with our survival-based need to be productive. Stress not only takes the prefrontal cortex offline, so our executive functioning and impulse control are on the fritz, but it drives the release of dopamine. Too much dopamine and we burn out our dopamine receptors, further increasing our need to feel better by getting a rush of endorphins as a reward. Although there are other genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors at play, this can lead to dopamine lows and lethargy so that we have no energy to access natural rewards, and it’s so easy to rely on and become addicted to artificial ones.
What’s a Habit Circuit? A wire that triggers unwanted behaviors
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