The Power of Habit (Duhigg) and Atomic Habits (Clear) are memorable books from my early teens. These authors described a minimal structure of learned behavior:

(1) cue => (2) craving => (3) routine => (4) reward

I was a proper self-help junkie (I now repress that part of me).

I was reminded of this framework when listening to a fantastic podcast on Waking Up (my meditation app of choice). Psychiatrist Judson Brewer explains how he uses mindfulness techniques to help patients fight addictions.

Here’s what I love about Judson’s approach: he is not focused on environment design or small tweaks. He is interested in the step with the highest leverage: craving => routine. The execution of a routine after a craving. He cuts straight to the chase. It should be clear that cultivating a mind which can opt out of (2) => (3) produces the greatest agency.

An addiction can be defined as a total loss of agency: your control system has been hacked. You are not in the drivers seat. You are caught in a series of thoughts that seem to inevitably lead to the routine. It is a brutal reminder that you are not all powerful. Stage 1 of Alcoholics Anonymous is Confession—you accept your lack of agency. The good news is that agency is a function of the causal structure you fit on reality (agency isn’t real, it’s a mapping on uncertainty); find new structure, and you get new agency.

Enter mindfulness. RAIN: Recognize, Accept, Investigate, Note. This is the essence of Judson’s approach. Faced with an impulse, become curious. Do not resist the behavior; simply tend to the parts of your experience that construct the craving.

Where do you feel the impulse? Is there clenching, rising, burning, heat, restlessness, relief, expansion? What is the identity of this craving? Even as the routine is carried out, note where your attention is brought.

(My former guru) Rupert Spira defines emotion as (1) bodily sensation and (2) thought labeling it. Every emotion can be felt in the body, because emotion is a configuration of your body—it is a mapping onto the entire interoceptive-somatosensory space (f: (sensation, thought) -> emotion). I am happy with this definition.

With this practice, one builds distance from emotion. One clings to sensation and thought less. One begins to write a new self-model: a meta self-model. One identifies not with the observed pattern, but with that which observes patterns. This is a new structure of selfhood that brings about new forms of agency.¹

By becoming more attuned to the particular sensations of the habit loop, you reduce the automaticity of the routine. You interrupt it. You don’t get write access, but something does. Judson explains how patients begin to reappraise the reward values of behaviors.

OK, so behavior change. What’s brilliant? Well, what really got me excited was his consumer-facing iOS apps. Here’s a few questions they might probe when you hit a craving:

How heavy does the cookie feel in your hand? Is the craving on the right or left side of your body? Mid-bite, which single tooth is applying the most force? Which part of your tongue feels the sweetest?

Despite a pretty outdated (and ugly) UI, results from his iOS app are also promising. This got me thinking. Why don’t we use phones for reliable habit change? I know the horse is already dead, mutilated, disfigured, and butchered, but… with LLMs abound, there are so many new ways for phones to interface with our mind.

This is at an intersection of two things I deeply care about: (1) mind, mindfulness, behavior change and (2) new tech. I am ideating.

Footnotes

1. I have always struggled with ideas of no-self, especially by gurus who teach practitioners to actively look past the self. “Meditate, and you will realize your true nature.” If no-self is my true nature, what self are you talking to? As of now, I think it’s some kind of intermediate step. You start with a physical model of the self, you transcend to some kind of spirit (“Self Perpetuating Intelligent Recurrent Information Transformer,” Bach), only to relinquish any notions of selfhood at all. At this stage, silence is the only teaching. ↩