# The Gravity of Habit ![[resources/images/20151008-the-gravity-of-habit.jpg]] [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream|Livestream]] | [[collections/Livestreams Collection|Collection]] | [[collections/Livestream Lessons|Lessons]] | [[collections/Simple Reminders|Reminders]] | [[livestreams/comments/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Comments|1,517 Comments]] *From the livestream broadcast recorded October 8, 2015, in Austin, Texas.* I want to tell you about the smallest thing I have ever done that worked, because the scale of it is the entire point and because I was in no position at the time to do anything larger. I had no money. I had no vehicle. I had no instrument of change available to me of the kind that advice books assume their reader already possesses, and I had reached the particular flavor of powerlessness in which a person stops believing that their own actions are connected to outcomes at all. So I looked for any change I could actually execute, found exactly one, and executed it. The next morning I drove to work by a different route. That sounds like nothing. It is nearly nothing, measured by effort, risk, cost, or the impression it would have made on anybody watching. What makes it worth a whole essay is that it worked, that it kept working, that it eventually became the model for everything else I understood about changing a life, and that the reason it worked turns out to be physical. ## Repetition Is Not Neutral +Every time a pattern runs it becomes slightly cheaper to run again, which means a life does not merely accumulate habits but progressively loses the ability to do anything else. The route a person takes repeatedly is reinforced by the taking, strengthening and smoothing until the alternatives are not so much rejected as never generated, and the person experiences the result not as a narrowing but as a preference. This is the part that deserves a name, because an unnamed force cannot be worked against: there is a gravity to habit, and it increases with use. {{A habit does not hold you because it is strong; it holds you because every repetition made it cheaper than the alternative, until the alternative stopped occurring to you.}} The biology is not a metaphor here, and the relevant findings were old news even in 2015. Pathways that fire together strengthen their connections; repeated activity increases the insulation along active fibers and raises their conduction speed; practiced sequences migrate toward circuitry that executes them with less supervision and lower metabolic cost. Each of those mechanisms produces the same subjective result, which is that the established route feels correct and the new one feels artificial — a difference in energy expenditure that almost everyone experiences as a difference in truth. The familiar thing is not more true. It is simply less expensive. > [!info] What the science says > The figure of a hardening network is close enough to the biology to be used as an instrument, with the honest limits stated. > > **Use strengthens the connection.** Donald Hebb proposed in 1949 that neurons firing together strengthen their link, and Bliss and Lømo demonstrated long-term potentiation in 1973 — a durable increase in synaptic strength following repeated stimulation. Repetition is therefore not a neutral act; it is the mechanism of installation. > > **Practiced sequences get cheaper to run.** As a behavior is repeated it shifts toward circuitry, including the basal ganglia, that executes it with less conscious supervision and lower metabolic cost. Habit research distinguishes goal-directed action from habitual action precisely by this insensitivity to outcome: once consolidated, the behavior runs on the cue rather than on the reward. > > **Novelty and enriched environments change the tissue.** Decades of work beginning with Rosenzweig and colleagues in the 1960s found measurable differences in cortical structure between animals raised in enriched versus impoverished conditions, and later work connected environmental complexity to neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Changing what surrounds an organism changes the organism, which is the strongest available defense of the small-perturbation method. > > **Reinforcement explains the preference for the familiar.** B. F. Skinner's operant work established that behavior is shaped by its consequences, including schedules that produce extraordinarily persistent patterns. A person's apparently temperamental caution is frequently a reinforcement history rather than a disposition. > > **Exercise and sleep are the least contested interventions.** Aerobic activity is associated with increased BDNF and with hippocampal volume changes in older adults, and sleep is implicated in the consolidation of both memory and motor learning. Neither is exotic and both are routinely skipped. > > **The honest limit.** None of this licenses the claim that one evening of novelty rewires anything. Structural change follows sustained practice, not a single departure, and the small act is valuable as reconnaissance and as the beginning of a practice rather than as a transformation in itself. ## Why the Smallest Possible Change Is the Right Instrument +A perturbation small enough that nobody could reasonably refuse it is a better instrument than a dramatic break, because its purpose is diagnostic rather than transformative. Take a different route; leave the television off for one evening and write instead; enter an unfamiliar restaurant; take a class you have no business taking. None of those endanger anything, which is precisely what makes the resistance they generate so informative — the size of the reaction belongs to the habit rather than to the experiment, so a trivial act can expose a powerful constraint that was previously invisible. {{A change too small to threaten anything will still produce resistance, and the resistance is the measurement you were unable to take any other way.}} The second thing the small act buys is a genuine increase in what the environment can show you. When I took the different route I was not performing a ritual; I was reasoning that I might see a building I had never seen, pass a business I had never noticed, encounter architecture that would give me an idea. A person who travels one path repeatedly has not merely formed a habit of driving. They have narrowed the sample of the world from which every subsequent thought will be drawn, and they have done it without noticing, because an unsampled street generates no sense of absence. This is also where the practice acquires its name honestly. Think about what the word means when a physician has a practice: not a performance, not an achievement, but a thing done repeatedly and with intention over years. One different route is not a transformation and was never advertised as one. What it establishes is the capacity to disturb an arrangement deliberately, observe what the disturbance reveals, and do it again — and that capacity, exercised regularly, is what eventually makes a larger intervention possible. Big change is cumulative. The alternative strategy exists, and it is real, and it is called quitting your job; I am not against it, but it should be chosen by somebody who has already learned to read their own system rather than by somebody hoping a single explosion will substitute for the reading. ## The Fish and the Water +A person cannot evaluate conditions they have never been outside of, which is the structural reason that unexamined circumstances feel like reality rather than like circumstances. A fish that has spent its entire life in water does not know it is wet; it would discover wetness only by leaving, and only then by finding that something other than wet exists. The same applies with uncomfortable force to upbringing, neighborhood, trade, income, marriage, and nation, because each of those supplies a baseline so continuous that it registers as the nature of things. {{You cannot assess a condition you have never stepped outside of, which is why the first function of any departure is not improvement but comparison.}} There is a trap folded into this that is made of a genuinely good human trait. People are remarkably able to become satisfied with their surroundings, and the ability is a mercy — it is how anyone tolerates a hard season — but used continuously it operates as a coping mechanism that produces a blind spot. The satisfied person stops seeing how things actually are, and more importantly stops seeing, through juxtaposition, how things could be. That is the exact deficiency the small departure repairs, because juxtaposition is not available to anyone who has nothing to juxtapose. Anybody who has moved into a better house knows the sensation of discovering retroactively that the previous one was worse than they had been able to perceive while living in it. Maslow's ladder contains the same catch, stated more awkwardly: it can seem that in order to become self-actualized a person must already be self-actualized, since the capacity to recognize what you are capable of is itself one of the capabilities in question. The resolution is not a philosophical one. It is the departure — the small, cheap, survivable exit from the water that supplies, for the first time, a second data point. ## The Whole Arrangement, Not the Willpower +Force of will is a legitimate tool and a terrible foundation, and almost everything presented as a discipline problem is actually an arrangement problem. A person asking how to change a behavior is usually asking how to apply more pressure, when the variable that actually governs their behavior is the totality of what surrounds them — their food, their media intake, their inner circle, the people they love, and their workplace. That inventory is the real instrument, and it is adjustable in a way that resolve is not, because resolve is a finite daily allowance and the surroundings operate continuously whether anyone is trying or not. {{Willpower is a tool worth having and a disastrous place to keep your power, because the surroundings are working every hour and the will is working only while you are watching it.}} The same logic governs mood, which I came to think is the single most undervalued skill available to a person. If you can shift your own mood you have acquired something worth more than intelligence, more than force of will, more than vitality, more than nearly anything, because every other capability is downstream of the state you are in while attempting to use it. The practical question is therefore which instruments you own for shifting it, and the only requirement that matters is that the instrument not incur a debt. A walk in the woods, an animal, an hour alone with a book, an instrument played badly, something painted or written — each of these works partly because making anything forces presence, and presence is most of what a shifted mood consists of. The instruments that work by borrowing against tomorrow also work, which is exactly the problem with them. And there is a failure mode worth naming plainly, because it is extremely common and it is almost never recognized by the person doing it: some people are habituated to drama and will generate it in order to get their needs met. The drama is a mood-regulation technology. It reliably produces attention, intensity, and relief, and because it works, it is reinforced, and because it is reinforced, it recurs — and the person experiences themselves as someone to whom chaotic things keep happening. Reinforcement explains more apparent temperament than temperament does, which is why I kept telling people to go read Skinner. ## What Actually Stands in the Way Nearly everything in this essay converges on an unwelcome conclusion, which is that the obstacle is almost never located where the search is being conducted. The arrangement is adjustable, the mood is trainable, the surroundings are changeable, the habit is disturbable, and the departure is cheap — and still most people will not do any of it, because the limiting factor was never the availability of the instrument. In most lives the greatest obstacle to getting what a person wants is the person, and specifically the part of them that has already concluded what is possible and stopped generating alternatives. That conclusion is also the reason I have never had much patience for the version of this material that promises a transformation. There is no transformation available next Tuesday. What is available is a different route to work, which costs nothing, risks nothing, and teaches you something true about the strength of the thing holding you — and then another one, and then a slightly larger one, until a person who could not previously execute any change at all has become someone who can execute a significant one. The gravity is real. It is also, measured correctly, escapable by increments. --- [[about/About Bryant McGill|Bryant McGill]] is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, systems architect, technologist, and strategic advisor, as well as a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations–appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and civilizational governance architecture. His forward analysis on U.S.–Israel Pax Silica frameworks has appeared in Jewish/Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS). --- ## Related blogs - [[blog/20170712 - Move the Big Marble|Move the Big Marble]]: the progression from a diagnostic departure to moving the element the rest of a life is indexed to. - [[blog/20180904 - Metacognition and the Plumbing of the Mind|Metacognition and the Plumbing of the Mind]]: the routing that hardens with use, and why the apparatus outranks its contents. - [[blog/20160328 - Genius Is Mostly Learned|Genius Is Mostly Learned]]: the companion argument that capability is built from acquirable terms rather than issued speed. ## Related Livestream Lessons **Directly related.** These broadcasts supplied the material cited in this piece and are documented with timestamps in the source notes below. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream#DaVincian Balance Is a Full Spectrum Rather Than a Peak|DaVincian Balance Is a Full Spectrum Rather Than a Peak]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: capability as an arrangement across health, relationships, spirit and intellect rather than a single developed faculty. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream#The Gravity of Habit|The Gravity of Habit]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: repetition as the installation mechanism, and the increasing cost of the alternative nobody generates. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream#Defiance You Can Afford|Defiance You Can Afford]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: executing the only change available when no instrument of change is available at all. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream#Why It Is Called a Practice|Why It Is Called a Practice]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: the physician's sense of the word, and a departure repeated with intention rather than performed once. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream#Big Change Is Cumulative|Big Change Is Cumulative]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: increments set against the strategy of massive differentiation, and when each is appropriate. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream#The Illusion of Safety|The Illusion of Safety]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: security that is priced as certain and delivered as neither. - [[livestreams/Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior - Livestream#The Super Relationship Inventory|The Super Relationship Inventory]] *(Mar 25, 2016)*: food, media intake, inner circle, loved ones and workplace treated as one adjustable instrument. - [[livestreams/Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior - Livestream#Mood Instruments That Incur No Debt|Mood Instruments That Incur No Debt]] *(Mar 25, 2016)*: the requirement that a state-change not be borrowed against tomorrow. - [[livestreams/Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior - Livestream#Force of Will Is a Tool and Not the Seat of Power|Force of Will Is a Tool and Not the Seat of Power]] *(Mar 25, 2016)*: a finite daily allowance distinguished from the arrangement that runs continuously. - [[livestreams/Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior - Livestream#Habituated for Drama|Habituated for Drama]] *(Mar 25, 2016)*: chaos generated as a mood-regulation technology, and why it recurs. - [[livestreams/Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior - Livestream#Getting Out of Your Own Way|Getting Out of Your Own Way]] *(Mar 25, 2016)*: the obstacle located in the person rather than in the circumstances being searched. - [[livestreams/Environmental Conditioning and the Path to Self-Actualization - Livestream#The Fish Does Not Know It Is Wet Until It Leaves the Water|The Fish Does Not Know It Is Wet Until It Leaves the Water]] *(Sep 12, 2016)*: why a continuous condition registers as the nature of things. - [[livestreams/Environmental Conditioning and the Path to Self-Actualization - Livestream#Satisfaction With Your Surroundings as a Coping Mechanism|Satisfaction With Your Surroundings as a Coping Mechanism]] *(Sep 12, 2016)*: a merciful human capacity operating as a blind spot, and juxtaposition as its only repair. - [[livestreams/Opening Your Genius Through Language, Abstraction, and Manifesting - Livestream#Being Bad at It Is Part of the Instruction|Being Bad at It Is Part of the Instruction]] *(Jan 4, 2016)*: singing, music and paint prescribed without any requirement of competence. - [[livestreams/Opening Your Genius Through Language, Abstraction, and Manifesting - Livestream#Structure First, Then Unstructured Operations|Structure First, Then Unstructured Operations]] *(Jan 4, 2016)*: a built vocabulary deliberately subjected to abstraction and poetry. ## Related topics - [[wiki/Habit Formation|Habit Formation]]: how a repeated sequence becomes the cheap default. - [[wiki/Habituation|Habituation]]: diminishing response to a repeated input, which is how a costly arrangement stops being noticed. - [[wiki/Neuroplasticity|Neuroplasticity]]: the capacity that makes a hardened route revisable. - [[wiki/Synaptic Pathway|Synaptic Pathway]]: the route itself, in the vocabulary of the tissue. - [[wiki/Classical Conditioning|Classical Conditioning]]: how a response attaches to a cue without anyone deciding it should. - [[wiki/Metacognition|Metacognition]]: watching the apparatus while it runs, which is what a departure makes possible. - [[wiki/Cognitive Flexibility|Cognitive Flexibility]]: switching routes rather than running the fastest available one. - [[wiki/Cognitive Agency|Cognitive Agency]]: ownership of one's own processing, which the practice is designed to return. - [[wiki/Path Dependency|Path Dependency]]: why an arrangement adopted early keeps determining what is possible long after conditions change. - [[wiki/Selection Bias|Selection Bias]]: the narrowed sample from which every later judgment gets drawn. - [[wiki/Introspection|Introspection]]: the inward inspection the practice requires and most people decline. - [[wiki/Personal Transformation|Personal Transformation]]: change understood as increments rather than as an event. - [[wiki/Discipline|Discipline]]: the finite allowance that arrangement is meant to spare. - [[wiki/Experiential Learning|Experiential Learning]]: knowledge acquired by departure and comparison rather than instruction. > [!quote]- Broadcast source notes > **Primary broadcast: [[livestreams/Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall - Livestream|Constructing Genius Through Humility and the Courage to Stand Tall]] (October 8, 2015).** An early broadcast, running an hour and a half for the first time, opening on "tapping into your inner genius" and closing with a practical instrument delivered in the last four minutes as the platform counted down the cutoff. > > 1. **10:03–10:41:** The balance definition. After using a self-destroying virtuoso as the counterexample — "is that really a fully expressed genius?" — Bryant answers: "I believe that it's less about intellect and more about a full spectrum of behaviors. It's what we could call a DaVincian balance… DaVincian balance has to do with everything. It has to do with your health, your relationships, your spirituality. Also, your intellect, it's about balance, you see." > 2. **1:24:21–1:24:59:** The safety argument. "Risk is your only chance of really living, that safety is a fatal illusion, a slow motion dream killer," followed by the corporate case: people who want the health insurance and the security of working for a corporation, except that "corporations lay people off by the tens of thousands. It's another illusion. It's an illusion of safety… And also, if you hate your job and you're stressed out, you're just slowly killing yourself. So there's no… It's not secure." > 3. **1:25:31–1:26:24:** The instrument. "There are high risk engagements and low risk engagements… we're creatures of habit, every single one of us, we get comfortable with our habit, you need to start mixing it up." Then the example, offered as "something very small, no risk whatsoever": "Let's say you drive to the work the same route every day. Just tomorrow, get up and go to work a different way, a different route, something you've never done. Do it tomorrow." Jenni adds the television case — "Or watch TV every night for three hours… Don't watch TV. And write." > 4. **1:26:26–1:26:47:** The mechanism and its name. "You're shaking up the neural network. You're shaking up, as you repeat things, you become more habituated and your neural network becomes harder and strengthens and you become more of a creature of habit. There's a gravity to habit. You have to break out of your habituation." > 5. **1:26:47–1:27:36:** The origin. "This was inspired by something I did. When I felt very powerless and when I had no money and when I had no vehicle for change, I tried to execute any type of change that I could execute. And the first thing I did was I took a different route to work… That was me executing difference, being defiant Bryant. It was a small step, do you understand? But it was defiant nonetheless because normally I would take the same route." Then: "breaking those neural pathways loose, I did something different." > 6. **1:27:36–1:28:12:** The reason it pays, and the word. "I said to myself, maybe I will see something I've never seen or maybe I'll drive by a business that I would not have noticed. Maybe I'll see a house that I'm inspired by the architecture." Then the etymological turn: "Something as small as going a different route to work can become the practice. See it's a practice… What does the word practice mean? Think about a doctor's practice and the word practice to practice something." > 7. **1:28:21–1:29:04:** Jenni's additions and the accumulation claim. Volunteer, "go to a different restaurant or take a class that you have never taken," and then: "if you just change them a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, a tiny bit, it can really, really change your life… It's cumulative. Big change is cumulative." Immediately followed by the contrast: "there is a strategy of massive action, massive differentiation, massive change… like if you quit your job, you're going to have some major change." > 8. **1:29:04–1:29:22:** The homework. "Read about BF Skinner until the next broadcast and read about the Skinner box and how people are motivated by reinforcements, negative and positive reinforcements and why you might be habituated in certain ways towards more cautious and what you perceive to be safer situations and scenarios and how those things may be holding you back." The broadcast is cut off before the promised material on "levers in the mind." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior - Livestream|Mood Regulation and the Architecture of Behavior]] (March 25, 2016).** The arrangement and the state. > > 9. **49:03–49:34:** The inventory. Self-mastery means "looking at things holistically, which is the totality of your super relationship, your food, your media intake, your inner circle, your loved ones, your workplace," and then the principle: "all outer mastery begins with inner mastery." > 10. **49:44–50:34:** The instruments and the constraint on them. A walk in the woods, petting or walking an animal, sitting alone — chosen deliberately so as to avoid "things that are damaging to yourself. So you don't reinforce a false changing of your mood," something "outside of yourself that you need, an addiction, that you have to shift your emotions." Then the question that locates the whole practice: "Who are you in that room alone?" > 11. **50:34–51:13:** Making as a mood instrument. Picking up a book, playing "a little music," painting or writing something, and the reason it works: "that's why creative outlets are so amazing because you do go into the present moment to create so it does shift your mood." > 12. **51:19–51:58:** Reinforcement and the second Skinner assignment. "Everything is about addiction, habit, and routine… it's just that some addictions are socially accepted. Some of them are socially rewarded. And some of them are socially unacceptable and you'll be punished for. But it's all about addiction. It's all about habit. It's all about routine. It's all about the response that you get… it's that Skinner box. Go research BF Skinner." > 13. **52:06–52:42:** Will and its proper place. "You can use force of will as a tool, but not as the seat of your power. The seat of your power has to be much deeper, much more spiritual, much more about balance and self mastery and inner peace. It's what I call the unseen essential." > 14. **52:42–53:10:** The drama mechanism. "Some people are habituated for drama and they will stir it up, they will stir up the drama to get their needs met because they're modulating their emotional state," with reference to habituation and endorphin receptor sites. > 15. **1:18:53–1:19:55:** The ranking and the obstacle. "If you can learn to shift your mood, which I think is one of the greatest skills you can have, more than intelligence, more than force of will, more than power, more than verb, more than vital nerve force, more than health, more than anything." Then: "You set into motion internal processes that you don't even understand… Your being, your total intelligence knows how to get its needs met. You just have to get out of the way of yourself." And finally: "in most people's lives you are your greatest obstacle to attaining what it is that you want… your limited thinking is the most insubordinate obstacle you will ever encounter in your lifetime." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Environmental Conditioning and the Path to Self-Actualization - Livestream|Environmental Conditioning and the Path to Self-Actualization]] (September 12, 2016).** The comparison problem. > > 16. **14:47–15:40:** Maslow's catch and the fish. "The problem, the catch-22 is almost that in order to achieve self-actualization, you first need to be self-actualized in order to achieve self-actualization," illustrated by the figure: "the fish doesn't know it's wet… if a fish spent its entire life in the water, does it really know that it's wet? I don't think so. It wouldn't know it was wet until it jumped out of the water and therefore discovered that there was something other than wet." > 17. **20:54–21:31:** Satisfaction as a coping mechanism. "We have a tendency as people to really kind of be satisfied with our surroundings as a coping mechanism… it's a part of our good nature as people, but it can be kind of a trap because it does create a blind spot where we aren't able to necessarily see what things are and how things really are. And even more importantly, through juxtaposition, how they could be." > > **Supporting broadcast: [[livestreams/Opening Your Genius Through Language, Abstraction, and Manifesting - Livestream|Opening Your Genius Through Language, Abstraction, and Manifesting]] (January 4, 2016).** The balance practice, prescribed. > > 18. **1:12:46–1:13:41:** The prescription. "If you want to tap into your genius that is already there, that is latent, that is dormant, that is within you, then one of the ways that you can do that is by beginning to experiment with art… Start singing, develop what is called DaVincian Balance. Even if you're not good at it, play music, write music, finger paint, write poetry, work with words in unusual ways." Then the two-stage method: "you work on your vocabulary, which is more structured, and then apply non-structured application to your vocabulary through abstraction and poetry."