Concept
Habit Loop
The habit loop means every habit runs in three steps, from the trigger to the action to the reward.
- 1
Set up the habit
One question per step: who do you want to be? When and where will you do it? And what is the smallest thing that still counts, say just two cards?
Set up the habit
One question per step: who do you want to be? When and where will you do it? And what is the smallest thing that still counts, say just two cards?
- 2
Get reminded, check it off
At the time you chose, the reminder arrives with your minimum and your place. One tap on “Yes, done”: every check-off is a vote for the person you want to be.
Get reminded, check it off
At the time you chose, the reminder arrives with your minimum and your place. One tap on “Yes, done”: every check-off is a vote for the person you want to be.
- 3
Keep going
The grid shows every day, the phases show the way: building, forming from 7, established from 30, anchored from 66. Skipping once does not break the streak.
Keep going
The grid shows every day, the phases show the way: building, forming from 7, established from 30, anchored from 66. Skipping once does not break the streak.
Your phone buzzes, you look at it, and there is a new message. That is a habit loop. First comes a trigger, then the thing you do, and at the end a small reward. The more often the loop runs, the more it runs by itself.
The journalist Charles Duhigg made this well known with his 2012 book “The Power of Habit”. Among other things, he drew on experiments by Ann Graybiel at MIT. There, rats learned to find chocolate in a maze. At first their brains worked flat out. As the route became a habit, their brains got calmer and calmer, and the rats ran almost on autopilot.
Your brain likes to save energy. Things that often happen the same way get bundled into a fixed routine. A clear trigger starts the routine, and the reward tells the brain: this is worth it, please repeat.
In Mnemorya a daily reminder brings you back to studying, that is your trigger. After the study session the app shows you a summary of what you got done: cards, blocks and Mana. That is your reward. Afterwards you can plan the next session right away, so the loop starts again tomorrow.
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
The book describes habits as a loop of trigger, routine and reward and shows how you can swap out the routine.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House.
Graybiel sums up how the brain bundles frequent routines into fixed packages that then run with almost no thinking.
Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31(1), 359-387.
doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.29.051605.112851In the experiment, the rats' brain activity changed clearly while a running task became a habit: it was active mostly at the start and at the end of the route.
Building Neural Representations of Habits. Science, 286(5445), 1745-1749.
doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5445.1745
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
