Page 92 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

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zombies everywhere:

Digging Deeper to Understand the Habit of

Procrastination

n the insightful book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg describes a
I lost soul—Lisa Allen, a middle-aged woman who had always struggled with
her weight, who had begun drinking and smoking when she was sixteen, and
whose husband had left her for another woman. Lisa had never held a job for

more than a year and had fallen deeply into debt.
But in a four-year span, Lisa turned her life around completely. She lost
sixty pounds, was working toward a master’s degree, stopped drinking and
smoking, and was so fit that she ran a marathon.
To understand how Lisa made these changes, we need to understand habit.
Habits can be good and bad. Habit, after all, is simply when our brain
launches into a preprogrammed “zombie” mode. You will probably not be

surprised to learn that chunking, that automatically connected neural pattern that
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arises from frequent practice, is intimately related to habit. Habit is an energy
saver for us. It allows us to free our mind for other types of activities. An
example of this is backing your car out of the driveway. The first time you do
this, you are on hyper-alert. The deluge of information coming at you made the
task seem almost impossibly difficult. But you quickly learned how to chunk this

information so that before you knew it, all you have to do was think Let’s go, and
you were backing out of the driveway. Your brain goes into a sort of zombie
mode, where it isn’t consciously aware of everything it is doing.
You go into this habitual zombie mode far more often than you might think.
That’s the point of the habit—you don’t think in a focused manner about what