Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golloy, the old habit will rememerge right away. habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the sturctures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.

There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.