Vol.5 What MIT rats tell us about addiction

Have you ever felt:
“I don’t even know why I’m drinking. The craving just hits from nowhere.”
Or:
“There must be something wrong with me. It’s like I’m not even thinking—I just pour the drink.”

If you’re nodding, you’re not alone.

But what if I told you that nothing is wrong with you?
That the craving that hits out of nowhere—and the autopilot feeling of pouring a drink—are actually your brain working exactly the way it’s supposed to?

Let me tell you a quick story about some MIT rats.

In the 1990s, researchers were studying how habits form.
They placed rats in a maze with chocolate at the end and monitored their brain activity.

Each time the maze door opened, it made a loud click—this became the cue.
At first, the rats were clueless—sniffing, scratching, wandering. Their brains lit up with effort.

But after a few hundred runs, something changed.
The rats heard the click… and zipped straight to the chocolate.

The interesting part?
As the rats got better, their brains got quieter.
Less activity. Less thinking. More automatic.

A sequence had formed in the rats’ brains:
Hear the click → run the maze → get the chocolate.
That’s a habit loop.

And our brains do the exact same thing.
They create shortcuts to save energy.

So when you find yourself pouring a drink without thinking, it’s not because your brain is defective. It’s because your brain has learned an automatic loop that’s now running in the background.

Sounds inconvenient? Actually, it’s the opposite.

Without this habit-forming mechanism, life would be exhausting.
Imagine getting into your car and having to figure out—every single time—where the key goes.
Or approaching a door and stopping to ask: Wait… how does this handle work again?

The good news?
Once you understand how the loop works, you can decode it—and start to redesign it.

More soon,
Jeanette