Why is change so hard? Nearly every time I work with a new client, they tell me how they know what to do - they just don’t do it. We tend to think that we’re building good habits when we repeat the desired behavior, and we’re building bad habits when we repeat the undesired behavior. Take smoking for example. Every time you smoke one more cigarette, you reinforce the habit of smoking. Every time you chew gum instead, you’re reinforcing quitting. But in terms of academics and work ethic, we rarely view procrastinating behaviors as bad habits. We we should be starting a huge paper, but we go down the social media rabbit hole instead, we’re not just neutrally procrastinating and avoiding building the “good habit” of starting work on time. We’re actively reinforcing the bad habit of task avoidance by temporarily alleviating the discomfort of getting started by engaging in social media, etc. From this perspective, there are really no truly neutral behaviors. Every behavior and every choice is a vote for the type of future behavior we’re more likely to do in that same given situation. Every time we’re faced with a choice, our action creates neural networks that reinforce that same action for the future. So next time a large project comes around and you avoid getting started on it, the thing you choose to do instead is the thing that’s being reinforced for the NEXT time you’re needing to do another big project.