S28E4 - Hacking Your Brain to Make Writing an Addiction

Computers aren't the only thing that can be hacked. You can, over time, trick your brain into thinking and reacting the way you want. This trick is especially helpful when you want to build healthy habits.

It takes about twenty-one iterations of a thing to make it a habit, and it's much easier to do something twenty-one times if you make it something desirable. Something we want to do. Or as James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, would say, make it a healthy addiction.

There are four steps in an addiction. The cue, craving, response, and reward. We can hack our brains into making writing an addiction by following these steps. Create a cue. Something that will trigger that craving. In order to make it an addiction, we then need to respond to the craving, and then we end by rewarding ourselves.

Listen to this episode for more about things you can do to start hacking your brain and instilling in yourself an addiction to writing.

First aired January 13, 2022.