Name: 一位神經學家、一位心理學家和一位記者對成癮和習慣的解釋 (Addictions and habits, explained by a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a journalist)
Uploaded: 2025-10-15T18:36:50.000Z
Duration: 6 min 52 s

So here's the thing to recognize about your bad habit.

所以，關於你的壞習慣，有件事你得知道。

We are living through this huge evolution in our understanding of habits, and

我們正經歷一場關於習慣理解的巨大演變，

it's being driven primarily by understanding the neurology of where habits come from.

而這主要是由理解習慣的來源的神經學所驅動的。

I thought that drugs were the source of the problems that we were seeing in our community.

我曾以為毒品是我們在社區裡看到的問題根源。

Turns out, not only was I wrong, society was wrong.

結果發現，不只我錯了，社會也錯了。

Basically, we tend to develop addictions when we have a psychological need.

基本上，當我們有心理需求時，我們就容易產生成癮。

At those moments, smartphones tend to be great vehicles for providing the hits that you need when you need them.

在那些時刻，智慧型手機往往是提供你所需獎勵的絕佳載體。

I think that there is this interior sense when a bad habit starts, strikes, that people know that they have a bad habit.

我認為，當壞習慣開始、出現時，人們內心會有種感覺，知道自己有了壞習慣。

It just seems like a lot of people, even the most successful people, don't necessarily know where to start at changing it.

感覺好像很多人，即使是最成功的人，也不知道該從哪裡開始改變。

The ability to form habits is one of the most important and amazing evolutionary tactics that the human race has come up with, and

養成習慣的能力是人類發展出最重要也最驚人的演化策略之一，

all primates, and almost all animals for that matter.

還有所有靈長類動物，幾乎所有動物都是如此。

When you form a habit, you can execute a fairly complex series of behaviors without having to think really, really hard about it.

當你養成一個習慣時，你就能執行一連串相當複雜的行為，而不需要費太多心思去想。

And what that means is that it lets us think about other things.

這也意味著，我們可以去思考其他事情。

But the downside of a habit is that you stop thinking while you're doing a habit.

但習慣的壞處是，你在做習慣的同時，就停止思考了。

So as a result, you become less aware of the negative consequences of that behavior.

是以，你對該行為的負面後果會變得比較不敏感。

There is a woman named Windy Wood who did a study when she was at Duke.

有一位名叫 Windy Wood 的女士，她在杜克大學時做了一項研究。

And what she found was that about 45% of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.

而她的發現是，一個人一天中大約有 45% 的行為都是習慣。

And this gets to sort of the way that habits work, which is that there's this thing called the habit loop.

這就帶到習慣的運作方式，也就是有所謂的習慣迴路。

There's first, a cue, which is a trigger for a behavior, and

首先是線索，也就是行為的觸發器，

then the behavior itself, which we usually refer to as a routine.

然後是行為本身，我們通常稱之為例行公事。

And the reward is actually why the habit happens in the first place.

獎勵其實是習慣發生的根本原因。

It's how your brain sort of decides, should I remember this pattern for the future or not?

這就是你的大腦決定，我應該記住這個模式以備將來使用，還是不記住？

And the cue and the reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges that drives your behavior.

線索和獎勵在神經學上交織在一起，直到產生一種渴望，驅動你的行為。

If you take this framework and sort of apply it and look at the behaviors that you do, for instance, backing your car out of a driveway, or why you suddenly feel hungry when you see a donut box on the counter at work but you weren't hungry five minutes earlier, you can find these cues and rewards that kind of explain the behaviors.

如果你採用這個架構，並試著套用並檢視你做的行為，例如，從車道倒車出來，或者為什麼在工作時看到櫃檯上的甜甜圈盒，你明明五分鐘前不餓，卻突然感到飢餓，你就能找到這些解釋這些行為的線索和獎勵。

Between 1990 and 2000, that is deemed the decade of the brain.

1990 年到 2000 年，這被認為是「大腦十年」。

There was a lot of money into studying brain illnesses, brain disease.

有大量的資金投入研究大腦疾病。

There was a lot of money in terms of learning about the brain.

And during that time, we are looking for some neural footprint of addiction.

在那段時間裡，我們正在尋找成癮的神經足跡。

And we thought that once cocaine interacted with these dopamine neurons, it just had this almost magical power over the person's behavior.

我們曾認為，一旦古柯鹼與這些多巴胺神經元互動，它就會對這個人的行為產生一種近乎神奇的力量。

We've learned that that's not necessarily the case.

我們已經瞭解到，情況不一定如此。

So when we think of drug addiction, it's important for the lay audience to keep the focus on the person's behavior.

所以當我們想到藥物成癮時，對於非專業人士來說，重要的是要將重點放在這個人的行為上。

Are they not meeting their obligations at home?

Are they not meeting their obligations in school?

All of these are important indicators of whether someone is drug addicted or not.

這些都是判斷一個人是否對藥物成癮的重要指標。

And notice I didn't look at anyone's brain.

注意到我並沒有看任何人的大腦。

I'm really looking at the person's behavior.

我其實是在觀察這個人的行為。

Behavioral addiction is a lot like substance addiction in a lot of ways.

行為成癮在很多方面都跟物質成癮很像。

Basically, what has to happen is that there's a behavior that you enjoy doing in the short term that you do compulsively, so you keep returning to it over and over again.

基本上，會發生的是，你做了一件短期內很享受的行為，但你卻強迫性地去做，所以你一再地重複。

But that in the long term harms your well being.

但這在長期上會損害你的身心健康。

And it can harm your well being in lots of different respects.

而且它會在很多不同的方面損害你的身心健康。

And it's much newer, it's a much more recent phenomenon.

而且它新多了，是個比較近期的現象。

And I think the reason why we've got these new forms of addiction, there are two main reasons.

我認為我們出現這些新的成癮形式，主要有兩個原因。

The first one is that technology is much more sophisticated and advanced than it was even 20 years ago.

第一個原因是，科技比二十年前更加精密和先進。

You're able to deliver the kinds of rewards that you need for a system to be addictive.

你能夠提供一個系統要變得令人上癮所需的獎勵。

So basically what people are looking for is unpredictability and rapid feedback of either rewards or if it's negative, then negative experiences.

所以基本上，人們在尋找的是獎勵的不確定性與快速回饋，或是負面經驗。

And you actually need that mix of positive and negative feedback.

而你確實需要正面和負面回饋的混合。

Just as, for example, when you post something online, sometimes you're going to get a lot of hits, sometimes you aren't.

就像，舉例來說，當你在網路上發布東西時，有時候你會得到很多回應，有時候則不會。

And it's that unpredictability that we find so compelling.

正是這種不確定性讓我們覺得如此引人入勝。

Whenever we're bored, whenever we're feeling a little bit lonely, whenever we're not really sure what to do with ourselves next, whenever we don't feel particularly efficacious, like we're having an effect on the world that we'd like to be having.

每當我們感到無聊，每當我們感到有點孤單，每當我們不太確定接下來該做什麼，每當我們覺得自己沒有什麼影響力，沒有辦法對這個世界產生我們想要的影響時。

Those are the moments when you're looking for what some people call the adult pacifier.

那些時候，你就會尋找有些人稱之為「成人安撫奶嘴」的東西。

And smartphones tend to be a great adult pacifier.

而智慧型手機往往是個很棒的成人安撫奶嘴。

Because at those moments, you turn on your screen, you swipe, and you feel relaxed again.

因為在那些時刻，你打開螢幕，滑動一下，又感覺放鬆了。

If you just try and say, I'm going to use willpower to make this behavior go away.

如果你只是試著說，我要用意志力讓這個行為消失。

這點我們從無數的研究中都瞭解。

Every scientist who's worked on habits will tell you once the neurology of that habit is set, it's always there in some form or another.

任何研究習慣的神經學家都會告訴你，一旦習慣的神經學基礎建立起來，它就會以某種形式一直存在。

So what you need to do is, instead of thinking about eradicating this bad habit or just using willpower to sort of blast your way through ignoring it, is to change it.

所以你真正需要做的，不是想著根除這個壞習慣，或只是用意志力去忽略它，而是去改變它。

And there's this thing that's known as the golden rule of habit change, which is, if a habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and

有個叫做習慣改變黃金法則的東西，那就是，如果一個習慣包含一個線索、一個例行公事和

a reward, you can't change all three parts at once.

一個獎勵，你無法一次改變所有三個部分。

What you really want to change is you want to change the routine, the behavior.

你真正想改變的是例行公事，也就是行為。

And to do that, you need to keep the same cue and deliver the same reward.

而要做到這一點，你需要保留相同的線索並提供相同的獎勵。

And you'll be able to shoehorn that new behavior into your daily pattern.

你就能夠把這個新行為巧妙地融入你日常的模式裡。

You can't suddenly say, I want a brand new habit tomorrow, and

你不能突然說，我明天就要一個全新的習慣，然後

It's something you have to give yourself permission to take a little bit of time to practice because you're building up neural pathways associated with a certain behavior, and

這是你需要給自己一點時間去練習，因為你正在建立與特定行為相關的神經通路，而且

those neural pathways just build up over time.

這些神經通路是隨著時間慢慢建立起來的。

You can't speed up that process any more than is natural.

你無法比自然的速度更快地加速這個過程。