By Nicholas Singh, Founder of MindFit®. Reviewed by MindFit® Clinical Advisors.
TL;DR
- You open the app, play the game, add to cart. You don’t particularly enjoy it, and you do it again tomorrow.
- Wanting and enjoying run on different systems in the brain. Habits get stuck when the wanting keeps firing after the enjoying has stopped.
- You can’t delete the urge, but you can train what you do next.
On this page: Wanting isn’t enjoying · Why the loop sticks · When it’s more than a habit · What actually helps · How long it takes · FAQ
You’ve done this. You open the app without deciding to. Twenty minutes later you close it feeling slightly worse than when you started. Tomorrow you’ll do it again.
And you weren’t even enjoying it.
Wanting and enjoying aren’t the same thing
Most people assume you chase things because they feel good. The brain doesn’t work that way.
Dopamine, the chemical everyone associates with pleasure, mostly doesn’t do pleasure. Research going back decades separates two systems: “wanting,” which dopamine drives, and “liking,” which runs on different circuitry entirely. Dopamine spikes when you anticipate something, not when you get it (Berridge, 2007).
They usually travel together. Sometimes they come apart.
You can want something you no longer enjoy. That gap is where compulsive habits live.
This is why people keep pursuing things that stopped being fun a long time ago. The wanting system is still firing. The enjoying system checked out months back and never told you.
Why the loop sticks
The pull is strongest before you act, not during. The refresh, the notification, the moment before you open it: that’s the peak. The activity itself is usually flatter than the anticipation promised. Then the loop repeats, because the anticipation is what got reinforced.
Resisting can make it worse. Treat something as forbidden and you spend the day thinking about it, which is more anticipation, which is more wanting. Plenty of people find the harder they white-knuckle, the louder it gets.
It’s usually doing a job. Boredom, stress, avoiding something you don’t want to start. The habit is a fast way out of an uncomfortable feeling, which is exactly why it wins in the moment and loses over a week.
The habit isn’t the problem. It’s the solution you found to a problem you haven’t named.
When it’s more than a habit
Everything here is about ordinary compulsive habits: scrolling, autoplay, the shopping tab you keep open.
If it’s gambling, substances, or a behavior that’s taken over your finances, your relationships, or your job, that’s a different problem with a different answer. Those are clinical conditions with real treatments, and a training app isn’t one of them. Talk to a doctor or a therapist.
What actually helps
- Name what you’re actually reaching for. Bored, stressed, avoiding a task, lonely? The habit is standing in for something. You can’t swap it out until you know what job it’s doing.
- Let the urge run without acting on it. In a study of 123 smokers, people given brief urge-surfing instructions reported cravings as strong as the control group’s, and smoked significantly fewer cigarettes over the following week (Bowen and Marlatt, 2009). The urge stayed exactly as loud. They just stopped obeying it. That’s what MindFit®’s Urge Surfing workout trains.
- Ask “do I want this right now” instead of “I’m not allowed.” Forbidden things get more attractive, and a rule you’re fighting takes more effort than a question you’re answering.
- Deal with the feeling underneath. If the habit is how you handle stress, you need something else that handles stress. Otherwise you’re removing a tool without replacing it.
- Make the first step harder. Log out. Delete the app off the home screen. Small friction at the start of the loop does more than willpower halfway through it.
How long this actually takes
Longer than you want. In a study tracking people forming new habits in daily life, the median time to reach automaticity was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254 depending on the person and the behavior. About half the participants never got there inside the study period at all (Lally et al., 2010).
That’s for building a habit. Unwinding an established one is its own project. The measure worth watching is the gap between urge and action, and whether it’s getting wider.
The takeaway
You’re not going to stop wanting things. The wanting system doesn’t have an off switch, and the goal was never to want less.
What you can build is the pause. Notice the pull, know what it’s actually asking for, and decide from there instead of finding out afterwards what you did.
That’s a trainable skill, and it’s the one MindFit® is built around. The free Mental Fitness Test scores you across nine attributes in about five minutes, including the ones underneath this, or you can try a live exercise and practice the pause directly.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I keep doing something I don’t enjoy?
Because wanting and enjoying run on separate brain systems. Dopamine drives anticipation rather than pleasure, so the pull toward something can keep firing long after the thing stopped being satisfying (Berridge, 2007).
Is a compulsive habit the same as an addiction?
No. Behavioral addictions like gambling disorder are diagnosed clinical conditions with specific treatments. An everyday compulsive habit is a much smaller thing. If a behavior is damaging your finances, relationships, or work, treat it as the former and speak to a professional.
Does urge surfing actually work?
The evidence is promising and modest. In a study of 123 smokers, brief urge-surfing instructions didn’t reduce how strong the cravings felt, but that group smoked significantly fewer cigarettes over the next week (Bowen and Marlatt, 2009). It changes what you do with an urge rather than whether you get one.
How long does it take to break a habit?
There’s no reliable number, and anyone giving you one is guessing. Research on forming new habits found a median of 66 days with a range of 18 to 254, and about half of participants hadn’t reached automaticity by the end of the study (Lally et al., 2010). Watch whether the pause before acting is getting longer. That moves before the behavior does.
Should I quit cold turkey?
For an ordinary habit, going absolute often backfires, because forbidding something increases how much you think about it. Reducing friction toward better options and building the pause tends to hold better. For a clinical addiction, that decision belongs with a professional, not a blog post.
Sources
Berridge, K.C. (2007). The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: the case for incentive salience. Psychopharmacology, 191(3), 391–431. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-006-0578-x
Bowen, S., & Marlatt, A. (2009). Surfing the urge: brief mindfulness-based intervention for college student smokers. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 23(4), 666–671. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017127
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
MindFit® is training, not treatment. If a behavior has taken over your life, or you’re dealing with gambling, substance use, or an eating disorder, speak to a doctor or a mental health professional.