The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types and 2 molecules
Minimum viable habit: a fully functional version of a much smaller behavior designed to prove that the behavioral anchor works — that you can reliably execute the behavior in its prescribed context — before investing in expanding it
Recovery protocol: a pre-defined, specific, and minimally actionable response to a single habit miss designed to prevent a lapse from becoming a relapse, consisting of trigger definition, recovery action, and reframing sentence
Abstinence violation effect: a psychological cascade that occurs after a single rule violation, where the violation triggers categorical self-appraisal leading to guilt and shame, which makes the behavior associated with the rule aversive and increases the likelihood of abandoning the rule entirely
Environmental design: the practice of shaping physical and digital spaces to make cues for good habits visible and cues for bad habits invisible, thereby altering the path of least resistance toward desired outcomes
Temptation bundling: the parallel form of habit bundling where a behavior you should do is paired simultaneously with a pleasure you crave, creating a combined experience that feels more rewarding than the should-be-behavior alone, using the formula 'I will only [want-to activity] while/after I [should-do activity]'
Two-minute version: the minimum viable representation of a habit that can be completed in 120 seconds or less with no special equipment, location, or mental state required, designed to preserve the habit pathway and identity signal during low-capacity days while maintaining the neurological momentum necessary for automaticity
Zeigarnik effect: the psychological phenomenon where uncompleted tasks create persistent cognitive tension and continued mental processing even when attempting to focus on other activities, causing unfinished work to demand resolution and interfere with rest
Shutdown complete: the ritualized verbal or behavioral boundary signal that marks the conclusion of the daily review process and indicates to the brain that no further work-related cognition is required for the evening, enabling cognitive closure and improved sleep quality
Habit audit: a periodic governance practice that evaluates whether recurring behaviors still serve one's current goals and identity, distinguishing between habits that should be kept, restructured, or retired based on explicit criteria including identity alignment, return on time invested, automaticity level, and context fit
Behavioral vacuum: a structural gap created when a habit that previously occupied time, delivered a reward, and structured a portion of one's day is removed, leaving unmet cravings and unstructured time that typically gets filled by other behaviors, often worse than the original habit
Habit: a learned behavioral pattern that executes automatically through the basal ganglia in response to contextual cues, bypassing the prefrontal cortex's deliberative processing and eliminating decision-making energy requirements
Willpower conservation principle: the cognitive strategy of reducing deliberative decision-making through habit formation to preserve limited deliberative capacity for high-stakes, novel, and consequential choices
Decision diet: a systematic approach to reducing daily decisions requiring deliberation by converting them into pre-committed defaults or habits, thereby preserving cognitive resources for consequential choices
Anchor moment: a pre-existing, reliably occurring behavior in one's daily routine that serves as a stable and predictable cue for initiating a new behavior, characterized by its reliability, specificity, and ability to provide a discrete triggering event that can be borrowed to extend behavioral sequences
Habit stacking: the practice of attaching a new behavior to an existing habit by defining a specific preceding-action cue that triggers the new behavior, leveraging the reliability and automation of the existing habit to ensure consistent behavior activation
Cue specificity: the degree to which a behavioral trigger is defined with sufficient precision that the brain can recognize it automatically through pattern matching without requiring deliberate cognitive processing or decision-making
Process routine: a routine defined by its form and duration rather than by its outcome, where the behavioral experience is consistent across repetitions regardless of output quality, and which produces a stable temporal signature that allows the basal ganglia to encode a single chunk
Minimum effective routine: the smallest version of a routine that still delivers the core reward necessary to close the habit loop and make the cue worth responding to tomorrow, containing only the load-bearing steps that contribute to reward delivery without unnecessary activation energy
Bounded variability: the design principle where a habit routine has a fixed core of essential behavioral elements that never change and a flexible periphery of contextual details that can vary without altering the fundamental behavior
Craving: the specific, visceral, often uncomfortable emotional need that a habit loop is designed to satisfy, distinct from surface-level goals or pleasurable rewards, and identifiable through systematic observation and substitution testing
Cue: the environmental or internal trigger that initiates a habit loop, identifiable through systematic observation across multiple instances using five dimensions — time, location, emotional state, social context, and preceding action — that must be consistently present for the habit to occur
Reward: the specific outcome or satisfaction that reinforces a habit loop, which must directly address the underlying craving for the habit to sustain itself, and can be measured through substitution testing to determine if it actually satisfies the craving
One-variable principle: the behavioral modification principle that when changing a habit, only one element of the cue-routine-reward loop should be altered at a time to maintain behavioral momentum and enable controlled experimentation
Craving engineering: the proactive method of deliberately constructing anticipatory desire for a behavior by consistently pairing the behavior with a specific, immediate, sensory-rich reward until the brain learns to anticipate the reward at the moment of the cue