What does it mean that habit anatomy consists of cue routine and reward?

Every habit has a trigger a behavior sequence and a payoff — change any one to change the habit.

Example: Every afternoon around 2:30, you stand up from your desk, walk to the break room, and eat a cookie. You have tried to stop. You have told yourself you will not do it today. By 2:45 you are holding a cookie. The habit persists because you have been attacking only the routine — the eating — while ignoring the cue and the reward. The cue is not hunger. It is 2:30 p.m. plus a drop in mental energy plus the social environment of the break room. The reward is not sugar. It is a ten-minute break from focused work and a brief social interaction with whoever else is in the break room. Once you identify that the cue is an energy dip and the reward is social relief, you can substitute the routine entirely: at 2:30, walk to a colleague desk for a five-minute conversation, then return. The cue fires, the reward lands, and no cookie is involved. You changed the routine because you understood the anatomy.

Try this: Select one habit you perform daily without conscious decision. Over the next three days, run a diagnostic each time the habit executes. Immediately after the behavior, write down three things: (1) what happened in the thirty seconds before the habit began — what you saw, where you were, what time it was, who was present, what you were feeling; (2) the exact behavioral sequence from start to finish; (3) what satisfaction or relief you felt in the thirty seconds after the behavior completed. After three days, identify the cue category (time, location, emotional state, other people, or preceding action), describe the routine in mechanical terms, and name the reward in terms of the underlying need it serves. You now have a dissection of the habit anatomy.