What is habit degradation?

Example: You built a morning review habit six months ago: wake up, open your task manager, spend 15 minutes prioritizing the day. It worked perfectly for weeks. Then one morning you checked email first — just once. Then you started reviewing while eating breakfast, skimming instead of thinking. Then you began skipping weekends, then Mondays. Today you open the task manager maybe twice a week, skim it for 30 seconds, and close it without changing anything. No single day felt like a failure. Each deviation was minor. But the agent that once drove your daily prioritization has drifted from a 15-minute deliberate practice into a vestigial gesture. The drift happened in plain sight, invisible because it was gradual.

This concept is part of Agent Monitoring in the How to Think curriculum.