What is habit loop trigger?

Example: Every afternoon around 2:30 you open your phone and scroll social media for twenty minutes. The pattern isn't the scrolling. The pattern starts earlier — with the energy dip after lunch, the slightly boring task you've been avoiding, or the Slack notification that broke your focus. Identify the trigger and you can rewire the entire sequence. Miss it, and you're stuck trying to fight the behavior with willpower alone.

This concept is part of Pattern Recognition in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for pattern recognition.