You delete Instagram to break the doom scrolling habit. Automatic behaviors still control you. You grab your phone, swipe up, and tap the same screen location. Except now it opens your banking app instead. You’re staring at your account balance, wondering why. Your brain executed the pattern before you thought about it.

Two out of three things you do are completely automatic. Your brain fires before you become conscious of the thought. Fish argues this is efficiency, not slavery. Your brain consumes a fifth of your entire energy budget, so it automates to survive. In Muay Thai, you don’t think how to throw a punch, only when. Hockey players don’t think about skating mechanics. The automation allows skill mastery while burning fewer calories. But some researchers claim this proves we don’t have free will. We just respond to stimuli and automate the responses. The debate: is pre-firing intuition helping you survive, or proof you’re not actually deciding?

Mindfulness can override automated reflexes, but only if you recognize the habit exists first. The willpower to break one behavior frees resources to build a new one. Your phone shuffle button idea might actually work.

Topics: automatic behaviors, doom scrolling addiction, habit formation, brain efficiency, free will neuroscience

GUEST:Greg Fish | cyberpunksurvivalguide.com

Originally aired on2026-01-28