Alexis Fernandez-Preiksa

It's something that's used in psychology when we're talking about removing a behavior.

And I did want to kind of cover it, even though I'm going to give you other tools to break a bad habit, but I thought it'd be cool to kind of delve into this idea of extinction.

So in psychology, extinction, the word extinction, is the process of eliminating or reducing a learned behavior.

Now,

you, this is something that you need to know.

When we eliminate, quote unquote, eliminate a behavior,

it doesn't mean that we have deleted this pathway in the brain for good.

There's always going to be some residual pathway there.

You could be decades where you don't do that thing and you might not have an inkling to want to do it at all, but sometimes bring you back into the exact same environment, the exact same circumstances, you can see a person kind of slipping into their old patterns and into their old ways when everything kind of brings them back into the old way.

So

for the most part, you are not fully completely eliminating that thing, but you are weakening it to the point where it no longer has power over you.

And that is the aim.

Okay.

And again, if you're changing your behavior, your environment, like I spoke about in the last episode, that's really also going to help massively for you to kind of have this extinction thing that we're going to do.

reduce or eliminate this learnt behavior.

And we are talking about a learnt behavior here.

So this is done by, this extinction is done by withholding the thing that reinforces what maintains the habit.

For example,

I'm going to talk about classical extinction and classic conditioning.

Now, if you're a psychology student or a neuroscience student or anyone who even did Psych 101, you very, very likely would have heard about Pavlov's experiment with dogs, Pavlov's dog, that whole thing, okay?