Winning streaks are neurologically indistinguishable from addiction. When a behavior pays off repeatedly, the brain's dopaminergic reward system doesn't just register pleasure — it begins predicting future reward, which means the anticipation itself becomes the pull. This is what the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume was circling when he argued that custom, not reason, governs most human action: the mind follows the groove of past success automatically, without consulting whether conditions have changed. The trap isn't weakness or laziness. It's competence. The very habits that built something — the aggressive negotiation style, the long hours, the risk appetite, the way you dominate a room — get encoded as identity-level defaults precisely because they worked. They stop being strategies and become the shape of you. By the time circumstances shift, the behavior feels too fundamental to question. Kent Berridge's neuroscientific research at the University of Michigan identified a distinction between 'wanting' and 'liking' — the wanting system (dopamine-driven) can persist long after the liking has faded, driving continued pursuit of something that no longer satisfies. The habit that finally empties you isn't new. It's an old success you never renegotiated.

Which of your current habits are you still running because they genuinely work — and which are you running because they once worked, and you've never formally reviewed the contract?

Drawing from Scottish Empiricism / Neuroscience of motivation — David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739), cross-referenced with Kent Berridge (incentive salience theory, 1998–present)