The question was not "why do people have bad habits?" but "what keeps the loop intact?"
Gonvik's approach was assembled from a decade of observing how people interact with their own routines — professionally, personally, and in organised group formats. What emerged was a consistent pattern: the habit loop's reward component is rarely what it appears to be on the surface.
A coffee habit at 10 am may have nothing to do with caffeine moderation and everything to do with a break from cognitive load. A nightly screen time pattern may function as a boundary marker between the working day and personal time. Replacing the surface behaviour without addressing the underlying function produces, almost invariably, a new surface behaviour fulfilling the same role.
Gonvik programmes map the function before proposing any substitution. The substitution, when it arrives, is therefore structural — not cosmetic.
