The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
Now, limbic friction is not a term that you're going to find in the formal neurobiological literature or even some of the psychological literature. It's, frankly, a term that I coined to encompass a number of different pieces of the psychology and neuroscience literature.
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So, using this Lally study as an example, some people would eat dinner, and then say, "Oh, that's right, I've been trying to develop the habit" "of taking a walk after dinner." "So, let's get up and go." Other people will feel like, "I just don't want to do it today." They're going to feel too much limbic friction and that limbic friction could arrive, again, from one of two sources. It could be because they are too tired to do it or it could be because they're too anxious and distracted in order to do it.
Limbic friction is a phrase that can be used to describe how much effort, how much activation energy you need in order to engage in a particular behavior.
So, if you're feeling particularly tired and you don't want to get out of bed, and you don't want to go out and do your zone II cardio, then there's a high degree of limbic friction. [...] Whereas if you're very, very alert, there's less limbic friction because you're moving toward something that's action oriented.