You probably remember the last time you took a shower, but if you took a closer look at your routine, you might find some blank spaces. Which hand do you use to pick up the shampoo bottle? Which armpit do you soap first?
Taking a bath, brushing your teeth, driving to work, and making coffee are all basic habits. In 1890, psychologist William James observed Living things are nothing more than a collection of habits. According to James’s worldview, habits are like deals with the devil. Make your life easier by automating the actions you do regularly. (For example, I would rather focus on that morning’s news than on the minutiae of how I make my daily cup of tea.) But once a behavior becomes a habit, what is driving that behavior? You may lose track of it. Or even if you really like it. (The tea may taste better if it is steeped longer.)
Around the New Year, countless people vow to reform their bad habits and introduce new, better ones. However, the science of habits reveals that habits are not dependent on our desires. “We like to think that we do things for a reason, that everything is driven by a goal,” Wendy Wood, a professor emeritus who studies habits at the University of Southern California, told me. spoke. But goals seem to be our main motivator only because we are more aware of them than the strength of our habits. In fact, by being aware of your own invisible habits, you increase your chances of successfully forming new, effective habits or breaking harmful ones during this season of resolutions, and instead of relying on what you’re used to, you’ll increase your chances of successfully forming new, effective habits or breaking harmful ones. You will be able to live a life that focuses on things. .
James was prescient about habits when he described them over 100 years ago. Habitual behavior, he wrote, “follows itself.” In fact, modern researchers identified Habits are acquired almost automatically. “Associating Context and Response”—They are formed when people repeat a behavior triggered by some trigger in their environment. If you repeat an action enough times, when you encounter a trigger or environment, you will perform that action without thinking. “That doesn’t mean people don’t remember what they did at all,” David Neal, a psychologist who specializes in behavior change, told me. “That means consciousness does not have to participate in initiating or performing that action.”
Our conscious goals can serve as the spark that motivates us to repeat certain behaviors and starts the habit engine. In fact, “the people who are best at achieving their goals are those who intentionally form habits in order to automate some of their behaviors,” says Benjamin Gardner, a habit-behavior psychologist at the University of Surrey. he told me. He recently established a flossing habit of flossing daily in the same environment (bathroom) and following the same contextual cue (brushing his teeth). “Some days I feel like that, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday.But I definitely believe I did it because it’s a very important part of my routine,” he said.
But even habits that you start with intention can drift away from the goal that started them once they become established, so it’s worth reevaluating them from time to time. Contextual cues will trigger habitual behavior even as our goals change. 1998 meta-analysis Found Intent can only predict actions that occur occasionally, such as getting a flu shot, but not actions that are repeated regularly, such as wearing a seatbelt. in one study Starting in 2012, students who frequent the stadium began to raise their voices when they saw footage of the stadium, even if they didn’t mean to. And scientists believe that habitual behavior and goal-directed behavior are different Pathways in the brain. When a behavior becomes a habit, it becomes more automatic and becomes more dependent on the sensorimotor system. When scientists damage the parts of an animal’s brain associated with goal-directed behavior, the animals begin to behave more habitually. (There are a few left discussionHowever, as to whether human behavior can truly be independent of goals. )
Nevertheless, people tend to explain their habitual behavior by appealing to their goals and desires. a 2011 survey It turns out that people who say they eat when they’re emotional aren’t actually more likely to snack in response to negative emotions. Eating behavior is better explained by habits. In a 2022 study, Wood and her colleagues asked people: why they drank coffee. Participants said they drank coffee when they were tired, but when they actually recorded how they drank coffee, there was only a small correlation with fatigue. “They had no desire to drink coffee,” Wood said. “That was just the time of the day when they were most likely to do it.”
Habits also maintain independence by being less sensitive to rewards. If you don’t like something the first time you try it, you probably won’t repeat the experience. But habits can persist even if the results are no longer enjoyable. A study that Wood worked on with Neal and other colleagues found that people who were used to eating popcorn at movie theaters ate more popcorn. stale popcorn than those without the habit. People with popcorn habits later reported that they knew the popcorn was bad, but they just kept eating it. “It’s not like we’re totally unaware that they don’t like it,” Wood said. “That behavior continues to be triggered by the situation they’re in.” Holding back stale popcorn isn’t that terrible, but more complex habitual behaviors like work-life balance, relationships, etc. , consider the impact if technology-related behaviors persist past their expiration date.
Awareness and attentiveness are powerful weapons against invisible habits. Recently studyGardner asked people who slept less than six hours a night to detail their bedtime routines. In doing so, they uncovered harmful bedtime habits they were previously unaware of. The author, James Clear, Atomic Habitssimilarly suggests creating “.habit scorecard”, a list of all your daily habits, including a rating of how positively, negatively, or neutrally they impact your life.
Neutral habits, like the timing of your yoga sessions, are the hardest to change. And if they’re just making your life easier, it may seem pointless to pin them down. However, habits don’t always have your latest intentions in mind, so it’s worth paying attention to them to see if they’re starting to work against you. Whether we like it or not, we are destined to be bound by our habits. But just knowing how they work—and how unaware we are of them—can help us live a life as free from spoiled popcorn as possible.
