“Take control of your habits, and you will take control your life.” Pick up a book on self-improvement, and you’ll come across this statement in one form or another. But what is a habit, why is it so important, and how does it form in the first place?
What Is a Habit, Anyway?
I start every morning with a 10-minute meditation, where I focus on my breathing and on bringing my mind back to the present moment. After I finish, I walk to the bathroom and take a shower. There, I build on my practice by imagining the water washing away negative thoughts and feelings.
This morning routine has worked wonders for my happiness and productivity.
Recently, however, I overslept and had to skip the first part of my routine: my morning meditation. I jumped in the shower, got dressed, and made my way out the door. “No problem,” I thought. “I can delay the meditation and do it in the evening instead.” But this time-shift led to some unexpected behavior that night.
Later in the day, I meditated as usual, but it was not until the water hit my back that I realized I had automatically entered the shower! I had already showered that morning, yet I went into automatic mode and did it again. What happened?
I had been taken over by the pull of habits.
A habit is a routine or behavior you perform regularly and often without conscious thought. Look no further than your morning to identify some of your habitual behaviors: you might hit snooze on your alarm clock, sit down to meditate, take a shower, drink a coffee, prepare a to-do list, or brush your teeth.
If used correctly, the things you do on a regular basis and at the same time of day, can bring order and structure to your day.
What Is a Habit and What Does It Look Like in the Brain?
Every human has a nervous system, a collection of wires that run through the limbs, trunk, and head. You can think of your nervous system as the “communication highway” of your body, sending messages about behavior, movement, and sensation throughout the entire body.
Messages are carried between individual passages of the nervous system called neural pathways. Neural pathways within the basal ganglia—an ancient and primitive part of the brain associated with involuntary actions—provide a home for your habits.
You find that an old, deeply ingrained routine will take the shape of thick and strong neural connections. On a microscopic level, this collection of pathways looks like tiny, matted webs of tree roots that are constantly evolving, growing, and weaving into other pathways.
The growth of these webs is stimulated by repetition. The more often you repeat a behavior in the same context, the stronger the neural pathways, and the harder it is to give up the new habit.
It is through repeated efforts that your brain learns how to behave more efficiently and effectively.
I had been practicing my morning routine for many years in the same context. Frequent repetition resulted in the thickening of neural connections, the formation of a habit, and in me taking a shower when I did not need to.
What Is a Habit, According to Neuroscience
Neuroscientists believe habits are one way that your brain learns complex behaviors. Automatic behaviors give us the ability to focus our attention on other, more important things by storing shortcuts in the basal ganglia. Shortcuts take the form of neural pathways, and help our brain to stop actively deliberating over what to do next.
Because routines preserve energy, they present themselves whenever we are awake: at home, work, or school. Humans like to do things with as little effort as possible, because our daily energy resource is limited.
Research shows that habits account for approximately 40 percent of our daily actions.1
With habits accounting for close to half of people’s everyday behavior, it makes sense why authors on self-improvement emphasize the importance of taking control of our habits. Habits govern the quality of our lives.
What Makes a Habit Good and What Makes It Bad?
We can’t afford to leave our routines to chance because our tendency is to choose the simple way. The most convenient option is usually the winning option. And most times, it is routines with negative consequences that are easiest to do.
It takes less effort to eat chips than to cut up some fresh vegetables and roast them in a pan. We need less energy to turn on the TV than to drive to the gym and walk on the treadmill.
Repeating what’s easy can cause harm and send us in a downward spiral. It is, for example, easy to spend money impulsively. But only because it’s effortless, doesn’t mean it is good for us.
With every unconscious repetition of a bad habit, our health, happiness, finances, or relationships can spiral more out of control.
By the same token, healthy habits—which require us to choose the hard way—can send us in an upward spiral. Read just 10 pages a day, and you are on track to finish 15 books in a year. Save just 300 dollars a month, and you will amass 72,000 dollars in 20 years. With every unconscious repetition of a positive behavioral pattern, you strengthen neural connections, and inch closer to success.
The question becomes, “How can we break bad habits and replace them with good habits?”
The Habit Loop: A Framework for Changing Your Habits
Break any habit into its fundamental components, and you see it takes the characteristic shape of cue, craving, response, and reward.
The earliest description of this behavior sequence was published in the late nineteenth century by Edward Thorndike. More recently, it was popularized by authors such as Charles Duhigg and James Clear.
The habit loop is an endless cycle that is active every moment you are alive, and it looks like this:
- Cue: The first step of a habit is the cue. A habitual behavior starts when you identify old cues in your environment. You might, for example, see a pack of cigarettes on your desk or noticing a tray of cookies on the kitchen counter. The cue is a trigger that causes a specific behavior to take place.
- Craving: You notice cues because you subconsciously associate them with positive thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This association leads to a craving, a powerful and often overpowering desire to engage in an activity that makes you feel good.
- Routine: To satisfy this urge, you take part in an automatic behavior. The response is the third step of the loop and takes the form of a specific action, such as smoking a cigarette or eating a cookie.
- Reward: Finally, you receive a mental reward. Rewards provide reinforcement and encouragement for the action. They aid your brain in remembering previous steps, making it more likely you will repeat the behavior in the future.
Analyze Your Own Habits
If you drink coffee daily, you can analyze your caffeine habit with these four simple steps.
For most, the act of waking up in the morning is a cue. You experience a craving because your brain expects feeling the effects of caffeine. The response takes the form of brewing or buying a cup of coffee and drinking it. Finally, this sequence leads to the reward of feeling alert.
Whether it is reading books, saving money, exercising, meditating, or drinking a morning coffee, this cycle governs any habit.
The habit loop is also a powerful tool for changing our habits.
If you’d like to learn how to apply the habit loop to break old habits and create new ones, I suggest you download my new book, Habit Change Secrets. It is free to download and distills the most fundamental information on habit change in one practical and easy-to-understand guide.
References
- Neil, David T., et al. “The pull of the past: when do habits persist despite conflict with motives?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 37, no. 11, Nov. 2011, pp. 1428-37, doi:10.1177/0146167211419863.