Invisible Habits Are Driving Your Life
You probably remember when you took your last shower, but if I ask you to examine your routine more closely, you might discover some blank spots. Which hand do you use to pick up the shampoo bottle? Which armpit do you soap up first?
Bathing, brushing your teeth, driving to work, making coffee—these are all core habits. In 1890, the psychologist William James observed that living creatures are nothing if not “bundles of habits.” Habits, according to James’s worldview, are a bargain with the devil. They make life easier by automating behaviors you perform regularly. (I would rather attend to what I read in the news on a given morning, for example, than to the minutiae of how I steep my daily tea.) But once an action becomes a habit, you can lose sight of what prompts it, or if you even like it very much. (Maybe the tea would taste better if I steeped it longer.)
Around the new year, countless people pledge to reform their bad habits and introduce new, better ones. Yet the science of habits reveals that they are not beholden to our desires. “We like to think that we’re doing things for a reason, that everything is driven by a goal,” Wendy Wood, a provost professor emerita who studies habit at the University of Southern California, told me. But goals seem like our primary motivation only because we’re more conscious of them than of how strong our habits are. In fact, becoming aware of your invisible habits can boost your chances of successfully forming new, effective habits or breaking harmful ones this resolution season, so that you can live a life dictated more by what you enjoy and less by what you’re used to.
James was prescient about habits, even though he described them more than 100 years ago. Habitual action “goes on of itself,” he wrote. Indeed, modern researchers have discerned that habits are practically automatic “context-response associations”—they form when people repeat an action cued by some trigger in an environment. After you repeat an action enough times, you’ll do it mindlessly if you encounter the cue and the environment. “That doesn’t mean that people have no recollection of what they did,” David Neal, a psychologist who specializes in behavior change, told me. “It just means that your conscious mind doesn’t need to participate in the initiation or execution of the behavior.”
Our conscious goals might motivate us to repeat a particular behavior, and so serve as the spark that gets the habit engine going. In fact, “people who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told me. He recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). “There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,” he said.
But even habits that are deliberately begun are worth reevaluating every so often, because once they solidify, they can break away from the goals that inspired them. If our goals shift, context cues will still trigger habitual behavior. A 1998 meta-analysis found that intentions could predict only actions that are done occasionally, such as getting a flu shot, and not actions that were repeated regularly, such as wearing a seat belt. In one study from 2012, students who often went to a sports stadium raised their voices when they saw an image of that stadium, even if they didn’t intend to. And scientists have shown that habitual behaviors and goal-directed behaviors involve different pathways in the brain. When an action becomes a habit, it becomes more automatic and relies more on the sensorimotor system. When scientists damage the parts of animals’ brains that are related to goal-directed behavior, the animals start behaving more habitually. (There remains some debate, however, about whether any human action can truly be independent from goals.)
And yet, people tend to explain their habitual behavior by appealing to their goals and desires. A 2011 study found that people who said they’d eat when they got emotional weren’t actually more likely to snack in response to negative feelings; eating behaviors were better explained by habit. In a 2022 study, Wood and her colleagues asked people why they drank coffee. The participants said they did so when they were tired, but in fact, when they logged their coffee drinking, it was only weakly correlated with their fatigue. “They didn’t have a desire to drink coffee,” Wood said. “It was just the time when they typically did during the day.”
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Habits also maintain their independence by not being as 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 their outcome stops being pleasing. In one study Wood worked on with Neal and other colleagues, people with a habit of eating popcorn at the movies ate more stale popcorn than those without the habit. Those with a popcorn habit reported later that they could tell the popcorn was gross, but they just kept eating it. “It’s not that they are totally unaware that they don’t like it,” Wood said. “The behavior continues to be triggered by the context that they’re in.” It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions—ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology—hang around past their expiration date.
In the face of invisible habits, awareness and attention are powerful weapons. In a recent study, Gardner asked people who slept fewer than six hours a night to describe their bedtime routines in detail. Doing so revealed pernicious bedtime habits they weren’t aware of before. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has similarly suggested making a “Habits Scorecard,” a written list of all of your daily habits that includes a rating of how positively, negatively, or neutrally they affect your life.
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Neutral habits, such as the timing of my yoga session, can be hardest to take stock of. And if they’re just humming along making your life easier, identifying them might feel pointless. But because habits won’t always have your latest intentions in mind, it’s worth keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t start working against you. Like it or not, people are destined to be bundled up with habits. But knowing how they work—simply becoming aware of how unaware of them we can be—can help get you to a life with as little stale popcorn as possible.