Once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is subsequently initiated by the unconscious, usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Our resulting behavior is no longer intentional or volitional. We’re operating on autopilot.

We think behavioral habits are just something we do, but in spite of what we think, our habits reveal more about us than our intentional acts do.

Why We Have Habits

The brain creates behavioral habits, with or without our conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so we don’t have to waste our precious and limited conscious attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.

When we’re learning something new (or creating or changing a habit), we have to focus a lot of conscious attention on what we’re doing. Anything that requires conscious attention uses energy, and in any given day we have a limited amount of it. It’s not an easily renewable resource. But once a habit is in place, little or no conscious attention is needed.

Examples:

• driving a car
• playing an instrument, if you’re trained
• raiding the refrigerator in the evening
• brushing your teeth before going to bed
• checking your email first thing in the morning

Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to the brain. It doesn’t care about our opinions of our habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do something—anything—often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert will power, using positive thinking, engaging in deep soul searching, or looking for the underlying cause of a habit are all fruitless endeavors. Unfortunately, you can’t have a heart-to-heart with your basal ganglia.

 But Aren’t I in Charge?

The common assumption is that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. We decide what we’re going to do and then do it. But only some behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions, far fewer than we’d like to believe. Estimates are that from 50% to 80% of what we do every day we do on autopilot, which means without conscious intention or volition. We may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while our minds are somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if we’re familiar with the route. We don’t need to pay conscious attention to our driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. We can zone out and our unconscious can generally get us to our destination just fine.

But since we tend to identify only with our conscious brain and not with our unconscious, we identify with our wandering mind instead of with what we’re actually doing.  And because we’re under the illusion that most of what we do is the result of conscious choice (behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions), we’re not aware of how pervasive habits are in our lives.

When we find ourselves doing something we’d rather not do (or not doing something we’d rather do), we’d prefer to believe we’ve willfully chosen the behavior just so we can maintain the illusion of being in control. But it’s not very satisfying to think that we’re intentionally and repeatedly doing something we have an intention not to do. We don’t understand why we can’t simply will ourselves (or, in some cases, beat our lazy selves into submission) to get the desired results. We end up feeling inadequate, ashamed, guilty, and possibly slightly crazy. The obvious and easy way out is to dis-identify with the behavior. That’s not the real me. That doesn’t reflect who I am. It’s just something I do.

Just as the brain has a habit of generating habits with no regard for our judgments and opinions about them, we have a habit of thinking less of our habits than we do of our intentional acts regardless of what that behavior actually amounts to. It’s not what we do that matters so much as whether we did it intentionally or as a result of a habit.

Not only do we think intentional acts define us more than habits do, we also think that what we think and wish and want is more important than what we actually do. (Rene Descartes would be proud.)

We think that what we think is of supreme importance. Next most important are our intentional acts. At the bottom of the list, getting extremely short shrift, are our habits.

But we have it backwards. It’s what we do that ultimately matters, not what we think or want. And what we do is primarily habitual (unconsciously generated) rather than intentional (consciously determined). Habits actually say more about us than intentional acts do.

Still Don’t Think Much of Habits?

In a study of habits vs. non-habits,” reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that participants thought habits weren’t as important as non-habits in reaching goals and were relatively uninformative about themselves and others.

Given the percentage of time each day we spend engaged in habitual behaviors, this is stunningly wrong-headed.

Another odd finding that came out of the studies on habits vs. non-habits was this:

Feelings of stress increased with the deliberation involved in a single non-habitual behavior rather than as a result of multitasking. According to Roy Baumeister (Professor of Psychology, Florida State University), the act of decision making about a single behavior can deplete self-control mechanisms and impair subsequent acts of self-regulation such as decision-making and performance.

Habits, however, do not drain self-control resources to the same extent as non-habits. Once a behavior becomes a habit, it frees up our conscious attention

There is less emotion associated with habitual behaviors than with non-habitual ones. There is a decreased sense of volition, as well, but that is accompanied by less stress, burnout, and feeling out of control.

It’s a little confounding that we fail to recognize the many benefits habits confer.

We Are What We D0

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

This is actually a paraphrase of Aristotle by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy. One thing Aristotle did say, though, is “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions.”

It’s easy to see how this works—that is, the positive, productive role of habits—in the development of a skill or craft—that of a musician, an artist, a writer, a quilter, or a cook, for example. We generally expect that the more a musician practices her instrument, the more dishes a cook prepares, the better they will become at doing those things. A musician is unlikely to attain excellence if she only practices when she’s in the mood for it. Skillful musicians develop the habit of practicing regularly whether they’re in the mood for it or not. And they don’t have to be in the mood for it precisely because they’ve developed the habit. They don’t have to waste conscious attention or drain self-control resources by thinking about or deciding each time whether or not to practice.

If a musician’s sense of identity includes her musicianship, then her habit of practice says quite a lot about who she is—as opposed to who a non-musician might be. When she shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, for example, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Her habit of practicing certainly contributed to her reaching her musical goals. Without it, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.

Habits and routines make achieving goals considerably easier. Habits and routines can free our conscious minds for greater things, and they are actually essential to people who need to be creative on a regular basis.

Habits Really ARE Us

Our conscious intentions are not reliable when it comes to predicting what we’ll do when well-entrenched habitual behaviors are involved. In such cases, environmental cues and triggers are much more influential and, therefore, much more reliable predictors. What we have done before is what we are likely to do again. (Intentions, however, are more predictive of future behavior in new or novel situations.)

Because habitual behaviors are cued by situations, events, or other people instead of by our conscious prodding, we feel somewhat disengaged from them. It seems that there’s a continuum between intention and habit. It doesn’t much matter whether the habit in question is one we intentionally set out to create or one that was created when we weren’t paying attention. A habit is a habit is a habit, and the further a behavior moves from the intention end of the continuum to the habit end, the lower our opinion of it becomes.

There is an important role for consciousness to play in regard to our habits. If we understand and accept the enormous usefulness of habits, we can use the conscious part of our brain to decide which habits we want to create or change. That’s where the “I” we identify with comes into play. It sets the agenda for which behaviors to chunk and turn into habits.

That requires paying attention to what we’re actually doing. (It turns out that one of the very few ways we can get some idea of what’s in our unconscious is by observing what we do—not by observing what we think, dream, or wish for.) We also need to have some idea about what we want and what it will take to get it.

In any case, we would do well to give more credit to the unconscious part of our brain and recognize that it is just as much a part of who we are as is the conscious part, probably even more so. Then we might be able to start using it instead of letting it use us, which it does in this case by chunking behaviors without our awareness and consent.

Here’s a Question

If you identified with your habits, as much as you do with your intentional acts, how might that change your sense of yourself? And how might changing your sense of yourself alter your relationship with your habits?