A couple of years ago, I noticed that instead of following the same route (taking the same streets) to and from a particular grocery store, my habitual route was somewhat circular. After paying attention a few times, I realized that the route I’d ended up with involved more right turns than left turns, which meant it was ever so slightly faster. (If you know me, you know even the illusion of faster matters.)
A habit is a recurring, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. Habits are acquired or learned over time. You can suddenly discover, as I did, that you have a habit you weren’t even aware of.
I may have consciously thought about making that initial right turn a few times at first, but I never think about it now. I’m satisfied with this habit, so I have no need to think about it unless I encounter an obstacle along the path. Goals, which I wrote about the value of last week, require ongoing System 2 intention from beginning to end. You’d be hard-pressed to complete a goal while your mind is otherwise occupied.
But habits only require System 2 attention until System 1 takes them over. That means that once a behavior or routine becomes a habit, it is initiated by your unconscious (System 1), usually as a result of something in the environment—a cue or a trigger. Your response is automatic rather than intentional or volitional.
Some other examples of habits are:
- playing an instrument, if you’re trained
- raiding the refrigerator in the evening
- brushing your teeth before going to bed
- biting your nails
- eating the entire bag of potato chips every time
- checking your email first thing in the morning
The word “habit” often elicits another word: “bad.” If you think of habits as bad—or as just something inconsequential that you do—you’ll have a harder time creating the habits you want to have.
Habits Are Immune to Your Opinion
Good habits, bad habits, they’re all the same to your brain. It doesn’t care what you think of your habits. All it cares about it is being efficient. Do anything often enough and it will become a habit. And habits, by their nature, are hard to change. Trying to exert willpower, 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.
Your brain creates behavioral habits, with or without your conscious participation, in order to operate more efficiently. It chunks repetitive behaviors and turns the chunks over to the basal ganglia so you don’t have to waste your precious and limited System 2 attention on them. Habits are an energy-saving device.
The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) has one imperative, which is survival. However, it is only concerned with the short term: get out of the way of that bus right now! The fact that eating an entire bag of potato chips every time may have long-term negative consequences for your survival is of no concern to System 1. Up till now, eating the entire bag of potato chips has worked out fine. You’re still here. The status quo is status quo.
Maybe your cholesterol is becoming a growing concern. Well that’s conceptual; there’s no immediate crisis. Acknowledging and evaluating information about your cholesterol and deciding whether or not to change your diet requires System 2 attention. And then actually changing your diet requires more System 2 attention. In the meantime, System 1 continues running it’s program—in this case your habit of eating the entire bag of potato chips each time.
You think, What’s wrong with me? I know better. Or worse, and even less productive: I must be trying to sabotage myself. But the fact that you have information or that you know better has no direct or immediate bearing on your habit, which runs automatically whenever it is cued or triggered.
We experience this confounding situation over and over again because we tend to assume that behaviors are preceded by conscious intentions. You decide what you’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.
You may be operating a 4,000 pound vehicle on a busy highway at a speed of 65 miles an hour or more while your mind is somewhere far, far away. This is especially likely to happen if you’re familiar with the route. You don’t need to pay conscious attention to your driving if nothing out of the ordinary occurs. You can zone out and your unconscious will generally get you to your destination just fine.
Your unconscious is doing exactly the same thing once you open the bag of potato chips. It’s getting you to your destination of eating everything in the bag. You don’t need to tell it to do that. But if you want it to not do that, you’re going to have to tell it over and over again until it rewrites the chip-eating program. You’re going to have to practice.
Repetition and Perseverance:
Practice, Practice, Practice
You would expect that the more a musician practices her instrument or the more dishes a chef 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.
When a musician shows up onstage to perform a violin solo, her habit of practicing ensures that her fingers know what to do with the violin. Without her habit of practicing, she might still be thinking about becoming a violinist or wishing it were so.
Changing or starting a new habit is no different. A musician or a chef wouldn’t expect to execute with complete skill the very first time. And the best musicians and chefs continue to hone their skills by practicing. So if you want to master not eating the entire bag of potato chips every time instead of just wishing it were so, all you have to do is keep practicing until it becomes automatic.