Mens natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.
-- Confucius
A habit is something we do without thinking. Anyone who’s learned to drive a car gets the impact of habit. You don’t have to stop and think about putting the car in gear after you put the key in the ignition. It’s a mindless action. “Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness,” says Gretchen Rubin.
A Duke researcher suggested in 2006 that more than 40 percent of our daily actions are performed by habit. When researchers at MIT began exploring the notion of habit in the early 1990s, they found that repeating an action makes it automatic and increases our skill — even as mental activity decreases. Our brains aren’t keen on expending energy. It’s the underlying reason we so often fail at resolutions no matter what time of year we make them. When something takes effort, eventually our motivation wanes and we stop doing it. But our brains excel at turning routines, no matter how complex and effortful (driving a car, for instance), into habits that are effortless.
Developing a habit involves three distinct elements: a cue, a routine and a reward. The cue tells your brain to shift to autopilot. See a stop sign and you automatically step on the brake. No thinking required. The routine is the set of actions or patterns of thinking that are set in motion by the cue. When you see a stop sign, you take your right foot off the gas pedal, shift it to the left and gently depress the brake pedal. The reward is any immediate response that tells your brain you just did a good thing that’s worth repeating. Anything that triggers the reward circuit upstairs reinforces to the brain that you want to repeat the action. We need the reward only while the habit is forming. In driver’s ed, you probably got praised for making a smooth stop. Once a smooth stop became habitual, you no longer needed the reinforcement.
In the beginning, creating a habit will feel like work — perhaps a lot of work. But once ingrained, the habit will require virtually no effort for the rest of your life. Unwanted and outdated habits don’t ever really go away. But they do go dormant when unused, just as a footpath grows over when it’s unused. You can wire new habits over the old ones. Habits are made up of a sequence of events in your brain — thoughts that follow a familiar pathway. Wiring over an old habit is like putting up a detour sign at the point where the cue occurs. You get in the elevator at work and automatically press 3. When you get promoted and move to the sixth floor, you still press 3. So you put up a mental detour sign and send your brain on a different route — you have to think about it a few times before you automatically begin pressing 6. But use a new mental pathway often enough and fairly quickly, it becomes your brain’s default. That’s the beauty of habit. It lets us stop thinking about it.
-- Molly Rose Teuke
