Habits are generally considered to be trivial, small behaviours. When you hear the word habits you may think up images of someone who cracks their knuckles, bites their nails or who uses the word ‘like’ inappropriately in sentences; but habits are actually far more pervasive in your day-to-day life than you may realise.
In fact, habits make up a huge amount of our daily activity. At the American Psychological Association’s 122nd convention, top researcher Wendy Wood estimated that around 40% of our daily activities are performed in the same way, and in the same context, which are the two criteria for defining an action as a habit. This means that around 40% of what you do isn’t done after careful deliberation or with specific goals or values in mind; instead it is done as a direct result of circumstance, in the same manner as you always do it.
A habit is, simply, a settled or regular tendency or practice – it’s a learned automatic sequence of behaviours that is not influenced by goal seeking or more simply what you ‘want’, but is rather initiated by a certain environmental cue and carried out to achieve an established end result. You may have taken initiative and decided to do it initially, but after an undefined period the conscious effort is removed meaning that you will continue to act it out even if it goes against what you are trying to achieve. Leading expert and researcher, Ann Graybiel from MIT, put forth the idea that habits were chunks of behaviours grouped together and considered to be one process. According to her research, a habit is a sequence of tasks which have been ‘bracketed’ together and are then treated by the brain as one single action, initiated by a cue in pursuit of a reward.
We will explain this fully below but for now consider the following – this makes some amount of intuitive sense because every day you perform routines which could be broken down into smaller parts of behaviour but you don’t think of them step-by-step. To make filter coffee you would enter the kitchen, boil the kettle, add grounds to a filter, then add that to a pot, pour boiling water over them and wait for the coffee to filter, pour and drink, but this is all grouped into ‘making a coffee’. Your brain manages well-rehearsed actions in the same manner.
Not only that, but it ties a cue to that routine provided the reward for completing it is reliable and then runs the program on autopilot after that cue is presented. Looking back at our coffee example, when someone starts to drink coffee in the morning it may be because they feel tired and need a pick me up or because they want to try (and then subsequently enjoy) a new beverage. After they drink the coffee they will experience a pleasant sensation due to the stimulating effects, taste or both, and therefore consciously decide to continue drinking coffee in the morning upon waking up. After multiple repeats of this routine the act of drinking a coffee will become tied to the cue of ‘waking up’ because of the reward created, and the person no longer decides what to do, they just do it. They could justify their repeating of the routine by remembering that they enjoy the taste or feel that they need the caffeine hit; but this does not take away from the principle that their instigation of the ‘make a coffee’ routine was not due to a conscious decision based in a rational weighing up of pros and cons.
The same thing will happen to a person who decides to have a glass of wine when they come home from work. At first, they choose to undergo the series of steps needed to go from where they currently are, to the state of ‘drank some wine’. After a while they will start to simply pour as they enter the house and, in many cases, crave their wine when they don’t have any. This doesn’t necessarily amount to alcoholism (though it can of course end up that way) but rather it indicates a habitual behaviour instigated by a cue and tied to an expected reward.