Habit Rehab
To Make a New Habit Stick, You Must Shake Things Up
This is part of a five-day Habit Rehab to help you start the year off right
Day 2:
Most habits are closely tied to environmental cues, which are nested in a person’s immediate surroundings. As you go about your day, you encounter any number of these cues. And these encounters initiate your habituated responses. For example, when you first sit down at your desk in the morning, you probably open certain applications — your email or your favorite news site — without thinking about it.
Once a habit is established (that is, once it’s anchored to a specific environmental cue), it becomes very, very difficult to dislodge. “Once a mental association is formed, we really don’t know how to make it disappear,” says…