Habit Rehab
To Make Habits That Stick, You Need to Train Your Brain
Science-backed tips to make new habits and break old ones
When you open your eyes first thing in the morning, you probably don’t spend much time deciding whether to hop in the shower or check your phone. Whatever you’re used to doing, that’s what you do. In many ways, you’re operating on autopilot.
These rise-and-shine routines and countless other automatic or nearly automatic behaviors are your habits. They encompass everything from the way you answer your phone to the foods you reach for in the grocery store. And you should be grateful for them. Without them, your brain would buckle beneath the weight of the countless small decisions life throws at you.
“If we all had to deliberate about every little thing we do in each moment, we wouldn’t be able to function,” says Phillippa Lally, a psychologist and senior research fellow at University College London. “Habits free up our brains to be thinking or concentrating on more important things,” she says. Habits, in other words, are evolutionarily programmed efficiency hacks.
