Member-only story
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.
Making new habits
Lally has published several studies on habit formation. She says that habits are largely the product of deeply entrenched pathways in the brain, which themselves are firmly strapped to environmental cues. When you climb into your car, for example, the familiar sights and sounds of your automobile lead you to put on your seatbelt or plug your phone into its charger. There was some time in the past when these actions weren’t rote; you had to think about them and decide to do them. But now they’re automatic. Research has found that circuits in the brain that control habitual behaviors may actually compete with those circuits that control more deliberate, “goal-directed” behaviors.
