What Science Says About Habits and Why You Should Care About It
Habits are basics in human behavior. Most of what we do every day has to be with them.
When we clean our tooth in the morning, when we get dressed, when we drive. All of this are habits, automatic behaviors we do without actually thinking.
What is a habit?
A habit is a routine formed by three elements: a trigger, an action and a reward.
Actually, is very easy. One day you react to a certain signal, do an action and something positive happens; then, you repeat it another day. And another. At the end, your brain learn to do this action when the signal is triggered to get the reward of this positive thing that happened the other times. You have an habit.
There’s no moral in habits: your brain is willing to create habits, regardless if the habit is positive or negative. One day you sit in your couch when you arrive from work, and feel the pleasure of rest after a hard day of work. Next day you do the same. Before you noticed, you have created the habit of sitting in the couch and any other healthier thing you may want to do is covered by the new routine. You smoke and feel important and popular, or socially included, or your nerves get calmed, you repeat it for days -nicotine addiction apart- and you are a professional smoker.
Habits are not stored in memory, but in basal ganglion.
The case of Eugene Pauly
Eugene Pauly suffered memory loss after a viral condition.
He didn’t remember anything before 1960’s, and lost the ability to create new memories, so he could be watching the same show from National Geographic in bucle without realizing.
Doctors warned wife to be prepared for a difficult life. Eugene wouldn’t remember how to do the most basic things, he wouldn’t remember where the toilet were, or the kitchen, or in case he leave the house, he wouldn’t remember how to come back.
But things didn’t go as expected. Eugene couldn’t do a map of the house, or tell doctors were the kitchen was, but sometimes he excused himself and go to the toilet, or while he was looking at the TV, he got up and go to the kitchen; then he went back to the couch.
Further investigations proved that habits were not located in memory, but in basal ganglion. That’s why Eugene remembered his habits, like going to the toilet or to the kitchen or even come back from the street to home, but at the same time he was unable to explain what the path to home was.
Why our brain form habits, even bad ones?
To understand this we should understand what Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow calls System 1 and System 2.
He explains brain has two ways of thinking, the System 1 and the System 2. The first is the automatic one, the unconscious one; the last is the conscious and rational one.
When we see 2+2 we fast imagine 4. This is not a rational thought, our brain has made no effort. We can walk or eat and, at the same time, make 2+2 without interrupting anything. This is our brain System 1 working.
Lets now imagine we are running and somebody asks us 24x54. Except we are like Albert Einstein, we will stop immediately and slowly start to think how to multiply this two numbers and what should be the result. This is our System 2 working hard, and this is a great effort for our brain. We feel exhausted if we need to do this kind of tasks for a long period of time.
As we are biologically designed to be energy cost balanced, our brains tends to use System 1 as much as possible. This causes, for example, cognitive dissonances, but this is another topic.
What is important here is that habits belongs to System 1, are automatic and easy and low cost. That’s why our brain try to form as much habits as possible, and as this is an automatic, unconscious system, there’s no moral, no positive-negative habit thinking here.
Can a habit to be completely removed?
Bad news here.
As far as science knows, habits cannot be completely removed from the basal ganglion.
This is one of the things, probably the most important one, what makes so hard to stop smoking, or drinking or removing any other addiction.
What we can do about a bad habit is to ignore it, to actively overcome it. We can change one habit for another.
Let’s put again the example of the man who come back from work and sit in the couch. If he actively decide to not sit, go to the street and run for an hour, and he is able to imagine a good reward for this, and he repeat this several days, he will create a new habit that will hide the previous one. He will stop sitting in the couch and start going to run everyday.
But the previous habit is still there. If some day this man is very stressed for work, has had a problem or, in general, its willpower is low, he will probably sit in the couch or, at least, he will need a lot of active thinking to go run.
That’s why addicts can relapse when they are stressed or under a lot of pressure.
The power of habits
From the above, you could think habits are like jails you cannot avoid or control, so there’s nothing you can do.
That’s not true.
In fact, habits are your best tool to change your life, to improve it, if you understand how they work.
You can create new habits. Find a routine you want to convert to an habit, think about a proper trigger and a proper reward, and repeat it. Sooner than you think you will have a new habit that will help you everyday.
If you want to remove a bad habit, even an addiction, you can. Try to find another habit that can cover the previous one and be very conscious about the moments were your willpower are at low levels.
Willpower is, in fact, something you can train, but also something limited. Don’t try to learn more than one habit at a time. Think about willpower like a one daily dosis medicine. When you have created one habit you don’t need willpower for it, so you can start to create another one and use the daily dosis for it.
In the previous section I’ve used the title of a book from Charles Duhigg, The power of habit.
All of the above comes from this book, Daniel Kahneman’s one, and my personal experience.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are fighting against an addiction, find expert advice. It will be the best decision you can make.