Making Habits, Breaking Habits
Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick
Book Edition Details
Summary
"Making Habits, Breaking Habits (2013) provides an overview of exactly what habits are and how we form them. Using this knowledge, it reveals how to create healthy habits and tackle the bad ones so that we can experience lasting, positive change in our everyday lives."
Introduction
Every morning, you wake up and perform dozens of actions without thinking twice about them. You brush your teeth, make coffee, check your phone, and drive to work, all while your mind wanders to other things. These automatic behaviors, known as habits, make up nearly half of everything we do each day. Yet despite their profound influence on our lives, most of us have little understanding of how habits actually work or how to change them effectively. The science of habit formation reveals fascinating insights about the human brain and behavior. Researchers have discovered that habits follow predictable patterns, taking an average of 66 days to form, not the commonly believed 21 days. More intriguingly, our unconscious mind plays a far greater role in habit formation than we realize, often overriding our conscious intentions. Understanding these mechanisms isn't just academic curiosity, it's the key to transforming our daily routines, breaking destructive patterns, and building the life we want. From the neuroscience of automatic behavior to practical strategies for lasting change, the research offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to harness the power of habits.
The Anatomy of Habits: How They Form and Function
Habits are like mental shortcuts that our brains create to save energy and processing power. When we repeat a behavior in the same context over and over again, our brain begins to automate the process, freeing up conscious attention for other tasks. This automation happens through a neurological loop consisting of a cue, a routine, and a reward. The cue triggers the behavior, the routine is the behavior itself, and the reward reinforces the entire sequence. The formation of habits follows a predictable timeline that researchers have carefully mapped. Contrary to popular belief, habits don't form in a mere 21 days. A landmark study at University College London found that it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, though this varies significantly depending on the complexity of the habit. Simple behaviors like drinking a glass of water after breakfast became automatic in about 20 days, while more complex habits like doing 50 sit-ups took much longer, sometimes over 250 days. What makes habits so powerful is their unconscious nature. Once established, we perform habitual behaviors with minimal awareness, often while our minds are focused on completely different matters. This autopilot function serves us well most of the time, allowing us to navigate familiar routines efficiently. However, it also means that habits can persist long after they've outlived their usefulness, running in the background of our lives whether we want them to or not. The context in which habits occur plays a crucial role in their formation and maintenance. We tend to perform the same behaviors in response to the same environmental cues, creating strong associations between place, time, and action. This is why moving to a new home or changing jobs can disrupt established patterns, suddenly making automatic behaviors conscious again.
The Unconscious Mind and Automatic Behavior Patterns
Our conscious minds like to believe we're in control of our actions, but research reveals a more humbling truth. The unconscious mind drives much of our behavior through automatic processes that operate below the threshold of awareness. These processes can be triggered by environmental cues, emotional states, or even abstract concepts, leading us to act in ways we don't fully understand or intend. Studies have shown that people can be primed to behave differently through subtle environmental manipulations. In one famous experiment, participants who unscrambled sentences containing words associated with elderly stereotypes subsequently walked more slowly down a hallway, despite having no conscious awareness of the connection. This demonstrates how our unconscious minds constantly scan the environment for cues and adjust our behavior accordingly, often without our knowledge. The unconscious mind also plays tricks on our self-perception. When researchers switched photographs of faces that participants had chosen as more attractive, most people failed to notice the switch and confidently explained why they preferred the face they had actually rejected. This "choice blindness" reveals how little access we have to our own decision-making processes and how readily we construct explanations for behaviors we don't truly understand. Perhaps most surprisingly, our unconscious processes can operate independently of our goals and intentions. People might automatically reach for unhealthy snacks when stressed, not because they consciously want to eat poorly, but because the stress-eating association has become so ingrained that it bypasses rational thought. Understanding these automatic patterns is essential for anyone trying to change their behavior, as it reveals why willpower alone often fails against well-established unconscious routines.
Breaking Bad Habits and Building Better Ones
The key to successful habit change lies not in relying on willpower alone, but in understanding and working with the unconscious mechanisms that drive automatic behavior. Breaking bad habits requires a combination of awareness, strategic planning, and environmental modification. Simply trying to suppress unwanted behaviors often backfires, as our minds tend to rebound toward the very thoughts and actions we're trying to avoid. The most effective approach to breaking bad habits involves replacing them with new, more desirable behaviors rather than simply trying to eliminate them. This replacement strategy works because it redirects the energy of the habit loop rather than fighting against it. When the environmental cue appears, instead of performing the old routine, we execute a new one that serves our goals better. This requires careful planning and the creation of implementation intentions, specific if-then plans that link situational cues to desired responses. Environmental changes can be particularly powerful in disrupting unwanted habits. Since habits are so dependent on context, altering the physical or social environment can break the automatic association between cue and response. This might involve removing tempting foods from the house, changing travel routes to avoid triggers, or modifying daily routines to eliminate habit-inducing situations. Even small environmental tweaks can have surprisingly large effects on behavior. Building new habits requires patience and realistic expectations. The research shows that habit formation follows a curved pattern, with the greatest gains occurring in the early repetitions. Each practice session moves us a little further along the path to automaticity, but the process takes time. Missing an occasional day doesn't derail progress significantly, but consistency over weeks and months is essential. The goal is to make the new behavior feel natural and effortless, which only happens through repeated practice in stable contexts.
Healthy Habits and Creative Routines for Life
The principles of habit formation can be applied to virtually any area of life, from health and fitness to creativity and productivity. Healthy eating habits, for instance, are best developed through small, sustainable changes rather than dramatic dietary overhauls. Research shows that successful dieters tend to establish regular routines, eating similar foods at similar times, which reduces decision fatigue and makes healthy choices more automatic. Exercise habits face unique challenges since, unlike eating, there's no natural biological drive that regularly reminds us to work out. Successful exercisers typically link their physical activity to established cues in their daily routine, such as exercising immediately after waking up or during lunch breaks. The key is finding a consistent time and context that can become automatic over time. Self-monitoring tools like pedometers can also help by increasing awareness of activity levels and providing feedback on progress. Creative habits require a delicate balance between routine and novelty. While establishing regular creative practices, like writing or painting at the same time each day, many creative individuals also need to guard against their work becoming stale through excessive repetition. The most innovative people often combine disciplined practice with deliberate variation, using constraints and changing perspectives to keep their creative processes fresh and engaged. Perhaps most importantly, building positive habits requires attention to the emotional and motivational aspects of behavior change. Habits that align with our deeper values and provide intrinsic satisfaction are more likely to stick than those pursued purely for external rewards. The most sustainable changes often start small but connect to larger purposes, creating a sense of meaning and identity that supports long-term maintenance of new behavioral patterns.
Summary
The science of habit formation reveals that our daily behaviors are far more automatic and unconscious than we typically realize, operating through predictable neurological patterns that can be understood and modified. While habits take longer to form than commonly believed and often override our conscious intentions, this same automaticity can be harnessed to create positive changes in our lives through strategic environmental design, realistic planning, and patient repetition. The most profound insight from habit research is that lasting change comes not from battling our unconscious tendencies but from working with them intelligently. Rather than relying solely on willpower, successful habit change involves replacing old patterns with new ones, modifying environmental cues, and building sustainable routines that align with our deeper goals. This understanding opens up new possibilities for anyone seeking to transform their health, creativity, relationships, or overall quality of life through the strategic cultivation of better automatic behaviors.
By Jeremy Dean
