• Understand the importance of habitual behavior in our daily lives
• Describe research done to learn about habitual behaviors
• Describe ways to develop healthy, new habits

Habits: The Good, the Bad, and the Consequences

Habits have gotten a bad reputation in popular literature. Eating too much and chatting online too much and so many other things we supposedly do too much are blamed on “bad habits”. And, in a world that prizes novelty and creativity, the idea that habits are “automatic” suggests that we may be going through life like zombies, not mindful and not experiencing our lives deeply enough.

But habits can be positive, too. Writer Gretchen Rubin notes that “habits are the invisible architecture of our daily lives…Our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.”^[1] Habits free us from always having to plan our next action and use willpower to get things done.

Habits are Automatic

Think back across the last hour. What have you been doing?

Which of the last hour’s activities were habitual—done at particular times of the day on a predictable schedule? How much of the time were you “on automatic”, guided by well-practiced routines that require little thought? Often, as we drive a car or walk to our workplace, work out at the gym or shop for groceries, our actions are unconscious and stereotyped as we think about something unrelated to what we are doing.

habits

Habits are automatic behaviors that are formed through repeated actions over time. They can be either positive or negative and can have a significant impact on our daily lives. Positive habits can help us build resilience, enhance our self-esteem, and lead to a more fulfilling life. In contrast, negative habits can lead to self-destructive behavior and impact our overall well-being negatively.

Developing healthy habits is a crucial aspect of positive psychology. These habits can help us become more mindful, achieve our goals, and enhance our overall well-being. For example, practicing gratitude daily can help improve our mood, increase our sense of well-being, and improve our relationships. Engaging in regular physical exercise can also help improve our physical health, reduce stress and anxiety, and enhance our self-esteem.

Another example of a healthy habit is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation can help reduce stress and anxiety, improve our emotional regulation, and enhance our overall well-being. By focusing on the present moment and being aware of our thoughts and emotions, we can cultivate a sense of inner peace and calm.

Habits may be “automatic” in the sense that they free up our conscious minds to think about other things, but they can be changed and they can be chosen. For millennia, religious teachers and moral philosophers have urged us to choose who we wish to be by shaping our own habits. We don’t become better by trying harder; we become better by eliminating the need to try—we just do it.

How Much of Your Time is Guided by Habits?

One obvious way to find out what people do during the day is to ask them. In fact, pause to do that now. How much time do you think you spend in habit-driven activities? What percentage would you say, between 0 and 100%?

You probably found that it is not easy to come up with a number here. What counts as a “habit”? And how well can we remember how long we were engaged in one activity or another? It is easier to remember interesting things than dull things, so there may be built-in biases in our memories to recall the engaging activities rather than the repetitive, habitual ones.

The Diary Method

Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) used a different approach, one that did not rely so much on memory: the diary method. They didn’t invent this research approach, but they were the first to apply it to the study of habits. This method doesn’t really involve keeping a diary in the traditional sense. Instead, it involves periodically “sampling” people’s activities along with some personal reflections on what they are doing.

Here is how it worked. Wood and her colleagues recruited college students and provided each one with a programmed wristwatch that buzzed once every hour. When the wristwatch buzzed^[2], the student recorded what they were doing. Then, the student answered a series of questions about this activity:

• How often they engaged in that behavior.
• Their current physical location.
• The physical location in which they generally performed the behavior.
• Which other people—if any—were involved in the activity.
• The amount of attention needed for successful performance (1 to 4: almost none to constant attention)
• The degree of difficulty of the behavior (1 to 5: very easy to very difficult)
• The intensity of emotions felt as they engaged in the activity (1 to 5: much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal)

They also answered an open-ended question: what were you thinking about while you were engaged in the activity?

The Results of the Diary Study

The researchers analyzed the “diary” reports of 279 students across two versions of this study. When they defined “habitual behaviors” as activities that regularly occurred at the same time and place, they found that 41% of the behaviors could be considered habitual. If this result actually generalizes the rest of us, then nearly half of our time is spent engaging in habit-driven activities.

In a separate analysis, the researchers approached the idea of a habit in a different way. They reasoned that if habits are somewhat automatic, then we can think about something else while we are engaged in the habitual behaviors. Because they asked the students what they were doing and what they were thinking about, the researchers were able to determine how often there was a mismatch between behavior and thoughts. Approximately 47% of the time, thoughts were about something other than what they were doing, a percentage very close to the 43% estimate from the previous paragraph. However, even though the data support the idea that we can and often do think about other things while engaging in habitual behaviors, we are not zombies—about 40% of the time, people were thinking about activities they labeled as habits while engaging in them. The experimenters explain that this is “consistent with the idea that this mode of behavior is best characterized by minimal or sporadic cognitive monitoring and not by the complete absence of thought.”^[3]

The researchers report one other interesting finding about habitual behaviors. When people engaged in habitual behaviors they reported lower negative emotions than when they were performing non-habitual activities. Specifically, habitual behaviors were associated with lower stress, reduced likelihood of feeling overwhelmed, and lower probability of feeling out of control. Happily, people did not feel less interested or less motivated while engaging in habitual behaviors, so reduced emotional reactions were not caused by becoming disengaged or less attentive.

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