Invisible Habits Are Driving Your Life
Monday, January 20, 2025
People “who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told Shayla Love at The Atlantic. Gardner “recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). ‘There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,’ he said.”
People explain habitual behavior by tying them to their goals and desires, but research shows habits become self-sustaining. One study found that people who said they eat when they get emotional weren’t doing that; they just ate out of habit, regardless of how they felt. Similarly, people said they drank coffee when tired, but fatigue was only weakly correlated to coffee drinking.
Even habits you deliberately create are worth occasionally reevaluating to see if they still make sense, Love writes.
Habits “can persist even if their outcome stops being pleasing,” Love wrote. One study found that people with the habit of eating popcorn at the movies would keep going even when the popcorn was stale. “It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions–ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology–hang around past their expiration date.”
I had bad health habits 25 years ago — diet, exercise, taking care of my teeth — and built habits to fix those. I think I actually went too far in my eating habits; I want to become more flexible about those.