Habits

Everyone has habits that they do constantly and don’t even realize, but how do these habits form in the first place?

This is a bad habit I have and most of my peers have too.

There are so many things we do everyday like: locking the door, brushing our teeth, or taking a pill. It might even be driving somewhere and then not fully remembering how you got there. It is all thanks to our brains autopilot mode.

Aristotle once said, “We are what we repetitively do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”.

What is a habit? A habit is a behavioral routine that is frequently repeated and tends to happen subconsciously. New behaviors can become automatic through the process of habit formation.

Habits drive our lives so much that sometimes we might want to break a habit. However, habits are a good useful thing to have; when we do something over and over, we become effortlessly good at it. Habits can either benefit or hurt the goals one sets for themselves.

The influence of goals on habits is what makes a habit different from other automatic processes in the mind. A series of experiments that was conducted by Anthony Dickens, at the University of Cambridge in England, showed the behavioral differences between goal directed and habitual processes. Basically, in the training phase, a rat was trained to press a lever in order to receive some food. Then, in a second phase, the rat was placed in a different cage without a lever and was given food, but it was made ill whenever it ate the food. This caused the rat to devalue to the food because it associated the food with being ill, without directly associating the action of pressing the lever with being ill. Finally, in the test phase, the rat was placed in the original cage with the lever, to prevent additional learning, no food was given in the test phase. If the rat wants the food, it presses the lever because it predicts that pressing the lever will deliver the food. If the food has been devalued, the rat will not press the lever. Habitual behavior is explained by a strong association between the action and situation in which an action was executed. The rat presses the lever when it sees the lever, not because of the predicted outcome.

When habits are formed, the action is typically split into chunks like unlocking the car, getting into it, adjusting the mirrors, putting on your seatbelt, etc.. It is still unknown as to how this “chunking” forms and stabilizes in our brain. Some habits are known as keystone habits and influence the formation of other habits. For example, let's say you are in the habit of exercising regularly, this can also influence eating healthy and spending less money.

One study suggests that the striatum, a region of the brain associated with decision-making, plays an important role in acquiring habits. A study with mice proved that the patterns of signals transmitted between neurons in the striatum shifted as the animals were taught a new sequence of actions.

Researchers said that is really is a high-level signal that helps to release a habit, and they think the end signal says the routine has been done. It is also thought that interneurons could possibly be preventing the principle neurons from initiating another routine until the current one was finished. Scientists are still trying to figure out what exactly happens in the brain when habits form, but regardless it is fascinating what our brain can do.