OST PEOPLE ASSOCIATE BAD habits with the kind of activities that wind up on a list of New Year’s resolutions—eating and drinking too much, spending too much time on the smartphone and avoiding the gym.
But bad habits are often behind more than just our personal peccadilloes. The neural machinery of habit formation is also the root cause of many of the worst collective behaviors: Texting while driving, gossiping about co-workers, littering, mansplaining, farting silently in public, making racist or unfair assumptions about strangers and even spreading the kind of misinformation online that some experts warn is threatening to undermine our democracy.
Many people who are aware of bad habits and recognize them to be potentially harmful blame themselves for being weak and lacking the willpower needed to resist them. But in recent years, scientists have used advanced imaging technologies to peer inside the brain as habits are being formed and they’ve mapped habit-formation to precise structures in the brain—structures formed so long ago in the smithy of evolution that humans share them with other mammals. Research suggests that habits, which operate below conscious awareness, usually cannot be tamed simply by resolving to resist them. By the time you realize you’re munching on that bag of potato chips, picking your nose, fighting with someone on Facebook or veering into oncoming traffic while texting, it’s too late.
If we want to change our habits, research suggests, we need to understand how they work, anticipate the cues that trigger them and find ways to break our habit cycle before it starts. Taming a bad habit requires a lot of planning: we need to reverse engineer the chain of behavior that precedes them, and then either remove the cues that set us off altogether, or take the time to build new habits that will replace them. It involves acknowledging that much of what we do is habitual and not the result of our own decision-making, and setting goals in a way that drives new behavior patterns.
Still, it’s not easy to break a habit—nature has made sure of it. That’s because habits are an essential tool of survival—without them, the simple tasks of everyday life would overwhelm us. Americans spend an average of 43 percent of each day engaged in tasks that are largely unconscious—that have become so automatic that we’re able to think and talk
