FEATURE HABITS
The word ‘habits’ gets thrown around a lot. Your GP encourages you to get into the ‘good habit’ of eating five portions of fruit and veg a day; your friend worries about their ‘bad habit’ of checking Twitter before bed; maybe you once had a music teacher who kept on at you to practise your scales until they ‘feel habitual’. Or perhaps you’ve been telling yourself that you want to get ‘into the habit’ of going to the gym twice a week.
All this talk makes sense at a colloquial level, but psychologists are more pedantic about it. In fact, not everything you do, or aspire to do, frequently or regularly, is necessarily a habit. Some of the situations above are more about goals (what you hope to achieve at some point in the future), intentions (your plans for what you’re going to do) and skills (such as being able to hit musical notes consistently), than about habits per se. Routines – such as going to the gym regularly – have the potential to become habitual, but it’s not inevitable that they will. So what exactly is a habit? And what does it take to make one that’s ‘good’ or break one that’s ‘bad’?
WHAT MAKES A HABIT?
A habit is your brain on autopilot
In psychology, saying that a behaviour has become
