The Whole View, Episode 438: The Fascinating Science of Habits
Welcome back to episode 438 of the Whole View. (0:27)
Stacy welcomes listeners to the very first show of the year!
She is still readjusting to life after the holidays and knows everyone can identify with that sluggish feeling of getting back to routine.
Sarah is a little different because she makes habit-centered resolutions every year.
She takes the New Year as a time to reevaluate what she's planning to do in a habit-focused, not goal-focused, frame.
This year, she thought a lot about body shaming and predatory marketing strategies of big business.
She always finds the "new year, new you" mindset nauseating every year. But this year, whether it's because of the "quarantine 15" or something else, it's particularly bad.
Especially given how emotionally vulnerable Sarah is feeling after 2020.
This led Sarah to look into what's new in habit-forming research and refresh her knowledge of the science of habits since she hadn't done so in several years.
There is so much cool science on habits, and Sarah jokes she fell down the rabbit hole.
When she emerged, she realized how actionable it is. And how it can help pull on a lot of threads on how we can set up to succeed, period.
 
What Are Habits?
Sarah suggests they start by looking at what scientifically is considered a habit. (4:00)
She thinks that it's a bit more common to think of habits in the sense of bad ones we want to break, like smoking or nail-biting.
Sarah explains that while we more easily identify "bad habits," habit-forming as a whole is a very important form of learning. 
A habit is a learned action that we perform automatically when we encounter that action's linked stimulus.
When the action is triggered, we perform it automatically and unconsciously. 
Real, fully-formed habits are insensitive to the "reward" phase we initially rely on to form the habit.
Sarah also explains that we perform habitual behaviors in the exact same way every time we encounter the stimulus. 
And once we reach the point where it does matter if there is a reward for performing the habit or not, the behaviors tend to stick with us long-term.
This is true even if the perceived benefit we derive from the behavior decreases over time or no longer distinguish a cause and effect of our behavior. 
Science of Habits In Daily Life
We perform about 40% of our day-to-day actions are habitual, meaning they are determined by stimulus-response associations and requires no conscious thought. (6:00)
We evolved the ability to form habits because it does something important in terms of freeing up thinking resources. 
When we're learning a habit, it starts as a routine to achieve an outcome (i.e., goal-directed), rewarded as reinforcement, and repeated in the same context.
Sarah explains at the beginning of this learning process, the brain must use multiple areas to perform the behavior.
Basal ganglia is the region of the brain associated with emotion, memories, pattern recognition, procedural learning, and control of voluntary motor movements. 
The prefrontal cortex is the region of the brain associated with executive function and cognitive control. This includes attentional control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, information processing, planning, reasoning, problem-solving, organization, and decision making.
As we repeat the behavior and master it, we use the prefrontal cortex less and less to perform the behavior. This is when the basal ganglia takes completely over. 
Once the action becomes a habit, we don't use the prefrontal cortex at all. This frees up valuable executive functions for other tasks!
Sarah used the example of learning to drive a car and "losing time" while driving long distances to show how prevalent the science of habits is in our lives. 
The Science of Habits Behind Social Language
The habit learning system increases efficiency, saving valuable mental energy, but comes at the ex