THE POWER OF HABIT

Our lives are filled with habitual behaviours, both good and bad, but how do they form and how can we build better ones?

- DR CHRISTIAN JARRETT

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 habitual means something very specific - although there are some niche controversies around the edges of the concept. One key feature of habits has been recognised since at least the time of William James, the American philosopher and historian who's regarded as one of the founders of functional psychology.

As he put it near the start of the 20th century, when it comes to habits, "action goes on of itself". What he meant by that is once something is habitual, you do it without thinking.