Making Habits, Breaking Habits

Three characteristics have emerged: firstly, we perform habits automatically without much conscious deliberation. Secondly, habitual behaviors provoke little emotional response by themselves. Thirdly, habits are strongly rooted in the situations in which they occur.

Our mental habits can change in this way because our minds are so good at spotting patterns; indeed, it’s one of the mind’s chief functions

. The reason is that habits, through their repetition, lose their emotional flavour. Like anything in life, as we become habituated our emotional response lessens. The emotion researcher Nico Frijda classifies this as one of the laws of emotion, and it applies to both pleasure and pain

Habits help protect us from ‘decision fatigue’: the fact that the mere act of making decisions depletes our mental energy. Whatever can be done automatically frees up our processing power for other thoughts.