One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life, is that we don’t necessarily choose our future, we choose our habits, and our habits choose our future.
Steve Covey wrote in his highly-influential book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that, “Habits are powerful factors in our lives. Because they’re consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness….Or our ineffectiveness.”
And Aristotle wrote in his immensely popular book Nicomachean Ethics, “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature people become good, others that it is by instruction, and others that it is by habit.”
For this Greek philosopher, habits reigned supreme. Aristotle believed behaviors that occur unthinkably, are evidence of our truest selves – and he famously said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Habits, scientists say exist because our brains are constantly looking for ways to save effort. And the way our brains accomplish this is by converting sequences of actions, and processing them into patterns and automatic routines. Researchers call this “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits are formed.
You see, our brains have an amazing ability to take repeated thoughts and patterns of behavior – and hardwire them into our subconscious. Science shows these patterns of behavior and thoughts repeated many times create what neuroscientists call a neuro-signature, or in lay terms, a brain groove. Brain grooves are found in the basal ganglia, which is the part of the brain responsible for recalling patterns and acting on them.
Brain grooves are generally formed in three stages. Stage one is nothing more than beginning a new routine. Stage two is repeating that routine. And stage three is a full-fledged, unconscious response to the routines we’ve imbedded into our brains, or more specifically, our basil ganglia’s. Often, we follow these routines without even being aware that we’re doing so.
Ann Greybiel, a scientists at MIT who oversees basil ganglia experiments states, “Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded in the structures of our brains, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to tie our shoes everyday, or how to drive a car after every vacation.
The problem is, our brains can’t tell the difference between good and bad habits, so if you have a bad habit, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.”
Let me close with this: All of us should focus on the early signs of bad habits, and do our best to cut them down in their budding stage, before they reach full bloom. Because unfortunately, bad habits never go away on their own.
