Every day we repeat countless behaviors unconsciously and almost involuntarily. From small automatisms, such as waking up in the morning and unlocking our phones, or habits like having coffee at the same time each day, to recurring patterns of behavior such as leaving important tasks until the last minute or procrastinating. While some of these behaviors are healthy and helpful, others are harmful and make our lives more difficult, yet we continue to repeat them. Why? What makes us do the same things over and over even when we know they are not good for us?
For clinical and forensic psychologist Aleix Hildebrandt, the easy explanation is that we are on autopilot and our brains simply carry us along. “It’s a reassuring idea,” he says, “but for the most part, it’s not true.”
According to Hildebrandt, rather than asking why we act on autopilot, we should reflect on whether, deep down, that is what we choose, or at least what our brains have learned to do.
“The more uncomfortable question is this: what if, many times, we are not on autopilot at all, but are instead choosing, again and again, immediate relief over tomorrow’s well-being?” Hildebrandt says.
“A habit is an association between a context and a response that is triggered automatically, with minimal mental effort, and that has become almost indifferent to whether you still want the outcome,” he continues. “It’s like reaching for your phone the moment you feel it vibrate in your pocket, lighting a cigarette as soon as you step out of the building, or biting your nails while reading a stressful email. These are actions, not decisions, and you catch yourself doing them.”
A behavioral pattern, by contrast, is something much broader. “It includes emotions, thoughts, motives and, very often, other people. Going back to someone who hurts you is not a habit. It is a pattern in which attachment, fear of loneliness, intermittent reinforcement, those good days that seem to justify everything, and an entire personal history all coexist,” the expert explains.
According to Hildebrandt, calling getting back with an ex a “habit” is like calling an unhealed wound a “custom”: “They may fit in the same sentence, but they are not the same thing, and treating it as a simple automatism guarantees that you do not understand it.”
A recent study, The Experimental Study of Habitual Behavior in Humans, published on the Open Science Framework platform, reviewed the leading protocols used to study habit formation in humans. The authors concluded that these protocols have significant limitations when it comes to demonstrating that observed behaviors are genuinely driven by automatic habits rather than by deliberate decision-making processes.
“Habits begin as conscious decisions, but constant repetition in the same context makes the brain progressively automate that behavior,” Pablo Martínez, a psychologist specializing in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience and one of the study’s lead authors, tells EL PAIS.
Although we tend to think of many behaviors as completely automatic, scientific evidence suggests that the boundary between conscious decisions and habits is far blurrier than it appears. “When we don’t have enough cognitive resources to evaluate which is the best behavior or decision, our brain triggers what it had done before, because that was likely correct or rewarded,” Martínez argues. “This allows great adaptation if the habits we’ve consolidated are adaptive, since they’re likely aligned with our goals at that moment.”
According to David Luque, a researcher in cognitive neuroscience and another of the study’s authors, “they are behaviors we have performed very often in the past and the neurocognitive system that supports them is permeable, so they are responses that activate given certain contexts.”
Some ‘bad habits’ are attempts at emotional regulation
Rosa Molina, a psychiatrist specializing in health and well-being, argues that many behaviors labelled as “bad habits” are in fact attempts at emotional regulation, or even a kind of emotional thermometer. “Repeatedly checking your phone or scrolling social media, procrastinating or returning to a harmful relationship can provide immediate relief from stress, anxiety or loneliness,” she says.
Molina also points to an important nuance that emerges from the Open Science research on habits. “The study’s idea that what we often call an ‘automatic habit’ is not always a habit in the strict sense is correct. Experimental neuroscience reminds us that many of these repeated behaviors may be more guided by the search for immediate emotional relief than by genuine behavioral automatization,” she explains.
When someone says, “I know this is bad for me, but I keep doing it,” we are often oversimplifying what is happening in the brain. “We tend to think that knowing something should be enough to change it, but the brain doesn’t work that way,” says Molina. “The person knows perfectly what is best for them, but the problem is that what they rationally consider important competes with signals the brain has learned to label as highly relevant. Knowledge competes with much older and more complex systems related to reward, emotional relief and survival.”
Hildebrandt argues that knowing and doing are handled by different mechanisms in the brain. “Knowing that something is harmful is information; behavior, by contrast, is carried out by a system much more closely tied to emotion and reward, and that system does not read reports. Understanding why you smoke does not put out the cigarette. In other words, insight may inform, but it does not act,” he says.
“Also, the brain doesn’t distinguish well between what’s good for you and what calms you,” he adds. “And at the decisive moment what calms you almost always wins; it isn’t a blind automatism, it’s a duel between two clocks that tell different times.”
“Habits are harder to control when we are stressed, tired or must react very quickly,” Martínez warns. “Those are conditions where our cognitive resources are diminished and that means we can’t control what kicks in by default, which is habit.”
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