Good Habits, Bad Habits

02The Hidden Engine Driving Half Your Life

Beneath the surface of your daily conscious decisions lies a quiet, immensely powerful engine that dictates almost half of everything you do. Once you understand exactly how this hidden engine operates, you hold the biological keys to rewiring your entire life. To truly master your behavior, you have to take a brief journey into the architecture of the human brain. The conscious, thinking part of your brain—primarily the prefrontal cortex—is the newest addition in terms of human evolution. It is responsible for logic, planning, and long-term goal setting. It is the part of you that boldly declares you are going to learn a new language or save ten thousand dollars this year. However, deep beneath this modern neural circuitry lies a much older, more primitive structure known as the basal ganglia. This almond-sized cluster of neurons is the true command center for your habits. It is ancient, incredibly efficient, and operates entirely below your conscious awareness. When a behavior becomes a habit, the brain actively shifts the control of that behavior from the energy-hungry prefrontal cortex down into the highly efficient basal ganglia. This process is known as chunking, and it is the brain’s ultimate survival mechanism for conserving energy. If you had to consciously think about every single action you took throughout the day, your brain would literally overheat and shut down from information overload. Think back to the very first time you learned how to drive a car. Every single movement required intense, exhausting focus. You had to consciously monitor the pressure on the gas pedal, check all three mirrors, gauge the distance of the cars around you, and figure out how much to turn the steering wheel. After just an hour of driving, you were likely mentally drained. But today, you can drive that exact same route to work while simultaneously planning your evening, listening to an engaging podcast, and drinking a cup of coffee. You arrive at your destination with almost no memory of the actual drive. Your basal ganglia took over the complex sequence of driving, freeing up your prefrontal cortex to focus on other things. This is the magnificent power of the habitual mind; it turns complex, difficult sequences into effortless, automatic routines. A profound realization from Wood’s work is the fundamental difference between a true habit and a mere routine. We often use these words interchangeably, but neurologically, they are vastly different. A routine is a sequence of actions you perform regularly, but it still requires conscious effort and willpower to execute. For example, doing your taxes every April is a routine, but it will never become a habit. You will always have to force yourself to sit down and do it. A habit, on the other hand, is an automatic urge triggered by a specific context. You do not have to force yourself to brush your teeth in the morning; the simple context of standing in your bathroom after waking up triggers the automatic behavior. The ultimate goal of behavioral change is not to build better routines, but to successfully push those routines down into the basal ganglia so they become true, effortless habits. To illustrate just how blindly powerful this hidden engine is, Wood highlights a wildly fascinating study involving movie theater popcorn. Researchers went into a cinema and handed out free buckets of popcorn to moviegoers. Half of the people received fresh, delicious popcorn, while the other half received popcorn that was stale, rubbery, and a week old. Predictably, the people who rarely ate popcorn at the movies took a few bites of the stale popcorn, realized it was terrible, and stopped eating. But the people who had a strongly established habit of eating popcorn at the movies did something incredible: they ate the terrible, week-old popcorn anyway. They ate just as much of the gross popcorn as the people who had the fresh batch. When questioned later, they admitted the popcorn tasted awful, yet they physically could not stop themselves from eating it. This popcorn study is a massive revelation for understanding human behavior. It proves that once a habit is formed, the actual conscious enjoyment of the behavior becomes completely irrelevant. The habitual mind does not care if the popcorn is good, and it does not care if a behavior is aligned with your long-term health goals. The brain simply recognizes the contextual cue—sitting in a dark movie theater watching trailers—and automatically triggers the pre-programmed physical response of reaching into the bucket and chewing. The basal ganglia operates like a blind machine executing a line of computer code. If the cue is present, the behavior fires. Understanding this blind, mechanical nature of habits explains why it is so incredibly difficult to break bad ones using logic alone. You cannot reason with your basal ganglia. You cannot explain to it that smoking is bad for your lungs or that biting your nails is unhygienic. It only understands cues, repetition, and rewards. Therefore, to change the output of this hidden engine, you have to completely change the inputs, starting with the physical world around you.

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