How Habits Control Our Lives
Our habits are both a blessing and a curse.
A blessing because they spare us from reinventing the wheel all the time. We let the daily routine carry us: the same actions, in the same order, produce the same results. You can't question everything every morning.
A curse because they lock us in. Once they're set – for years, for decades – they're extremely hard to change. We do what we do because we don't know any other way.
A habit takes no mental energy. By following the same path, the same automatic moves, we put part of our daily life on autopilot so we're free for the rest. But when we want to change – quit smoking, start exercising, stop biting our nails – the effort burns energy we can no longer use elsewhere. Everything else gets that much harder.
We are the sum of our habits.
Many traits we think of as part of who we are are actually habits we could change. What psychologists call "the declarative" ("that's just how I am, I love this, I hate that, I always do such and such, etc.") is often an excuse for a way of doing things we don't have the energy to fix.
And there's comfort in fatalism. It's easier to say "that's how I am" than to try doing things differently.
James Clear describes this link between identity and habit in Atomic Habits. How cultured we are today, he says, is the result of our reading habits over the past ten years. Our health, the result of our eating and exercise habits over the past ten years. Our finances, of our work and saving habits over the past ten years.
And the person we'll be in ten years, the result of the habits we build today.
But what I find fascinating – and what has really helped me grow these past few years – is recognizing that we know almost nothing about where our habits come from.
Most of the time, we have no idea how our habits started. The older they are, the less we know. And since they control a large part of our lives, that amounts to saying that, by and large, we don't know why we do what we do. Worse: when someone asks, we make things up, we invent excuses that mix "that's how I am" with hazy stories about the past, beliefs, society... Anything but admit we don't know.
Think about it: why do you eat three times a day? Where does your relationship with work, success and failure come from? How did your addictions start? Your passions? Why do you listen to this music, watch these shows, trust this group over that one?
Where does it all come from? Your parents? School? Television? Work?
And above all: if you don't know how or why these habits took hold, how can you tell whether they're actually good for you?