WHY YOUR BRAIN BUILDS HABITS

After you stumble upon an unexpected reward, you alter your strategy
for next time. Your brain immediately begins to catalog the events that
preceded the reward. Wait a minute—that felt good. What did I do right
before that?
This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try
differently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the useful
actions get reinforced. That’s a habit forming.
Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate
the process of solving it. Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions
that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly. As behavioral
scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to
recurring problems in our environment.”
As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases. You
learn to lock in on the cues that predict success and tune out everything
else. When a similar situation arises in the future, you know exactly what to
look for. There is no longer a need to analyze every angle of a situation.
Your brain skips the process of trial and error and creates a mental rule: if
this, then that. These cognitive scripts can be followed automatically
whenever the situation is appropriate. Now, whenever you feel stressed, you
get the itch to run. As soon as you walk in the door from work, you grab the
video game controller. A choice that once required effort is now automatic.
A habit has been created.
Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. In a sense, a habit
is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in
the past. Whenever the conditions are right, you can draw on this memory
and automatically apply the same solution. The primary reason the brain
remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future.
Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the
bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time.
As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious
attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the
conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do
automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed.
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can
allocate your attention to other tasks.

Despite their efficiency, some people still wonder about the benefits of
habits. The argument goes like this: “Will habits make my life dull? I don’t
want to pigeonhole myself into a lifestyle I don’t enjoy. Doesn’t so much
routine take away the vibrancy and spontaneity of life?” Hardly. Such
questions set up a false dichotomy. They make you think that you have to
choose between building habits and attaining freedom. In reality, the two
complement each other.
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who
don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of
freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for
the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be
short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like
you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions
about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when
do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making
the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed
for free thinking and creativity.
Conversely, when you have your habits dialed in and the basics of life
are handled and done, your mind is free to focus on new challenges and
master the next set of problems. Building habits in the present allows you to
do more of what you want in the future.

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