Habits

What are habits?

Habits are learned tendencies to respond to recurring cues with relatively little deliberate decision-making. Repeating a response in a stable context can build an association between that context and the response. Habit strength is therefore not the same as frequency: an action can happen often and still require planning and effort.

How habits develop

Wood and Neal (2007) describe how context–response associations develop and interact with goals. Wood and Rünger’s review (2016) also emphasizes that habitual and goal-directed activity can work together. A cue can help start an action without making the whole activity unconscious.

Research on exercise makes that distinction useful. Phillips and Gardner (2016) distinguished habitual initiation of exercise from automatic execution of the exercise itself. Starting a workout can become cue-driven while the workout still requires attention and effort.

The review of Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits uses this distinction to assess the book’s advice about starting and sustaining demanding activities.

Habits, routines, and practices

A routine is a recurring arrangement of actions. A habit is a learned response to a cue. A practice, in the distinction developed in Habits vs. Practices, is an activity that continues to require attention, effort, or judgment. These are different features of an activity, so they can coexist.

Consider someone who writes after breakfast. Sitting at the desk and opening a document may become habitual. Writing at that time is their routine. Deciding what an argument means, choosing evidence, and revising a confusing paragraph are parts of the writing practice. Getting started more readily does not make the intellectual work disappear.

How much behavior is habitual?

In two diary studies, Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) classified 35% and 43% of recorded behaviors as habitual, using frequent repetition in the same location as their criterion. The widely quoted 43% comes from the second study. It is not a fixed share of every person’s life, and it does not mean that 43% of human action occurs beyond conscious control.

There is no universal habit deadline

In Lally and colleagues’ study (2010), the often-cited 66 days was the median model-estimated time to approach an automaticity plateau among participants whose data fit the model well. Estimates ranged from 18 to 254 days. It was not a deadline or a success rate for every participant. A 2024 systematic review found a limited and varied evidence base for estimating how long health habits take to form.

Changing a habit

Start by identifying the response, the situation that prompts it, and what makes the action worth repeating. Changing a cue or practicing another response may help, but the replacement must fit the problem. If someone reaches for food because they are hungry, a reminder to do something else does not remove the hunger.

A recurring cue may help someone begin a complex activity. The activity itself can still require motivation, attention, and effort. Treating the whole thing as one habit hides those different problems.

The popular habit loop is a simplified description, not a complete theory of all habit learning. For a longer discussion, see What Is a Habit? and Habit Coaching. See habit formation for the development of cue–response associations.