Why are habits so hard to break, even for a moment?

March 30, 2006 5:32 PM

It's one thing to stop smoking, or stop biting your nails, or stop drinking, altogether -- what I want to know is, why is it sometimes so difficult to stop doing a habitual activity even for a few moments, while trying really hard?

Today, another person asked MeFi a question about blowing on food to cool it; that reminded me of a day many years ago, when I was eating gazpacho at a restaurant. No matter how much I tried not to, no matter how hard I fought against it, I couldn't keep myself from blowing on the spoonful of (cold) soup before putting it in my mouth. I failed to resist the temptation three spoonfuls out of every four.

Similarly, someone I know has an annoying physical habit they do when bored; however, if you call their attention to it, they still can't resist doing it. It's not a tick, or a tremor, or something involuntary -- it's a deliberate physical activity they can't resist the temptation to do, like scratching an itch.

Does anyone actually know why these habits are so hard to break, even for a moment, when you're consciously aware you're doing it and actively trying to stop?

posted by davejay to science & nature (9 comments total)

They're hard to break because they are reflexive, preprogrammed into your nervous system in such a way that the action takes place with minimal interaction from your brain.

A favorite game with some of my old martial arts buddies was to walk up to one another and toss a small object (keys, a ball, whatever) up over the other person's shoulder. The attempt to catch it was automatic, and you could pretty much count on something bad happening to you while your hands were up and your attention was on the object.
posted by tkolar at 5:55 PM on March 30, 2006

It is amazing how little people have to think to do things. If somebody has worked out a response to a situation they will respond without thinking even when the response is wrong.

Stereotypes are very real and are central in guiding behavior. I'm not talking about just things like racial stereotypes but more mundane stereotypes like 'soup is hot'.

Also much behavior is not centrally planned, but data driven by the environment. For example let’s say you want to get a glass of water from the kitchen sink. Do you have a detailed plan of what to do? A 'data driven' analysis says that the environment tells you into what to do next. Here is one scenario:

1. goal: go to glass cupboard.
2. glass cupboard says open me.
3. why are you looking at glasses - ah you remember you want water. grab a glass.
4. glass says fill me. goal: go to sink faucet.
5. sink faucet says turn me on.
6. glass in hand and water flow says put glass in water flow.
7. nearly full glass says turn off water flow.

In this type of action you really only have to plan going to the cupboard and remember that you want a glass of water. Otherwise the environment tells you what the stereotypical thing is to do.

Errors that people make in simple action sequences suggest that action triggering like the above is real. For example I witnessed one person who several times put an ice cube tray "back" in the cupboard above the freezer door of a refrigerator. It seems this person had a goal of go to X (the position in front of the refrigerator/cupboard) and the cupboard was louder than the freezer in telling the person what to do.

In general I would say that people don't think about 98% of what they do. You can cope very well with stereotypical responses to what you are focused on in your environment.

Only when these knee-jerk responses are wrong is there a problem if the person can't supervise and override them. And in that direction lies obsessive-compulsive disorders.

My guess is that most people are quite obsessive-compulsive and ridged with how they interact with the world. Being fixed in your ways is only a problem if the voices from the environment become overwhelming ("wash me", "count me", "turn me off", "scratch me", ...)
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 8:05 PM on March 30, 2006

Without getting in to too much handwavery about things that I'm underinformed about, I do recall reading about the way in which repeated activity tends to build more physical neuronal connections in the brain pathways activated by those activities or ways of thinking. It's self-reinforcing. Not sure if that'd be macro enough to actually reinforce observable behaviour, but it's an interesting question.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:12 PM on March 30, 2006

These answers are great--I don't feel so alone in my own autopiloting-quirkiness. Every time I walk into the kitchen at work to get something for a table, no matter what I actually need to get--steak sauce, bread, salad dressing--I walk straight to the drink mugs and start to pull a couple out before I realize that I'm not getting drinks, I need something else.

Part of the problem is you stop thinking "I don't need to blow on this" or "I don't need soda this trip" because you're thinking about other things (what you do need, eating the soup, your meeting tomorrow morning...).
posted by Cricket at 9:12 PM on March 30, 2006

Edgar Allen Poe addressed this all-too-human behavior in a story called The Imp of the Perverse as well as in "The Tell-Tale Heart" (discusion of the latter).
posted by Rash at 10:22 PM on March 30, 2006

A huge part of Buddhist practice is based around cultivating ways to make conscious decisions instead of mindlessly doing things by habit. Have a look at this book.
posted by teleskiving at 1:00 AM on March 31, 2006

I had one of Donald A. Norman's books stolen from me, I believe it was The Psychology of Everyday Things but it had list of the types of errors that people can make and why they make them...

Aha, all it took was finding one to enter into google and it brought up all of them. I still completely recommend the book.


Capture errors: Frequently done activity suddenly takes charge instead of the one you intended. Two different sequences with their initial stages in common

Description errors: Performing the correct action on the wrong object. Most frequent when wrong and right objects are physically close to each other

Data-driven errors: Triggered by the arrival of sensory data

Associative activation errors: Triggered by internal thoughts and associations

Loss-of-activation errors: Forgetting

Mode errors: Devices have different modes of operation, e.g., digital watch



What you're talking about with the soup seems to be a Description or possibly Data-Driven error. However this has little to do with habits of compulsion.

I hope this isn't a derail, but it's been something that's come up in conversation 3 or 4 times the past few days and my lack of details has been frustrating and it took this for me to actually dig it up....
posted by Brainy at 5:54 AM on March 31, 2006

Total derail, if I could make this small I would. I've found that the more you know about these errors, the more empathetic you can be. Someone was telling me a story they said was kind of embarassing but kind of funny. It revolved around them getting their shoe caught on a stair but instead of untangling they just continued to walk forward, falling flat on their face. Dumb mistake right? I see it as just a capture error and thought it normal and unembarassing.
posted by Brainy at 5:57 AM on March 31, 2006

Because your mind is obsessed with NOT doing whatever it is you're trying to avoid doing. Try NOT to think of a blue-eyed polar bear and that's exactly what you think of.
posted by suchatreat at 9:42 AM on March 31, 2006