What habits play a role in your life?

Habits are omnipresent, and when they’re bad, they can be very bad.

What habits play a role in your life? Perhaps dieting and smoking spring to mind. But our lives are actually full of many different habits.

A minimum of one-third of our waking life is powered by our unconscious, where we operate on auto-pilot, not fully cognizant of what we’re doing while we’re doing it. It’s not surprising, then, to find you have many more habits than you might think.

Social habits, such as who sits where at the family dinner table; work routines like saying “mm hmm” and “a-ha” during meetings; eating habits that help us sift through multitudes of food-related decisions every day – and the list goes on!

Do you ever catch yourself checking your email for the hundredth time only to discover that, still, nothing interesting has arrived in your inbox? Then you’ve experienced what behavioral psychologists call the partial reinforcement extinction effect, when you keep repeating the same action, even without reward, simply because you’re used to doing it unrewarded.

Even if we get the rare reward of an interesting email, we keep robotically refreshing our inbox regardless, as we’re used to the frustration.

But there are other habits that you can't see: habits of thought. If they are negative in nature, these habits can be connected to mental illnesses such as depression.

Whether thoughts are positive or negative depends on our appraisal of something that happens to us, and sometimes we appraise in unhealthy ways.

Imagine you lost your job. If you’re in the habit of perceiving yourself as powerless and culpable, you’ll have trouble fighting the negative emotions that unemployment entails.

Another type of habit is rumination – when you think about something over and over again. Some say that retrospection can help us learn from our supposed failures, but there’s a difference between reviewing your past experiences and wallowing in the misery and pain of them.