Habit is a major player in our lives, no matter how free-spirited we may imagine ourselves to be. Experts estimate that 40–45% of everything we do in a day is habit; we just don’t think about it anymore. The way you reverse out of your driveway, for instance, or how you make your bed or brush your teeth: in the beginning you had to think about what you were doing; now you don’t. Try brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand – you really have to concentrate. But if you use your habitual hand (called ‘habitual’ for a reason!), you can literally do it with your eyes closed.
When we think about habits, it’s usually the bad ones we focus on: smoking, eating ice cream when we’re sad, biting our nails when we’re stressed, chewing our lips,. We rarely think about the habits we want to , because we don’t think of them as habits; we think of them as goals: ‘I’m going to lose 5kg’; ‘I’m going to run a marathon’; ‘I’ll write in a journal every day.’
