Making Habits, Breaking Habits

How long does it take to form a new habit? Say you want to start going to the gym regularly, eat more fruit, or practice a musical instrument. How long should it take before you stop having to force it and start doing it automatically? The surprising answers are found in Making Habits, Breaking Habits, a popular examination of one of the most powerful and under-appreciated processes in the brain. Without much conscious thought, we express--through our habits--who we are and what we believe. But we intuitively distrust the idea that our ingrained ways define us; we hold many of them in low regard and associate them with negative aspects of the self. At the same time, during much of everyday life, we make no grand decisions. We're led, instead, by simple habitual patterns of thought and behavior. Although we're not as proud of these actions, without them we wouldn't be able to prosper, and all the planning in the world would be worthless. Without habits, nothing would ever get done and society and our whole civilization would slip away into indecision and confusion. This book will show you how strange habits are and how they pervade every area of our lives, from our trips around shopping malls to our online habits. Making Habits, Breaking Habits shows how behavior isn't just a product of what we think, it also feeds back directly into our thoughts themselves. Where once our past behavior was ignored, as though it would always defer to our will, here you'll find a view of our species that integrates both thought and habit. It's at this wild frontier, between our will and our habitual behavior, that our true nature can be found.