In search of lost habits

I expect you have managed to break some of your unloved habits, and to cultivate others that you embrace. Given the well-known difficulties involved in breaking and making habits, our own successful breaks and makes are significant achievements. But do you ever pause to consider the habits you have loved and yet somehow lost along the way? In my case, these include home bread-making; limiting my daily caffeine intake; going to bed very early; checking emails just once a day; and switching off my mobile phone and leaving it in the kitchen overnight. I liked those habits. I miss them.

My only habit-related expertise comes from the lived experience of trying to make and maintain desired habits, and to notice and break undesired ones – with mixed results, I should add. I have not directly tackled the subject of habits in my research. However, the publication of Sylvie Delacroix’s rich and nuanced Habitual Ethics? (Bloomsbury, 2022) provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on some habit-related questions and puzzles. Indeed, the book prompts me to wonder why I haven’t thought in much detail about habits before, since Delacroix has done an excellent job of persuading me that habits are of substantial importance in our moral and political, individual and collective lives, particularly when it comes to thinking about possibilities for change. The question which motivated Delacroix to write the book was: ‘what enables us to periodically stand against commonly accepted norms to initiate change in the way we develop the standards governing our way of living together?’ (21). Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines and literatures, she illustrates just how and why understanding the role of habits assists in attempts to answer that question. It is especially pertinent, emphasises Delacroix, in contexts like ours where we constantly encounter new social media platforms and ‘profile-based, personalised optimisation tools’, which may impact ‘our capacity for critical agency and ongoing transformation’, often in ways we don’t notice or comprehend (115).

Though we think we know a habit when we see one, it seems they are surprisingly hard to pin down. They are ubiquitous but also multifaceted. They come in ‘all shapes and colours’ (3). We can acquire them ‘intentionally’ or ‘unintentionally’ (2). We learn that ‘habit requires repetition’ and that something is only a habit if it has ‘at least momentarily escaped your conscious awareness’ (2). When something is a habit, it ‘requires less [cognitive] effort’ of us (3). Habits save us time and brain space. According to Delacroix, none of this means that habits necessarily sit in opposition to conscious reflection, deliberation, and decision-making. We are able to reflect critically on at least some of our habits (11).

At the same time, as Delacroix highlights, it is difficult to capture exactly how and when something transforms from not-habit to habit, as well as exactly what connects and distinguishes habits from cognate but different phenomena, such as reflexes, skills and addictions. Habits apparently range from the more biological and organic (e.g., breathing and sleeping, 55), to the social and cultural (e.g., shaking hands when meeting people, 4), to the expert and professional (e.g., an experienced doctor’s routine during a check-up, 45), and beyond. While some habits are quite rigid, others remain malleable. In fact, Delacroix points out that ‘habitual ethics’ is only a possibility ‘because and to the extent that we develop habits that are malleable enough to remain at the service of the evolving demands of our ethical life’ (119). Habits can make things possible (e.g., reading this paper, 1), and can make things difficult (e.g., noticing the need for change, 87). In Delacroix’s words, habits are ‘essential to our physical and mental well-being. Many make us capable of wondrous things, including the art of living together. Some hold us back, sometimes painfully so’ (3). Habits are intricately connected to contextual cues, and so we need to be aware of the ways in which contexts – including structural and environmental factors – contribute to habit formation, plasticity/rigidity, manipulation, and so forth (e.g., in online environments, 115).

When encountering an academic debate as a non-expert, as I am here, it is fascinating to learn of the existing fault-lines in the scholarly literature. Some readers, Delacroix notes, will dismiss the very idea of ‘“habitual ethics” as a contradiction in terms’, and so an important part of Delacroix’s quest in the book is to show that it is not a contradiction and should be taken seriously (134, 6). As someone raised in a religious family, the first thought that came to my mind was almost the opposite one: the idea that the habitual and the ethical are in contradiction struck me as curious and unfamiliar. The book doesn’t address religious ethics and beliefs, but that would be another fascinating line of inquiry for Delacroix’s study of habitual ethics. For example, it seems that a central objective of religious parenting and child-rearing is to inculcate desired ethical habits in children, through teaching and repetition. Religious communities recognise the importance of environment for supporting wanted habits and breaking unwanted ones.¹ Though I am no longer religious, I recognise that many of my ‘better’ ethical ‘habits’ – things I continue to do almost instinctively – owe themselves to that upbringing.

So some habits really do stick around for the long haul. The book is principally focused on concerns about the plasticity, malleability, and adaptability of ingrained habits. That focus makes sense for Delacroix’s purposes and interests in possibilities for positive individual and collective change. One theme to which I found myself returning, however, relates to the challenges involved in deliberately inculcating and maintaining desired habits. As I read the book I started to understand – as is probably obvious to habit researchers – that there is a symbiotic relationship between making and breaking habits. To acquire and cultivate a new desired habit I will have to resist/replace/break a whole range of existing (often ingrained) habits. I will have to be attentive to contextual cues. This inspired me to ask the following questions, as possible starting points for future conversations on these themes.

Returning to my opening longing for habits loved and lost, it is very interesting to me that some habits are hard to break and others are easy to lose. I am keen to learn more about which ones are hard to break and which ones are easy to lose, and why. Is it related to the content of the habit? For example, is it harder to break a habit that we find simple and/or fun, and easier to lose a habit that we find difficult and/or dull? Is it related to how the performance/non-performance of the habit makes us feel? Is it related to the strength of the habit, the length of time we’ve had the habit, or whether we acquired it intentionally or unintentionally? Or perhaps it’s about genetics and personality? Or is it about environment and contextual cues? Or something else? Or – more likely – is it some combination of those?

Let’s take my own loved and lost habits as a starting point. The following is all true: (1) home bread-making became a habit for me during the Covid pandemic lockdowns. I was in my home for most of the day, every day. The context changed when the lockdowns ended. (2) While I was pregnant and nursing I was very conscious of what I consumed and I was also very tired, hence the relative ease of limiting my caffeine intake and going to bed very early every night during that period of my life. I am neither pregnant nor nursing now. (3) There seem to be times in one’s career when it is easier and times when it is more difficult to stick to checking emails just once a day, given the changing nature of one’s responsibilities, volume of emails, importance of being available, and so forth. So it isn’t surprising that I lost the habit of checking emails just once a day when my work responsibilities intensified and multiplied. Yet, equally, it is also true that there are people who took up home bread-making during Covid-19 lockdowns and maintained the habit when the context changed. Some people will have developed similar abstemious habits to mine during pregnancy and nursing, but will have kept them afterwards. There will be plenty of people with far more intensive and demanding jobs who stick to checking emails just once a day. What’s more, I have retained some of my habits through changing contexts and periods of my life, and so on. All of that suggests that the story about why any particular habit is difficult to break or difficult to keep for any particular person may be quite complex and individualised. What of collective habit breaking and losing?

In addition, while reading Delacroix’s book, I realised that the range of things we call ‘habits’ is extremely broad. My partner is sitting next to me right now, and I see that he is biting his nails. He has had the nail-biting habit since childhood and does it instinctively, without thinking. It is a relatively simple action: move hand up to mouth and nibble on nail. Nail-biting is a habit when one finds oneself nibbling at one’s nails repeatedly, without thinking. By contrast, consider ‘jogging’, which is one of the ‘habits’ that Delacroix mentions in her book (2–3). The act of jogging itself is also relatively simple: something like moving one’s legs in a continuous running motion for a while. But the ‘habit of jogging’ presumably normally requires a whole host of additional behaviour preceding (and following?) the jogging part itself, including fixing on a time to run, locating your running clothes and shoes, dressing in those clothes, finding a place to run, moving to the allotted place, and so on. This makes me wonder whether we ought to think of the ‘habit of jogging’ as a single habit after all. In order for jogging to be a habit, it looks as though a person has to develop a number of jog-adjacent/jog-conducive habits, too. So what exactly are the boundaries around ‘a habit’? Where does one habit end and another begin? Many things that are described as a ‘habit' seem to be more like ‘jogging’ (requiring a string of multiple, habitual behaviours) rather than like nail-biting. Does that matter? Is ‘habit’ a useful umbrella term for them all anyway, or would it be preferable to consider them as distinct phenomena?

Now, there seems to be at least one obvious reason why it would be easier to lose a jogging ‘habit’ than a nail-biting habit: nail-biting demands so much less of us (e.g., in terms of equipment, preparation, time, and physical and cognitive effort) than jogging. I somehow managed to lose my ‘switching off my mobile phone and leaving it in the kitchen overnight habit’ without noticing I had lost it. Then one day I realised that I was in my bedroom scrolling on my mobile phone. That carefully cultivated habit required all sorts of behaviours, many of them deliberate, as well as various contextual cues. Of course, it is possible that I hadn’t really properly established it as a habit at all, even though I think/thought of it as a habit. Perhaps it was a habit-in-the-making, or perhaps it was just a very weak habit. Or perhaps its strength waxed and waned over time. Or maybe these more complex behavioural chains are importantly different in kind from the sort of things that people come to do ‘unconsciously’.

In the social and political realm, one familiar method for assisting people in breaking undesired habits and developing desired ones is by ‘nudging' them.² The idea is to adapt aspects of their ‘choice architecture’ so as to make selecting the ‘better’ choice easier and more likely – for example, by moving the confectionary further away from the tills at the supermarket, and by supplying smaller plates at a buffet. Unsurprisingly, there is much debate about the ethics of nudges, and the ways they intervene in the framing of people’s choices in order to affect their behaviour.³ Nudgers themselves argue that all sorts of actions and omissions and policies intervene in the framing of people’s choices in order to affect their behaviour. What might distinguish acceptable (benign, rather than obviously nefarious) interventions from unacceptable ones?

Delacroix is an expert in data ethics, and is keenly aware that we live in a ‘world in which habits are exploited with more precision than ever before by technological and regulatory interventions’ (8). As with concerns about nudging, it seems to me that we ought to worry about interventions that happen behind our backs and indeed where their effectiveness relies on their happening behind our backs. I’d also be worried about interventions that infantilise us. Transparency and respect are key. Delacroix points out that ‘social media platforms and recommender tools of various kinds’ have a distinctive feature: ‘they do not lend themselves to open co-construction’. This, Delacroix argues, can lead to ‘the unhealthy rigidification of habits’, because ‘habits that I once co-negotiated with and within my environment become unquestionable “givens”’ (123). Delacroix is concerned that this rigidification of habits can be alienating, adversely affecting ‘our capacity for transformative agency by halting the possibility of experimentation’ (124). Delacroix meticulously shows how we lose opportunities for chance encounters, to offer feedback, to shape, challenge and resist aspects of our environment.

Again, for good reason, Delacroix’s focus here is on maintaining plasticity and malleability in the face of the ethical threats accompanying rigidification. What happens when we shift the focus onto the difficulties involved in making and retaining desired ethical (and other) habits? I would welcome an app that prompts me to call my Grandma every day. As a layperson, I feel anxious about the prospect of my daughter becoming hooked on the social media platform Snapchat through its clever promotion of ‘Snapstreaks’ – as I understand it, the app encourages users to keep sending ‘snaps’ to friends on a regular basis in order to maintain a Snapstreak. This is an effective way to ensure that users stay engaged and invested in the app. By contrast, I also feel excited at the prospect of her becoming hooked on learning a new language via a very similar incentive structure on the language-learning programme, Duolingo. Furthermore, experience tells me that, however much we think we are hooked on a tool or platform, social groups are fickle, and trends come and go (see MySpace, FriendsReunited, and possibly also … Twitter/X? Facebook/Meta?). In the past, I thought I wasted too much time on Facebook, worried about it for ages, and then eventually left Facebook. Problem solved! (Then I joined Twitter …) I suppose we can worry too much about the prospects of becoming trapped. We exist in a world of many alternatives, of good and less good influences and examples, of diverse people with their ranges of desired and undesired habits, of ‘couch to 5K-ers’ and ‘5K back to couch-ers’.⁴

Right, at this point I should probably put my phone away, make some bread, and head to bed. Oh, and my Google calendar is telling me that it is time to call my Grandma, and that this contribution is overdue. Let me just quickly check my email.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an illuminating discussion of habit and religion, see CL Carlisle, ‘Habit, Practice, Grace: Towards a Philosophy of Religious Life’ in F Ellis (ed), New Models of Religious Understanding (Oxford University Press 2018) 97–115.

2 See for example RH Thaler and CR Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (Yale University Press 2008).

3 For further information, see AT Schmidt and B Engelen, ‘The Ethics of Nudging: An Overview’ (2020) 15(4) Philosophy Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12658.

4 For the uninitiated, see <www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/running-and-aerobic-exercises/get-running-with-couch-to-5k/#:~:text=Couch%20to%205K%20is%20a,each%20of%20the%209%20weeks>.