You walk into your weekly team meeting, your usual coffee shop, or a lecture hall, and, without even thinking, you walk right to the same spot. Someone else is there? You feel a strange, almost irrational irritation. Sounds familiar?
This doesn’t mean you're boring. What you are doing, according to psychologists, is actually very clever.
According to ‘Psychology of Habit, ’ a landmark review by Wendy Wood and Dennis Rünger, published in the Annual Review of Psychology, habits are the brain’s way of functioning efficiently. Over time, when a behavior is repeated in the same context, the brain automates it, moving control from the slow, effortful decision-making system to a faster, automatic one, the study says. In other words, it’s not quirky to pick the same seat. It’s your brain doing what it was designed to do.
Your brain saves energy, and that is a good thing
Here is something worth sitting with. According to the study titled ‘Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action ’ by Wendy Wood, Jeffrey M. Quinn, and Deborah A. Kashy, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, about 43 percent of people’s daily behaviors are habitual, meaning they are performed repeatedly in stable, familiar contexts and require very little conscious thought.
The study suggests that when people are doing something out of habit, they probably aren’t thinking about what they’re doing at all because the activity doesn’t require their active guidance. That’s probably almost half your day on autopilot, and that’s the point.
There are limits to how much the brain can consciously decide. In their Annual Review of Psychology review, Wood and Rünger found that when people act out of habit, the ready response in mind reduces deliberation: your brain isn’t burning energy re-evaluating the same low-stakes choices over and over again.
And as this research shows, people with strong habits think and process information in a way that makes it less likely they will even consider acting differently. By taking your usual seat, you have just taken one decision out of the mental queue.
