Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patters can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviours.

If you want to do something that requires willpower - like going for a run after work - you have to conserve your willpower muscle during the day.

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

What we know from lab studies is that it's never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure - that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.