Do you often catch yourself procrastinating doing your homework, biting your nails, or drinking coffee way too much? Bad habits can vary from person to person but, everyone has them. A habit can become second nature but people have no idea how it even became a bad habit. So, how do bad habits begin?

In the first stages of the development of a habit, your mind goes through a “habit loop.” The loop goes through three parts; cue: something that triggers your brain to go into automatic mode, routine: the act itself and lastly, reward: something your brain likes and will remember.

A person who drinks coffee every single day would be an example of this. A person tries coffee for the first time one morning. The person discovers they enjoyed the taste and the way they felt after drinking it. The next morning, your mind remembers the experience and you will want to drink it again since you enjoyed it so much. Eventually the person will continue this action, turning it into a bad habit.

Bad habits also begin from simply being bored. When people get bored they think of easy ways to distract themselves. Things like nail biting and procrastination are easy distractors for people. Then every time you get bored, your mind will automatically go back to that action, as if it is programmed into your brain.

Though bad habits are easy to make, they are even harder to break, but not impossible. By replacing the bad habits with healthier or better options, bad habits can be diminished. All habits start the same way, by simply changing the bad habit into a better one such as drinking a cup of water in the morning instead of a cup of coffee a bad habit can be changed. By repeating the action more and more your brain will soon replace the bad habit with the good one.