September 23, 2025 | Erin Bluvas, [email protected]
New research published in Psychology & Health has good news for public health interventionists and the populations they serve.
Health promotion education and behavior associate professor Amanda Rebar teamed up with faculty from Central Queensland University and the University of Surrey
to assess how many of our everyday behaviors are driven by habit. They found that
the majority of these actions (66.34%, in fact) are, indeed, habitual – suggesting
that making healthier lifestyle changes may be less about starting from scratch and
more about swapping one habit for another.
“Many psychology models portray people as rational decision makers who carefully deliberate
over the pros and cons of their options prior to choosing how to act,” says Rebar,
who studies motivation of health behaviors and how to make or break habits. “However,
previous research has shown that one of the most reliable predictors of future behavior
is past behavior. Further, much of this repetitive behavior is undertaken with minimal
forethought and is instead generated by the automatic influence of habit.”
Intentional actions are slow and effortful, whereas relying on habits leads to smooth
and efficient behavior that individuals can engage in through repetitive actions that
require limited conscious awareness. But how much and to what extent do we lean on
habits as we go through our daily lives?
To answer these questions, the researchers designed an ecological momentary assessment
study to estimate the proportion of everyday behaviors that are actually habits. They
also looked at alignment between intentions and habits, concepts that are frequently
portrayed as oppositional but are often complementary – likely because habits are
typically formed through the repetition of an intended behavior. For example, switching
from cereal to overnight oats might have started as an effortful, intentional action
each morning but soon becomes a habit through repetition.
Many psychology models portray people as rational decision makers who carefully deliberate
over the pros and cons of their options prior to choosing how to act. However, previous
research has shown that one of the most reliable predictors of future behavior is
past behavior.
The team recruited 105 participants to complete six daily surveys on their moment-to-moment
activities over the course of a week. The behaviors the participants were engaged
in at the time of each survey prompt varied widely, with the most common activities
including employment, education, or volunteer duties (21.7%), domestic or childcare
activities (17.9%), screen time (17.2%), and eating or drinking (10.7%). Exercise
came in at only 5.9%.
After coding and scoring the survey responses, the authors found that most daily behaviors
(66.34%) were habitually instigated and 87.6% of habits were habitually executed.
A notable outlier was exercise, which was more likely to be habitually instigated
but less likely to be habitually executed. They also discovered that 76.2% of daily
behaviors were intentional, providing evidence of significant overlap (46%) between
habits and intentions.
“Our study shows that two-thirds of what people do each day is sparked by habit, and
the majority of the time those habits are intentional,” says Grace Vincent, a sleep
science associate professor at Central Queensland University’s Appleton Institute
and a co-author on the study. “This means that if we set out to create a positive
habit, whether that’s around better sleep hygiene, or nutrition, or general wellbeing
improvements, we can rely on an internal ‘autopilot’ to take over and help us maintain
those habits.
“For people who want to break their bad habits, simply telling them to ‘try harder’
isn’t enough,” adds Benjamin Gardner, a psychology professor at the University of
Surrey. “To create lasting change, we must incorporate strategies to help people recognize
and disrupt their unwanted habits and ideally form positive new ones in their place.”
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