We’re all familiar with habits. A good habit will have you at work on time, ready for the action of your day. A bad habit will have you calling in sick due to a hangover.

Habits make or break us, but what really… are they? How do they form, and how do we correct them?

How Habits Form

In an interview for Harvard Business Review, Charles Duhigg detailed the process for learning a habit. The author of The Power of Habit: Why we Do What we Do in Life and Business says a habit has three components:

A cue, which starts the process, a routine, which is the actual behavior of the habit, and a reward, which tells our brain to encode this pattern for future use.Let’s say that one day, maybe back in college or high school, you were feeling sad. A friend invited you over for drinks and for one night you forgot your troubles. Maybe you even made new friends who helped you get over your slump in the long term.The cue in that example was the feeling of sadness. The routine was a night of partying, and the reward, the thing that assured you’d do it again, was the feelings of bliss and new company.

Breaking a Habit

Let’s fast forward. You’re not in college anymore and you’re sad on a Tuesday. You finish an entire bottle of wine and take a few shots of tequila.

You pass out around midnight and wake up to call in sick because you feel worse than you did before the wine. Breaking this cycle will take more than sobriety. It will take some neural rewiring. You know the reward process of your habit, the feeling of bliss and escape. The diminished rewards are making you want to change. However, you may not know that the cue is sadness.To break a habit, you must isolate the cue and the reward. Charles Duhigg details his time breaking a habit of getting a cookie every afternoon.

First, he found that he received the urge for the cookie around 3:15-3:45pm. His cue was a time of day. Then, he thought he knew the reward. It was a cookie! He was, however, wrong.If the reward he sought was food, an apple would do. If the reward he sought was a quick sugar rush, coffee would also do the trick. He tried both along with a mid-day walk and nothing worked. Finally, he found that he simply loved going down to the cafeteria around 3:30pm to talk with his colleagues and get a break from work. He associated the cookie with socialization. So now, every day at 3:30pm, Charles takes a walk to find some friends and gossip some about work.Now, back to our drinking problem. The solution might be as simple as going out to spend time with friends when you feel sad. Maybe it wasn’t the alcohol that made you feel better, but the people. However, it could also be that you need a better way of dealing with your sadness. Going for a run releases endorphins, keeping a journal can help you deal with emotions, and professional counseling is a great option as well. Once you find that these things help you feel better, you will modify the unhealthy habit you formed around alcohol.

Without Thinking

Habits are stored in a different part of our brain than memory. We do them before we are consciously aware that they happen. For this reason it is integral to evaluate and change habits as needed. You never need to stay in a slump.