You know smoking is taking years off your life. You wish you would stop checking your phone first thing in the morning because looking at Instagram photographs of your friends’ beach vacations is making you miserable. You are determined to start taking a daily walk but no matter how firm your resolve the night before, you just can’t bring yourself to get out the door in the morning. We all have things about ourselves that we wish were different: habits that niggle at us, actions we take that we know aren’t good for our health and well-being. We want to change, sure. But how do we do it? Why Do We Get Into Bad Habits In The First Place? “Writing is a habit,” Mark Bauerlein, Ph.D., professor emeritus, used to tell his students when I worked as his teaching assistant at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, “and a habit is …