A new study challenges the long-held idea that habits form only through slow, gradual repetition.
What if your habits don’t form through countless repetitions over months or years? What if the brain can decide, almost instantly, that a behavior is no longer worth thinking about?
That possibility is at the center of a new Johns Hopkins University study published in Nature Communications. The research challenges one of the most enduring ideas in psychology and neuroscience: that habits emerge through a slow, gradual process of reinforcement. Instead, the findings suggest that the brain may sometimes switch surprisingly quickly from deliberate decision-making to automatic behavior.
The discovery could help explain why some routines suddenly seem effortless after feeling intentional for so long. It may also offer new clues about how deeply ingrained behaviors, including unhealthy ones, might eventually be changed.
A Century of Assumptions About Habit Formation
Habits are essential to daily life. They allow the brain to automate routine actions, reducing the mental effort needed to navigate the world. From tying your shoes to driving a familiar route, habits free up cognitive resources for other tasks.
“For over 100 years, the theory of how habits form has been one of gradual strengthening and repetition: You do enough repetitions, and slowly over time the brain starts to realize, ‘I don’t need to be thinking about this anymore,’” said Kishore V. Kuchibhotla, senior author of the study and a neuroscientist who studies learning in humans and animals. “But the reason scientists tend to think of it as a gradual process is because of how we have studied it.”
Kuchibhotla and his colleagues suspected that the apparent gradual nature of habit formation might be influenced by the way researchers traditionally measure it.
A New Way to Study Habits
To investigate the process differently, Kuchibhotla and his colleagues developed an experiment designed to better reflect everyday decision making.
People do not choose drinks only because they are thirsty. They may select sparkling water or another favorite beverage simply because they enjoy it more than plain water.
“We essentially motivated them by something else – a taste preference,” Kuchibhotla said.
In the study, mice always had access to acidic water in their home cages, allowing them to stay hydrated even if they disliked the taste. When they responded to a specific sound, they received water they preferred.
Because the mice were not especially thirsty, they sometimes responded to the sound and sometimes ignored it. The researchers confirmed that this behavior was goal-directed because the animals only acted when they wanted the preferred water.
Then the behavior changed. At a specific point, the mice began responding to the sound every time, even when they no longer wanted the water. Rather than developing gradually, the shift appeared to happen suddenly, as if a switch had been turned on.
“What surprised us most is that nothing changed on our end. The animals simply switched strategies from one trial to the next. Capturing that kind of rapid behavioral reorganization is rare,” said lead author Sharlen Moore, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Brain recordings collected during the experiments pointed to a possible source of that switch: a specific brain region that may help control the transition between goal-directed and habitual behavior.
“The fact that it is so sudden implies that something is controlling it,” Kuchibhotla said.
Implications for Breaking Bad Habits
The researchers also observed that some mice returned to goal-directed behavior after spending long periods acting out of habit.
“It really shows how much our methods shape what we see: when we stop over-motivating the animals, we start to uncover aspects of behavior that were basically hidden before,” Moore said.
The findings were significant enough that the National Institutes of Health awarded the team a new grant to further investigate the potential mechanism behind this behavioral switch.
“Many habits are helpful for freeing up your mind for other things. But that’s not always the case. The fact that there may be a controller means maybe we can reverse maladaptive habits back to goal-directed behavior,” Kuchibhotla said. “Rather than thinking of habits as always being there no matter what, it’s possible that bad habits need not be there forever.”
Reference: “Revealing abrupt transitions from goal-directed to habitual behavior” by Sharlen Moore, Zyan Wang, Ziyi Zhu, Joy Wang, Ruolan Sun, Yeonjae A. Lee, Adam Charles and Kishore V. Kuchibhotla, 31 March 2026, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71048-0
The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01DC018650 and R00DC015014); and through fellowships from the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
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