You can’t help discussing habits in the season of resolutions to change or break them.

We all start out with such strong resolve but often times fail to recognize the triggers that make us cave.

“Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they’ve done it enough, their behavior doesn’t follow their intentions,” Neal explains.

Neal says this has to do with the way that over time, our physical environments come to shape our behavior.

“People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment,” Neal says.