You probably remember when you took your last shower, but if I ask you to examine your routine more closely, you might discover some blank spots. Which hand do you use to pick up the shampoo bottle? Which armpit do you soap up first?

Bathing, brushing your teeth, driving to work, making coffee—these are all core habits. In 1890, the psychologist William James observed that living creatures are nothing if not “bundles of habits.” Habits, according to James’s worldview, are a bargain with the devil. They make life easier by automating behaviors you perform regularly. (I would rather attend to what I read in the news on a given morning, for example, than to the minutiae of how I steep my daily tea.) But once an action becomes a habit, you can lose sight of what prompts it, or if you even like it very much. (Maybe the tea would taste better if I steeped it longer.)

Around the new year, countless people pledge to reform their bad habits and introduce new, better ones. Yet the science of habits reveals that they are not beholden to our desires. “We like to think that we’re doing things for a reason, that everything is driven by a goal,” Wendy Wood, a provost professor emerita who studies habit at the University of Southern California, told me. But goals seem like our primary motivation only because we’re more conscious of them than of how strong our habits are. In fact, becoming aware of your invisible habits can boost your chances of successfully forming new, effective habits or breaking harmful ones this resolution season, so that you can live a life dictated more by what you enjoy and less by what you’re used to.

James was prescient about habits, even though he described them more than 100 years ago. Habitual action “goes on of itself,” he wrote. Indeed, modern researchers have discerned that habits are practically automatic “context-response associations”—they form when people repeat an action cued by some trigger in an environment. After you repeat an action enough times, you’ll do it mindlessly if you encounter the cue and the environment. “That doesn’t mean that people have no recollection of what they did,” David Neal, a psychologist who specializes in behavior change, told me. “It just means that your conscious mind doesn’t need to participate in the initiation or execution of the behavior.”

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Our conscious goals might motivate us to repeat a particular behavior, and so serve as the spark that gets the habit engine going. In fact, “people who are best at achieving their goals are the ones who purposefully form habits to automate some of the things that they do,” Benjamin Gardner, a psychologist of habitual behavior at the University of Surrey, told me. He recently enacted a flossing habit by flossing each day in the same environment (the bathroom), following the same contextual cues (brushing his teeth). “There are days when I think, I can’t remember if I flossed yesterday, but I just trust I definitely did, because it’s such a strong part of my routine,” he said.

But even habits that are deliberately begun are worth reevaluating every so often, because once they solidify, they can break away from the goals that inspired them. If our goals shift, context cues will still trigger habitual behavior. A 1998 meta-analysis found that intentions could predict only actions that are done occasionally, such as getting a flu shot, and not actions that were repeated regularly, such as wearing a seat belt. In one study from 2012, students who often went to a sports stadium raised their voices when they saw an image of that stadium, even if they didn’t intend to. And scientists have shown that habitual behaviors and goal-directed behaviors involve different pathways in the brain. When an action becomes a habit, it becomes more automatic and relies more on the sensorimotor system. When scientists damage the parts of animals’ brains that are related to goal-directed behavior, the animals start behaving more habitually. (There remains some debate, however, about whether any human action can truly be independent from goals.)

And yet, people tend to explain their habitual behavior by appealing to their goals and desires. A 2011 study found that people who said they’d eat when they got emotional weren’t actually more likely to snack in response to negative feelings; eating behaviors were better explained by habit. In a 2022 study, Wood and her colleagues asked people why they drank coffee. The participants said they did so when they were tired, but in fact, when they logged their coffee drinking, it was only weakly correlated with their fatigue. “They didn’t have a desire to drink coffee,” Wood said. “It was just the time when they typically did during the day.”

[Read: The long-held habits you might need to reconsider]

Habits also maintain their independence by not being as sensitive to rewards. If you don’t like something the first time you try it, you probably won’t repeat the experience. But habits can persist even if their outcome stops being pleasing. In one study Wood worked on with Neal and other colleagues, people with a habit of eating popcorn at the movies ate more stale popcorn than those without the habit. Those with a popcorn habit reported later that they could tell the popcorn was gross, but they just kept eating it. “It’s not that they are totally unaware that they don’t like it,” Wood said. “The behavior continues to be triggered by the context that they’re in.” It’s not so terrible to endure some stale popcorn, but consider the consequences if more complex habitual actions—ones related to, say, work-life balance, relationships, or technology—hang around past their expiration date.

In the face of invisible habits, awareness and attention are powerful weapons. In a recent study, Gardner asked people who slept fewer than six hours a night to describe their bedtime routines in detail. Doing so revealed pernicious bedtime habits they weren’t aware of before. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has similarly suggested making a “Habits Scorecard,” a written list of all of your daily habits that includes a rating of how positively, negatively, or neutrally they affect your life.

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Neutral habits, such as the timing of my yoga session, can be hardest to take stock of. And if they’re just humming along making your life easier, identifying them might feel pointless. But because habits won’t always have your latest intentions in mind, it’s worth keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t start working against you. Like it or not, people are destined to be bundled up with habits. But knowing how they work—simply becoming aware of how unaware of them we can be—can help get you to a life with as little stale popcorn as possible.

At least the fever came on a Friday. Or at least that’s what I, an absolute fool, thought when my nine-month-old, Evan, spiked a 102-degree temperature after I picked him up from day care recently. That meant he’d have three days to recover and would be back at day care on Monday.

When the fever rose to 104 on Saturday, my husband and I grew concerned, and when it persisted on Sunday, we took him to urgent care. They diagnosed Evan with an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics, which should take “a day or two” to work, the doctor said.

Okay, fine; we would miss a day of work. Our jobs, thank God, are flexible about such things.

Except on Tuesday, Evan still had a fever. His ear infection had not gone away, and in fact had worsened to the point that he refused to eat or drink and screamed whenever he was laid down. On Wednesday, the doctor switched him to a new antibiotic. That Friday, a mere 48 hours away, I had to go record my audiobook, in a recording session that my publisher had already booked and paid for.

[Annie Lowrey: Why I can’t put down the vacuum]

Before we had Evan, my husband, Rich, and I had discussed such exigencies using Fair Play, a popular system—in the form of a book and card game—for divvying up chores. It aims to help women in heterosexual relationships, who tend to take on more household cognitive and physical labor, offload tasks onto their partner. Rich was assigned researching backup child care, for whenever our son was inevitably sick and could not attend day care.

The thing is, Rich never did research backup child care. Before people have kids, they don’t realize that parenting is like running a complex military operation in addition to holding down your regular job. He figured we wouldn’t need backup care, and because I was tired and pregnant and swamped with millions of other tasks, I didn’t do the research for him. So here we found ourselves.

Which is why, when Rich asked me, four days into Evan’s fever, as we were syringing Tylenol into his wailing mouth at 2 a.m., “What are we gonna do?” I very reasonably responded, “I don’t know, dickhead! What the fuck are we gonna do?”

I had done what the pop-feminist chore-management gurus suggested. I had tried to reduce my mental load by foisting ownership of and accountability for tasks onto my husband. The only slight hiccup in this plan is that if your husband doesn’t do the tasks, the system falls apart.

The problem, as both Fair Play’s author, Eve Rodsky, and I, and probably lots of other women, see it, is the men. Our husbands or male partners, enlightened though they may be, don’t notice what needs to be done, or they forget to do it, or they don’t know how to do it. This requires the woman to act as project manager, reminding her husband to clean the baby’s humidifier or to grab the yogurt snacks, and so on and so forth, as long as you both shall live.

In theory, Fair Play offers a good solution. The best-selling 2019 book, and its companion card deck, lay out all the chores a family could conceivably have—everything from buying birthday gifts to doing the dishes to taking out the trash—on 100 cards, which the couple is meant to divide. Though the resulting division might not quite be 50–50, it should feel equitable. Rodsky writes that the man in the relationship should take at least 21 cards. She told me that a popular way to keep track of who has which card is through the software program Trello.

Each person is to take complete “ownership” of their card, including its “conception, planning, and execution.” The same person remembers that it’s time to clean the countertops, finds the cleaning liquid, and actually uses it.

Of course, people’s definition of “clean” varies, and many women have higher standards when it comes to tidiness and caretaking. Single, childless women tend to do more housework than single, childless men. Rodsky addresses this through something called the “minimum standard of care,” or a basic level of competence for each task that both spouses agree upon in advance. This means no cramming all the Tupperware into a Jenga tower if the MSC, as it is known, calls for it to be stacked neatly. (Left mostly unresolved is what to do if you can’t agree on a minimum standard of care, or if one partner doesn’t live up to it.) You maintain this system through regular check-ins with your spouse, at which you assess how things are going and re-deal the cards if necessary.

Sure, this may sound like romance by McKinsey—a friend of mine called these chore check-ins “deeply unsexy”—but hundreds of thousands of people have bought the book or card deck. Couples seem to really need a way to talk about household labor, and Rodsky offers one.

Rodsky, a married mother of three based in Los Angeles, worked as a lawyer and philanthropic adviser before she developed Fair Play. She got the idea, she writes, when one day after she had hustled out the door with a bag of snacks, a FedEx package, a pair of kids’ shoes to be returned, and a client contract—literally with her hands full—her husband texted her, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” She was doing so much, but apparently she should have been doing the blueberries too.

It made her realize that despite a successful career, “I was still the she-fault parent charged with doing it all, buying the blueberries and masterminding our family’s day-to-day life while my husband … was still not much more than a ‘helper.’”

For the book, she interviewed hundreds of couples and immersed herself in research about the division of household labor. She came away with a set of facts and observations that may make you want to set your bra on fire and run off to a lesbian commune. Men hate to be nagged but, Rodsky writes, when pressed in interviews, they admit that they wait for their wife to tell them what to do around the house. Countless studies show that women do much more unpaid labor—housework and child care—than men do, even when both work outside the home. Rodsky cites a study showing that after couples who claim to be egalitarian have a baby, men cut back on the amount of housework they do by five hours a week. In part because of this disparity, working women, on average, see their incomes cut in half after having children.

You may be thinking “not all men,” but it’s an awful lot of men. Several studies show that women score higher on two facets of the conscientiousness personality trait: orderliness and dutifulness. In layman’s terms, this means women like things neater than men do, on average, and they pay more attention to the rules and structure of home life.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary. It could be that women are socialized from girlhood to be cleaner and more organized, and are judged in adulthood for having a messy home more than men are. Socialization might have contributed to my own orderliness: My parents are immigrants who, from what I can tell, have never taken a gender-studies course. When I told my mom about the Fair Play system, she said, “That’s dog nonsense. Men don’t know what to do with kids. Especially your man.”

It could be that because women bear disproportionate costs of childbearing in the form of pregnancy, birth, and in many cases breastfeeding, many feel more invested. They may pay greater attention to their children, and their various needs and proclivities, than the kids’ father does. And men tend to earn more than women, so when one person’s work has to take a hit for the kids’ sake, it’s usually the woman’s. Rodsky quotes one father as saying, “I’m so proud of how well my wife balances work with her family life.” Her family life.

I heard about Fair Play during the pandemic, and I thought it could help settle the chore wars that had been simmering between Rich and me for years already. Within a few weeks, we’d read the book, bought the cards, and scheduled a weekly check-in on our Google Calendars. It worked for a while. But after I got pregnant, I suddenly felt the need to, for example, research the difference between strollers and “travel systems,” while Rich did not. We thus found it virtually impossible to play fairly for more than a few weeks at a time. After Evan was born, it didn’t seem possible at all.

To name just a few of 10,000 examples: Rich was in charge of cleaning the floors, but he forgot to do it unless I asked. We hired a cleaning lady. He forgot to pay the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady texted me to ask about getting paid. I would task him with taking Evan to a doctor appointment (which I had made), and he would forget the diaper bag. Mentally, I willed Evan to have a huge blowout in the waiting room, just to teach him a lesson.

Perhaps these are personal foibles, specific to me and my husband. But the broader system—and indeed, any system of this kind—seems like it would crumble for any couple operating under the pressures of modern life, especially if you don’t live near family.

Let’s say you’re holding the “dinner” card, but you really need help with the execution part—peeling the potatoes—because you got stuck on a work call. According to Rodsky, what you’re supposed to do in this case is ask for help from “someone in your village other than your partner.” The problem, of course, is that I, and so many other moms, don’t have a village. My parents live a flight away. Rich’s parents are dead. We have no other family nearby, and we have to drive an hour to see most of our friends. Often, I’m “assigning” Rich tasks, even if they’re technically my “job,” because I’m literally holding a crying baby and no one else is available to help.

Rodsky herself seems deeply empathetic to people who don’t have the money or time to maintain a perfectly run household. She grew up with a single mother, so financially pinched that they used trash bags as luggage. She told me that when she would go into the kitchen at night to get her disabled brother some water, she would close her eyes for a second to allow the cockroaches time to scatter off the piles of dirty dishes.

On our call, Rodsky suggested that one solution might be thinking of your village as a neighbor or even a friendly security guard at a local store—two individuals her own mother relied on for occasional help when she was a girl. But I don’t know my neighbors or my local shopkeepers well enough to do this.

Rich and I have also struggled with the minimum standard of care. At one point, Rich tried to convince me that floors don’t actually need mopping. They can just be dirty! Rodsky suggests that, in situations like these, you should “collaborate on what is reasonable within your own home,” ultimately reverting to a “reasonable person” standard from jurisprudence. But the problem is that in our home, and in many others, there is no judge or jury. We are prosecutor and defense attorney, and there’s no verdict in sight.

A recent study of the Fair Play system conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that the system did work—at least among the couples who actually applied it. When participants in the study completed the Fair Play program and divided the household labor more equitably, their mental health improved, their burnout decreased, and their relationship quality improved. But here’s the rub: Only about a quarter of the participants actually completed the Fair Play program. Darby Saxbe, a USC psychologist and an author of the study, told me that participants might have dropped out because they didn’t pay for or even actively seek out the program; they were offered it. Or perhaps being overwhelmed with parenting and domestic labor didn’t leave a lot of time for divvying up parenting and domestic labor. Still, Saxbe thinks the program is worth considering, especially before couples have kids. “We know domestic labor is a huge reason that a lot of women initiate divorce and separation, but we don’t have a lot of great solutions,” she told me.

Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies the division of household labor, told me Fair Play is the program she tends to refer people to when they tell her they’re struggling with chore management. But people who seek it out, she said, often struggle with “overload, maybe some conflict in the relationship.” These are the very things that become hurdles to doing Fair Play.

I asked Rodsky what to do if your partner just doesn’t do his cards—the issue that my husband and I keep running into. Rodsky told me this can mean that the partner who does do their cards has poor boundaries. “They haven’t really done that internal work yet to really understand what a boundary means,” she says. “What are they willing to accept?” Rodsky says that for her, setting a boundary meant telling her husband, “I’m not willing to live like that anymore.”

But I am willing to live this way. I’m not getting divorced, because there is too much work to do. Right now a helper is worse than a co-pilot, but it’s better than nothing. And, well, when we’re not screaming at each other about Clorox wipes, we do like each other.

Daminger also suggested doing some “deep work” to understand why a (hypothetical) husband (but actually mine) wasn’t doing his fair share. It could be that “you and your partner have very different underlying goals and intentions,” Daminger said. “And I think if that’s the case, then systems for dividing up tasks better are probably not going to be effective.”

[Joe Pinsker: The gender researcher’s guide to an equal marriage]

When reached for comment, Rich called this article “very good” and “delightful,” but admitted that he has “a vastly different thinking pattern around what is clean and what isn’t clean.” Then he pointed out that he, unbidden, cleans “both sides of the garbage-disposal cover.” Then we got into a fight about how often he initiates Swiffering without being asked.

The more I talked with Rodsky and Daminger, the worse I felt. I felt bad for having an imperfect husband and an imperfect life. Why didn’t I know my neighbor well enough for her to be my village? Why did I marry a sloppy guy who doesn’t Swiffer? Why did I have a baby if I don’t have good boundaries, or even a Trello account? I came away with the conclusion that Rich and I are just not very compatible in this way, and that to approach compatibility would take a whopping amount of couple’s therapy that we don’t have time for right now.

Instead, our strategy is not one that Rodsky would like. I bark out orders, and Rich kinda-sorta fulfills them, most of the time. He doesn’t understand Evan’s needs the way I do, and it would be too hard for me to explain them to him. I’m pickier and cleaner than he is, and it will probably always be this way. Rodsky referred to this kind of thinking as being “complicit in your own oppression.” I call it getting our kid to middle school in one piece.

There is another element to it, though. During that frightening, feverish week, I spent hours swabbing Evan’s forehead with a cold washcloth and, because it hurt his ears to nurse, giving him sips of breast milk from a cup—his first-ever drink from something other than a bottle. I had to admit that part of me liked cuddling him and easing his distress—even if it was technically Rich’s turn to be on duty. It was mental, emotional, and physical labor that didn’t pay and that I, on some level, enjoyed. It wasn’t fair. But life rarely is.