The fact that most poor habits are common is explained by the idea that they have easy and instantaneous rewards. And most productive habits are rare because they have hard and far-away rewards.

It’s often easy to think of lying and telling the truth within these categories as well. As in, people lie because it’s the easy way out while telling the truth is the hard thing to do.

That’s actually not the case though.

Lying is one of the most cognitively intensive tasks you can do. It requires a tremendous amount of energy for your brain to do say something it is aware isn’t true. It is like playing a new role on its own.

But it can become easy. Because even though it requires extensive care from your frontal cortex to do at first, as you keep doing it, the action moves closer and closer to the hippocampus and becomes rather cognitively inexpensive to do.

It is true that we unconsciously look for the easy thing when it comes to habit building. But what that easy thing is can sometimes not be about our environment, genes, etc., but the choices we’ve made leading up to the moment.

You don’t have to view the good habit as the one that’s difficult and taxing. Your brain can figure out how to make a hard thing relatively easy. You just have to keep doing it long enough.