From a psychological perspective, patterns of behaviour are often cued and thereby controlled, by environmental and social contingencies, or settings. One reason why behaviour change is so difficult is because the contingencies help elicit behaviour, This means that most behaviour you demonstrate is evoked by the context within which it occurs, rather than being a pure and independent act of free will. Consider this: why are you reading this? Wouldn’t you rather be doing something else? Eating? sleeping? talking or playing with friends? But you are reading this because the contingencies that exist around the context of studying elicit certain patterns of behaviour. Why do you study? Because you have certain goals you want to achieve. Why do you have these goals…? As you can see, you are inexorably tied into your own social contexts in such a way that makes changing the patterns of your behaviour rather difficult. Try stopping studying for six months and see what happens. You would find it very hazardous to your career to do so and I’m not advocating that you do this. But it serves to illustrate how behaviour is controlled by our contexts a lot more than we generally acknowledge.