Here is a situation you may recognise. It's 4pm. You're busy at work, you finish writing an email and you press "send". One task is finished and there are, of course, more tasks waiting for you. That moment between tasks is just long enough for you to realise two things: one, you're tired and two, the work day is not over. As if by magic, you find yourself in the kitchen, opening cupboards. And low and behold, there are biscuits! Yay!!

"What has this to do with learning, Clare?" I hear you ask. "Why have you brought me to the kitchen to eat biscuits?" Well, once we understand the components of a habit, we can recognise them and then we can adapt them to help us achieve the outcome we want, including developing good learning habits.

A habit is made up of four components: a trigger, a desire, an action and a reward. In our biscuit-eating example, the trigger is the break between tasks and the recognition of tiredness. The desire is to have enough energy to get through to the end of the working day. The action is the move to the kitchen and the hunt for something to eat. And that first, second or tenth bite of biscuit is a reward: you fulfil that desire.

Of course, a 4pm biscuit-eating habit is great in the short term, combatting tiredness but it's counter-productive if we're trying to eat more healthily.

We can focus on each component of a habit to make it easier or harder for us to repeat. But I want to draw your attention to one element present in both the desire and reward components of habits. And that is pleasure. Pleasure, or the anticipation of pleasure is a crucial factor between successfully forming a habit and failing.

Neuroscientists discovered the importance of the brain chemical dopamine in the 1950s and since then they have been charting its involvement in a whole range of functions, including voluntary movement, learning, memory and motivation. Here we are interested in two key discoveries about dopamine: it is released when we experience pleasure and when we anticipate pleasure. Once we experience pleasure, our brains pay particular attention to the details of the trigger or action that led us to the experience. Why? Because we want to repeat it. Next time we encounter that trigger, our brain will release dopamine, both boosting our memory and prompting us to act in the same way to get a similar reward.

In fact, our brains have far more neural circuitry allocated for desiring pleasure than for experiencing it. Remember that 4pm biscuit craving? It's the desire of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act. We've practised it so often, it has become automatic. So, if we look to adopt and maintain new learning behaviours, we need to make them pleasurable so that we want to repeat them again and again. Our brains are designed to help us repeat them if the reward is sufficient.

We also need to find ways to give ourselves frequent dopamine hits because humans respond better to instant gratification than to delayed gratification. In his excellent book "Atomic Habits" the writer and habit expert James Clear explains that we're hard-wired to choose instant gratification over delayed gratification for reasons of basic survival. As opportunist hunter-gatherers, we didn't know where our next meal was coming from or how safe we were from a predator. In this context, taking advantage of something pleasurable the instant it presented itself made sense. As the threat from immediate danger subsided and the advantages of being able to produce and store food stuffs increased, mankind learned to delay gratification. Nevertheless, the basic physiological pull of pleasure still has a profound effect on our ability to maintain modern habits.