7 “quirky” habits that 91% of us share without realizing it – VegOut

Ever notice how the “weird” stuff you do in private turns out to be… not that weird?

When I worked front-of-house in luxury F&B, I learned that people are delightfully predictable behind the scenes: chefs hum the same four bars on loop, servers check their phones for “ghost pings,” and yes—everyone sneaks a nose scratch on the walk-in camera at least once.

The more I read psychology, the more it felt like reading kitchen notes on human nature.

We’re not odd — we’re human.

Here are 7 “quirky” habits that most of us share—often without realizing it. And in at least one case, we’ve got a dead-on number: 91% of adults admit to doing it. I’ll let you guess which one.

1. We pick our noses (and pretend we don’t)

Let’s rip the bandage off.

A population survey published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry asked randomly selected adults about nose picking. Ninety-one percent said they were current pickers. Not “once as a kid”—current.

The authors’ take was simple: it’s basically universal, and only a tiny fraction meet the threshold for a disorder. The social taboo just makes us better at hiding it. 

As gross as it sounds, the impulse makes sense. Dry mucus irritates, airflow feels blocked, your brain flags a quick fix, and your hand… obliges.

Fun fact: etiquette books have been scolding this since the 1400s, which tells you how long we’ve tried to pretend otherwise.

2. We get songs stuck in our heads

You know the drill: one chorus takes over your brain and refuses to pay rent.

Researchers call it involuntary musical imagery — earworms for short. Reviews in music cognition consistently report that earworms hit the overwhelming majority of people. Some large surveys clock the experience at over 90%.

Durham University’s music-psych lab even shows how certain melodic shapes make a tune “stickier.” In other words, your brain isn’t broken; it’s on algorithm mode.

What helps?

Completion.

Listening to the whole song often resolves the loop. Chewing gum has modest evidence, too—motor activity that competes with the loop. (I wish this worked for the “Happy Birthday” marimba version I once heard on repeat during a brunch shift.)

3. We feel “phantom” phone buzzes

Ever check your phone after a phantom vibration and then pretend you were… stretching?

You’re in crowded company. 

Studies of medical staff, interns, and students show prevalence ranging from two-thirds to nearly 90%, with tech journalists and psychologists calling it a normal misfire of attention and touch perception. The more emotionally tethered we are to notifications, the more likely a fold in your jeans will register as “urgent text.”

As one researcher put it, these aren’t hallucinations so much as our brains doing what they do best—pattern-detecting in noisy signals.

The practical trick is boring but effective: turn off vibration for a week and the phantom pings usually quiet down.

4. We procrastinate (even high achievers)

There’s a reason “I’ll start Monday” feels universal.

A well-known meta-analysis from psychologist Piers Steel found 80–95% of college students procrastinate, and broader surveys suggest about 95% of people delay tasks at least sometimes.

The psychology is familiar: present bias (now > later), low expectancy (“will this even work?”), and mood repair (“future me will be braver”). That mix is why even motivated, organized people stall—especially on ambiguous tasks.

I’ve learned to treat procrastination like mise en place. If a task is sticky, I “prep” the smallest possible next action (open the doc, title it, type one dumb line). Momentum does the rest.

5. We mind-wander almost half our waking lives

Here’s a wild stat from Harvard researchers: people report their minds are off-task about 47% of the time, and that drift tends to correlate with lower momentary happiness.

That doesn’t mean daydreaming is bad — creative insight often arrives when our attention roams—but it does mean our default setting is “elsewhere.”

No wonder you’ve read the same paragraph five times and still couldn’t summarize it. 

My kitchen analogy: it’s like a simmer. Attention isn’t always on boil—nor should it be—but if the pot stays unattended, something scorches.

Tiny anchors (a timer, a checklist, a single highlighted line) pull attention back without scolding yourself for being human.

6. We rehearse conversations in our heads

If you’ve ever scripted a tough talk in the shower—or replayed what you should have said—you’re using a tool psychologists call inner speech.

Not everyone experiences a constant inner monologue (recent work suggests meaningful variability), but many of us rely on silent self-talk to plan, coach, and simulate social scenarios.

Think of it as “mental mise en place.”

As noted by cognitive scientists studying inner speech, some people externalize it (talking out loud to themselves)—which is also normal and sometimes helpful for problem-solving. If it helps you organize the chaos, it’s a feature, not a bug. 

7. We experience déjà vu

Finally, let’s talk about the spookiest quirk on the list: that sudden flicker of I’ve been here before.

Lifetime incidence varies by study, but surveys typically find that most people—often a majority and up to the high 80s depending on age and method—report at least one déjà vu episode.

It’s more common in younger adults and tends to fade with age. The leading theories involve a brief processing mismatch in memory systems, like a duplicate “save” that tricks your sense of familiarity. 

When it happens to me, I treat it like the kitchen printer spitting the same ticket twice. The order’s real; the duplicate is just a timing glitch.

So what does all this say about us?

To me, it’s oddly reassuring. The same brain that can memorize a wine list of 200 labels also hums the chorus to a summer hit on loop.

The same person who’s meticulous at work will still check their phone for a vibration that never was. We’re walking contradictions — and that’s fine.

Here’s the more useful bit: each quirk hints at a lever you can pull.

• Normalize the human stuff. Knowing “91% of adults pick their noses” doesn’t mean you should go mining in meetings. It means we can drop the shame spiral about being a human with a body. Shame rarely makes behavior better; awareness often does.

• Design tiny interventions. Earworms? Play the song through or switch tasks for two minutes. Phantom buzzes? Kill vibration for a week. Procrastination? Shrink the next action to something that takes less than two minutes. Evidence-based micro-tweaks beat “try harder” speeches every time. 

• Use rituals on purpose. If inner speech helps, script it. If mind-wandering derails you, set gentle anchors (timers, checklists, context-specific cues). Rituals don’t make you robotic; they free your brain for the good stuff—creativity, connection, tasting notes that sing. 

The bottom line

Most of what we call “quirky” is just common human wiring wearing a funny hat.

The stats back that up—from 91% of adults fessing up to nose picking, to more than 9 in 10 of us catching earworms, to huge majorities feeling phantom buzzes.

The goal isn’t to erase the quirks — it’s to understand them well enough to steer them.

That’s personal development in a nutshell: less self-shaming, more self-design. And if your brain starts playing a chorus while you set a timer to start the thing you’ve been putting off… welcome to the club.

We saved you a seat.