Will I never learn?

There might be a technical term for this phenomenon, but if there is, I’ve never heard of it.

I’ve noticed in my day-to-day routine that there are certain automatic habits that I can’t seem to unlearn. For instance, when I’m getting dressed for work in the mornings, I often use a shoehorn to put on my dress shoes. I get the shoehorn out of a drawer in my nightstand. I always intend to open the drawer, take out and use the shoehorn, then put it back and close the drawer. However, I almost always open the drawer, take out the shoehorn, and then close the drawer, which means I have to open the drawer again to put the shoehorn back. While it’s not a big deal, I wonder why I almost never remember to leave the drawer open, no matter how many mornings I repeat the process.

I have a lot of similar examples, with a varying ratio of remembering/forgetting, but the common thread is that the ratio never seems to improve.

The only truly negative side effect is inconvenience, but it just makes me wonder what’s going on. I’ve heard of a psychological theory for memory that refers to learning a schema or a scripted series of events. For instance, if your cat jumps on the table every time you feed it, even though you put the cat back on the floor every time, the cat continues to jump on the table because it thinks this series of events has to take place before it can eat. But, that really doesn’t answer any questions for me. Obviously I understand the relationship between events, so that theory doesn’t apply to me, but the mechanism seems similar.

It’s just weird. One of life’s little mysteries, I guess.